"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
Early spring seems like the palest of the Gates’ many blooming seasons. The world around him is filled mostly with white blossoms, and a gust of the coming evening’s wind sends those in the branches overhead flying about like massive flakes of snow. They cover the ground, perfuming the air as the young stallion wades through them on his way out of his homeland.
He doesn’t leave often, preferring to keep to the places he knows best. But on nights like these, with the moon full and his family restless, he prefers the danger of the unknown to the strangeness of his own home. It forces him to be aware of his surroundings, his golden ears flicking about as he makes his way deeper into the unknown and toward the Common Lands.
He finds the first stranger who does not scowl when their gazes meet, and approaches with an easy smile that nevertheless does not reveal his pointed teeth nor the full length of his jaw.
“Have anything fun planned for the evening?” He asks, the feathers above his brow rising in curiosity. With the sun setting, his eyes are red-gold and bright even in the long shadows around them, and he glances to see if there are others nearby that he might ask the same question if it turns out this stranger has neither plans nor anything interesting to say.
The Gods giveth, and the Gods taketh away. It was a tale as old as time, older even than the Gods themselves. Mortals though had a tendency for foolishness, for greedily drinking from that fountain of power that the Gods occasionally let flow. Iccarus had learned the hard way, that foolish mortal. Those who took more than what was freely offered were certain to be punished.
She had certainly taken her fair share, and when it was stripped from her, she hadn't learned. Instead she had dwelled solely on the "what ifs" and "could have beens", letting life go on while she struggled to find a way back to the past. The Gods would gleefully make mockery of a fool like her.
Daytime bled into dusk, and she could feel something odd creeping along her bones. Something like a shiver, but heavier somehow, and much more powerful. She barely has time to contemplate though before a stranger approaches, all golden skinned and soft eyed. Her blue eyes turned to him, and with her thoughts elsewhere she forgot to grimace, and instead she stares blankly as he asks her plans. At the end of his question, the clouds rolled away, revealing a full moon. The grimace on her pretty face grew, and the flesh on her body began to bubble and rot. It was over as quickly as it started. Gone was the pretty grulla mare and her downy wings, to be replaced by something long dead and crawling with grave worms.
" Queens do nothing for fun." she said, her voice slithering into his mind.
Ravin, who happens to know another queen, would usually agree.
He is not thinking about queens though. He is not thinking about much at all. He is too busy staring at the way her face has caved in, then at the tiny little worm wriggling in what was left of the skin below her nearest eye. He has never seen such a thing before, but he is too fearless, and leans closer.
When satisfied he draws back, a scowl having settled onto his handsome golden face.
I don’t like that, he is about to tell her.
His mouth even opens a little, the words ready to spill across blue lips.
Though still often thoughtless, Ravin had been berated for rudeness often enough as a young child to hesitate, and as he does, he realizes what he had not before, lost in fascination as he was. Her voice had not sounded in his ears.
The frown on his face remains, but rather than disturbed it becomes suspicious, his eyes narrowing as the thought of danger finally crosses his mind.
“What’re you queen of?” He asks, deciding it would be best to know what kind of monster he is dealing with if the thing in front of him turns out to be a monster. She’s probably a queen of ghouls, he thinks, ruling over the dead and here to… Well, he’s not quite sure what a ruler of the dead might be doing in the Meadow.
08-04-2025, 03:19 PM (This post was last modified: 08-04-2025, 03:20 PM by Topsail.)
A relit cigarette never tastes the same, and thats all I'll preach about rekindling old flames
"What are you queen of?" he asks, and for a moment, she has no answer. There is something lurking there at the edge of her mind, but it stays hidden in the recesses of her memory. But then a figure emerges through the fog, a sometimes black, sometimes winged, always powerful male with a horn jutting from between his cunning eyes. Eight is his name, and once upon a time, they had ruled the most fearsome kingdom in all of Beqanna. The Valley rings through her mind, the very name dragging the corners of her rotten mouth up into something of a grin. Born a princess of The Gates, she had quickly found herself blooming in the darkness of The Valley fog.
"The Valley. I rule The Valley along side Eight, the powerful magician." she says, the lilt to her voice confident in a way only a queen can be. The young stallion before her doesn't seem ignorant, but the fact that he does not seem to know her, The Raptor Queen of the Valley, does give her pause. "Are you new to these lands?" she asks into his mind, considering him with a reptilian tilt of her head. Feathers fall around her as her wings wilt, but she does not notice. Nor does she notice the skin melting from her slender shoulders, or the graveworms that play within the tunnels of her muscle and sinew.
Up above them, the clouds gather. The moon is quickly losing the battle in the sky, though for now it bathes them in that bright blue-white. As it shines, she rots, her mind gone to decades past. The moon in her curse. Born in the light, but bloomed in the dark, she is a cursed flower now.
