[open quest] Part One: The Discovery

[Ea]

She had thought it would be more painful, to be reborn.
Instead, she slips past the door to Afterlife and finds nothing much has changed within her. There is no punishment, no torture to bring her back into the world the way she left it. She wishes she felt different; whole, or renewed, somehow.
Wishful thinking, that she could become changed so easily.
She pauses, kicks at the dirt to feel it move beneath her, to make sure this is real, turns, and watches the Afterlife begin to close: her choice solidified.

She lived so much of her first life being strong but malleable — the iron to her mother’s fire, which bent and molded her as a child into someone that would make her family proud. Then, as an adult and even in death, she found herself a planet to Ramiel’s sun. She flourished in his presence, his warmth, but it only left her colder in his eclipse. She hadn’t realized it then, that she had been living her life for others, but she knew now.
She needs a new metaphor.
Perhaps, then, this life would be different. She can only hope so.

Her second life goes by so quietly at first. She tries to find her footing, avoiding her island, avoiding everyone. Even through an earthquake and a tornado, Ea stays by herself. She lives amongst the Ruins for a while, hidden between the rocks, the eerie silence. It feels fitting: a ghost in a ghostland, she thinks with a smile.
It had once been unlike her to be paralyzed by uncertainty, but here she is, once again, walking in the dark. Pacing. She barely registers the brightening moonlight, the night aglow in silver. It’s only when the stench of death floods her nostrils that she is broken out of her trance — she slows her pace, but follows the smell, only a few steps before she reaches a lake. The rhythmic, gentle lapping of the lake should soothe her, but instead, she can only think of the bodies before her.
She doesn’t quite know why she moves closer, but she does.
She expects to feel nothing for these strangers, but as she drops her head to inspect the bodies — the blood, the two-headed, tentacled mare twisted next to a feathered, dark purple and white stallion — a sadness rises in her chest. It makes no sense — she had seen her own share of death, had died herself, brutally — and yet, she mourns them. She allows it to wash over her as the waves wash over them; allows herself to feel it for just a moment before pushing it back down again.
It’s only then she notices the sprites that had been flitting around them, bright and silver and quick. She raises her head, entranced as they spin and spin until a portal appears beneath them, a haze of clouds.
She needs no encouragement, this time.
No thoughts, only impulse, as Ea steps through the portal, to the other side.

you get dragged down, down to the same spot enough times in a row
the bottom begins to feel like the only safe place that you know

[shrykos]

s h r y k o s

and there's a madness that's just coursing right through me

He knows not of the changes wrought through the lands - all he knows is that he is here.

He has fallen prey to his own tendencies these past years, becoming little more than a lethal hunter throughout the lands. Never had he called a territory home, and so there was never any home - or family, he supposes - to miss. He knows he has a father and a sister, but once he had given himself up his more reptilian side, even they faded from his mind; forgotten like kingdoms and territories of old.

Shrykos isn’t sure what rouses him from his sleep, but perhaps it is the brightness in the middle of the night, illuminating the world around him as if it were midday. With a snarl on his draconic lips, he rises to his feet, the earth peeling away under his talons like flesh from bone. He stretches, blinking sleep from his eyes, and smells the blood before he turns the corner and finds himself before a lake shimmering with starlight.

It takes but a moment for his eyes to fall upon the bodies before the water, and hunger gnaws at him as he takes in the sight before him. Blood stains the water to near-black and he stalks toward the ruins of the two horses, focused on nothing but the seemingly free meal.

The bodies are pushed further from the lapping waves by a force Shrykos hadn’t noticed until that moment, and he pauses as he fully takes in the scene and the sprites darting about. As if satisfied that Shrykos has pulled his attention from the bodies, the sprites churn together suddenly, forming what can only be described as a portal, a curtain to somewhere else. Eyes narrowed, he moves towards it, the free meal forgotten as curiosity calls to him.

There is nothing for him to lose, he supposes, as he nudges his way through the gateway.

[Viszla]

Myrna suffocate the fire  i started-------------------- right when it kindles She’d begun to doze off in the late evening, having spent the last hours of daylight transforming some of the flaxen hair of her spinal mane and tail, twisting it with her magics into blue delphiniums and yellow crocuses. It was a familiar use of her ability, an exercise that soothed her and required all her attention and focus, and she was not disappointed when she woke a few hours later to find that most of them had transfigured back to white-blonde hair. Nothing seemed amiss as she woke, and the mare called Myrna sleepily blinked her blue-grey eyes as she turned her head to look around. The golden grasses of the Pampas were turned silver by the starlight, and around her the dozing sides of her family rose and fell peacefully. But Myrna, without dreamless sleep and the intense focus turning from fauna to flora requires, found that her mind wandered to less than peaceful places. The palomino mare has not slept well in years, and tonight was no exception. She takes a step forward, intending to go and get a drink from the river, and finds herself instead at the edge of what used to be the Meadow. Myrna doesn’t recognize the place; she’s been twice and had always focused more on scanning the faces for her grandparents than taking in the scenery. This time too, she is focused on the faces. The dead faces. Who are they, she wonders? And how had they died? The movement of the sprites is smooth and enchanting, and her attention is drawn from the bodies to the brilliant portal that they create opens into clouds. Myrna hates clouds. They remind her of storms - of The Storm, the one that had drowned everything she had known and left Beqanna a smaller, darker island. The one she feels responsible for. Myrna doesn’t even pause to think before she steps forward. If this is a chance to change what she had ruined, she will take it.

[animus]

It was solitude that Animus always craved.

It was solitude that led him astray.

Never was he Draco’s golden boy nor Despoina’s avenger. A child, caught amidst the tides of cruelty and confusion, he drifted. His demon of a father always nudged him along, pressed quiet encouragement into his ears on the nights his body cracked and morphed into some otherworldly creature.

Animus was never a child with a strong constitution, never eager to learn the whims of his magic. Exhaustion became his lonely state—alone and adrift on a sea of changing lands and bright-eyed strangers. Solitude taught him the treasure of silence, soothed the heat of abandonment, nurtured an enlightened 
independence.

It was solitude that saved him.

Perhaps Animus is the kind of quiet stoic that never lets another in, the kind of jaded that cannot and will not understand love, the certain kind of determined that damns him to a wretched fate—he knows he has been damned since birth. The jaws of Hell hiss and bite but they will no longer frighten him. He knows he 
wears those flaming teeth when he so desires. The Devil’s taunts merely bolster him.

It’s the secrets of his solitude that save him as the world changes.

Around the bend of trees gleams the silky scales of a queen. The king shimmers with crimson. Animus throws his head up, nostrils flaring as a snort of quiet surprise escapes his throat. Black like his father, 
crimson like his eyes.

“Go, Animus.”

The man’s skin crawls as his body changes.

“Go.”

Animus takes a single, stumbling step back as his father’s voice rings true in his head.

Upon the bank, a shadow grows spiraling, sharp horns.