"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
He breathes and speckled stardust swirls around his face. Little lights cast brilliance and shadow across his body. A walking universe, perhaps—he imagines his little planets have their own small worlds, orbiting him as if he were a sun. A god, maybe. With him, they die; without him, they die.
The Ruins both suit and reject Daedalus. He is luminescent and ethereal amongst such drab surroundings; but his otherworldly nature draws the stone closer to him, splashes light and dark like a ghostly guardian of stone passing through time. He is lost to time as he lingers within the land, remembering wistful nights as a boy, staring straight up at the moon as if she were the answer to all his childish questions.
Still brooding in his most vulnerable moments, Dae’s face contorts into a frown as he peers down at the flat bit of rock he used to rest upon. Alone and thoughtful, he leans to one side and lets the moon illuminate his face like it once did as a boy.
The frown, rare for his often passive face, encroaches slightly around his eyes.
Sometimes Matilda still dreams of the jungle she remembers from her youth, of the lush green foliage and rivers of lava. In her dream it has spread across Beqanna, eating up every inch of the meadow and mountains - until there is no end of it in sight. You could walk the entire breath of the continent without feeling the warmth of sunlight on your face, or seeing the stars - unless you really tried.
She’s always a little disappointed when she wakes and finds that, however the world has changed recently, her dreams have not come true. Still, she cannot let what has been lost drag her down or keep her stationary - and there is so much to explore.
There had been an embarrassingly long time where she sulked about not being able to visit Baltia or Stratos - until someone else pointed out that she could shapeshift. So she had spent the day twisting through underwater canyons and testing how fast she could swim when she accidentally shifted into the favourite food of a particular fish.
When she emerges back onto land, Matilda is pretty sure she’s missing a small chunk out of her tail somewhere from that particular close call.
She becomes a wolf long enough just to give a good shake to rid herself of the excess water but is still damp as she moves forward as a mare again, turquoise eyes taking in moonlit shapes of the ruins.
Although it’s likely she would have approached anyone that she rounded the corner and spotted - the stallion standing upon a stone instantly captures her attention. It’s the small orbs around him that draw her in - she’s never seen anything like them, like him. But it’s the frown she can see when she draws closer that actually prompts her to speak. “Did the moon do something to offend you?” She glances between him and the silvery celestial body, the piece of her father’s imagination that she inherited making it no trouble at all to instantly dream up all sorts of ridiculous scenarios.
When Daedalus turns his head to face Matilda, he briefly wonders if he is seeing a ghost. He felt rather ghostly and melancholy among these ruins—it would not surprise him to discover something otherworldly within their walls. She is as pale as a specter and as beautiful as a lovely memory. Dae blinks once, then again, slowly releasing a breath.
It’s a few quiet moments later that the orbited stallion finally realizes what the mare had said. He blinks once again and lifts his head to its full height.
“Why on earth would I be offended by the moon?” he answers, pointedly glancing between a few of the planets spinning around him and Matilda’s eyes. Then his eyes narrow as he realizes that perhaps she is offended by his appearance and he huffs, already affronted.
“Are you offended by something?” Dae asks, voice low with indignation. He grunts and glances up at the moon before sputtering, “You, I mean you look like you pissed off a field of lavender, so—” He stops suddenly, his hubris already getting ahead of him.
She laughs with surprise at his comment and his indignation. It was so far from what she had expected, this reaction of his, and rather than be offended, or cowed, or infuriated by the snapping reply she is somewhere in the realm of being entertained. It does not phase her, and after the surprise fades it leaves a smile illuminated both by his glow and the soft purple one that halos her head in her flowers.
“Listen, you’re the one that was frowning up at the moon. It’s not that big of an assumption to make.” Would it make more sense that he was frowning about something down on the earth and that he was merely gazing upon the moon? Sure! But Matilda’s world was one that didn’t make a lot of sense, and she happily jumped to whatever the more entertaining explanation was.
Like right now - it was becoming more and more clear that he was the son of the moon, and that’s how he inherited these little moons. The frown made sense then - parents had a way of inspiring such an expression. Even when they were as nice as her own. And the moon probably wasn’t a very involved parent, either, what with living so far away.
Matilda doesn’t ask about any of this, instead she just adds with a sweet smile: “Also they’re lilacs, not lavender.” And she shakes her head from side to side to shimmy those glowing flowers to they flop (she assumes) rather impressively.
Daedalus is even more offended by Matilda’s immediate laughter, but it’s hard to tell with the scowl that’s already on his face. It’s not that Dae is incapable of the silliness Matilda tosses lightly for him to catch; but more so that he can almost not fathom how someone else might find him silly. He sighs as Matilda continues to speak, quickly realizing how much of this interaction he has misunderstood.
“Oh,” he accidentally says out loud, followed by a quiet sputtering and vocal disfluencies.
Two neon eyes flash in and out of existence as Dae contemplates the difference between lilacs and lavender. His eyes eventually narrow in suspicion and he reaches down to sniff at the flowers clustered around Matilda’s ghostly antlers. “Yeah, I guess they smell different than lavender,” he concedes.
Daedalus feels a bit of ice around him melting as Matilda’s playful nature warms him. He half-smiles, drawing back to peer at the pastel woman. He pushes a planet similar in color to her (swirls of pale purple and blue and pink) toward Matilda’s antlers, watching as it orbits them before eventually returning to his pull of gravity.