She doesn't blink as she watches him, doesn't breath either. The living dead have no use of such trivial things.
with love, topsail
ooc - i am literally the worst, but here is a 3 month later reply :')
Ravin’s head tilts, recognizing the name. It is a story to the young stallion, one of the many places that had once been but were no longer. A dark story, he remembers, but an old one.
Old like the queen in front of him, her skin sloughing from her sides. Ravin does his best to hide a wince as he watches a bit fall to the ground, but is not entirely successful. Perhaps he’ll die soon, Ravin thinks, killed by the ghoul queen of the dead Valley. He can’t remember any of the specifics, but he’s sure there’d been a tale or two about that, whispered in the moondark around a pyre of glowing flowers, of Eight and of horrors.
Will it be his soul she takes, he wonders, or perhaps his body as replacement to her own?
His spiraling is halted by the question she asks, his ears pinning as if to somehow impede the silent voice. Him, new? That’s the question that he asks to the strangers who seem lost or out of time.
“I mean, I guess…relatively?” he replies, thinking that the Valley had been nothing but stories for generations, “But I’ve lived here my whole life. Well, not here, in the…” His voice trails off as he realizes what he might reveal, and to whom. To what.
“So, uh, got any plans tonight?” He asks again, this time hopeful for the opposite reason.
A relit cigarette never tastes the same, and thats all I'll preach about rekindling old flames
High above and at the very top of the ridge line, the sky begins to change. First, pink bleeds into blue to create purple, then orange and yellow appear to backlight the clouds. The moon battles on, trying hard to maintain its control but the sun is a valiant warrior. The cool tones of the moon and the night are no match for the power of the sunshine. Though it all begins gradually, barely even noticeably, it does not take long for the moon to fall prey to the whims of the sun. It creeps downward below the opposite horizon, yielding for now but with a promise of return.
At the first ray of light, she begins to transform. The graveworms retreat back to the cavernous spaces between her muscle and sinew. Her split skin slithers and crawls, stitching itself back together seamlessly. The downy feathers of her wings sprout along the bony appendages, filling in gaps and leaving them just as voluminous as before. And most importantly, her mind settles. With a gasp she is thrust back into the here and now, and what had once seemed so real is cast back into her memories from days gone by.
Her lids flutter over her blue eyes, and it takes her a moment to gather herself. With a start she sees the bewildered colt before her, his brows raised and caution practically oozing from his skin. She can't say she blames him, if that creepy crawly feeling she has in her own bones is any indication. With a shake of her pretty head to ease the tension, she offers him a smile, though it is small and tight. "No plans to speak of. My time has never really been my own, so I'm not sure what to do with myself." she says, her voice much gentler now than it was before. "So where do you call home? Myself, I was born a princess of The Gates. My father was noble, but a terrible ruler. Much too soft. I found The Valley more to my taste..." Another smile, an another attempt to ward off whatever cursed magic had fallen over her tonight.
If she can hear his thoughts, Ravin has no doubt that the ghoulish creature in front of him can hear the thundering beat of his heart, a dead giveaway to the building fear in his chest. He takes a deep breath, near certain that the next sound to come out of him could be a screech, and then the sun begins to rise.
The silvery grey of light of dawn blushes into a faintly pink daybreak, the streaks of purplish blue at the edges of the horizon a match to the young stallion.
Ravin doesn’t notice the light at all, only its effect on the ghoul. The rapid reversal of her wounds is gruesome, but far less so to Ravin who has lost count of the wounds he has seen heal in an equally rapid manner. Never without the welcome blur of the water of the magical waterfall though, and the young stallion’s displeasure at the binding skin is undisguised. Nor is he a stranger to the transformative power of the Moon, a magic that his father insists rivals that of the Mountain.
She seems as bewildered by the change as Ravin had been, and as he watches the no-longer-a-ghoul queen shake off whatever odd magic that had been, he easily convinces himself that it was mostly the worms in her eyeballs that had made him feel panicked, and not concern for his life and soul.
The mare in front of him looks fairly normal now, and when she speaks, her voice is softer, and more importantly: not in his head.
A princess of the Gates, she says, the child of a soft ruler. Ravin’s youth is disconcertingly similar, though his own sire is a moon-addled seer and his mother is the gentle leader. He is not yet entirely sure that he shouldn’t turn tail and run, but her attempts at friendly smiles remind him very much him of Luvi trying her best. He remains. Remains, but doesn’t quite let down his guard.
“I’m also from the Gates. My mother is the Queen, and my father the Moonspeaker. My name's Ravin. What's yours??”
Ravin
