"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
There are times he misses it.
The way the joints had ached.
The way he’d wondered whether he was a real thing at all.
How he’d hid from the sun, tucked into the shadows of some small-mouthed cave. How he’d pulled the fog around him to protect himself from the light. How he had laid there in the dark and keened.
It had been the pain that had raised him, after all. He had been a child just as Livinia and Beyza had been children, but he had also been something altogether different. Something strange, even then. Gaunt and sinister and unnatural, the breathing labored and the voice thin. Such a troublesome creature, Jamie.
He returns to Pangea now. He had been powerless in the beginning, meek and meager. Pathetic even. Pitiful in the way the pain crippled him. And now? Now the power is almost boundless. Now he can drape the fog across his shoulders like a cloak.
And with each step he takes he grows smaller, shrinking, stepping steadily back in time until he is that child again. Until his movements are stilted and he has to grit his teeth with the vicious aching in his joints. But gone are Beyza and Livinia. Gone are all the others. It is quiet here and he thinks perhaps he is the only creature that stirs as he limps toward the cave where he spent his youth tucked into the darkness.
The air is damp inside but it smells so terribly familiar. The shadows close in around him, welcoming him home as he lies down there. He is a child again, he is weak. Every terrible thing he has done has not been done yet. If he listens hard enough he can hear children laughing outside.
For the entire trip, Beyza doesn’t know why she is pulled here, back to the place she was born. Back to the remnants of when she was someone else. Or when she had convinced herself she was someone else. The truth of her had always been there, warm and lovely deep in her core, waiting patiently for the frost and outrage to thaw on the outside.
When she passes the border to Pangea she senses two things — the first is the realization that she had come here to find a trace of her twin. Caledonia, the sun to her moon. The sister who was truly warm all along, and who Beyza had wasted time feeling like a shadow of. The ache for that missing piece had been so easy to keep locked tight within her amongst all the other things she so expertly represses. Now, in the place where they had once roamed and played and been frightened, that box opens up and fills her with longing.
The second thing she notices is that Jamie is here. The inky traces of his death magic float like rot around her.
Beyza will hide herself away, she will lock herself up tight just like her emotions somewhere to keep her children as safe as she can, but today she will not run from this. In a flash, she materializes just outside of a cave she recognizes from their youth. Where the strange sickly boy had once enchanted her and she had seen so much potential.
The unnatural glow of her coat burns hot as white fire, refusing to let the shadows and the past squash it as she enters the cave.
And there he is.
Not the stallion he had become, but the young colt. One of her first friends. She cannot imagine he would be doing this on purpose, returning himself to this weaker state, so perhaps this is only a trick Pangea is playing on her. A ghost of the past and not the reaper himself.
So she says the name she has not spoken for years, quiet and dull like the rocky walls around them. “Jamie.”
The child stirs, thinks perhaps it is his mother calling for him. Or maybe Livinia. The child blinks open his strange yellow eyes and cringes away from the light. He moans, as he had always moaned. He turns his freakish head, though he can feel the way the light touches his skin. Or what might have been skin, had he been born a real thing and not something more like an idea.
He draws in a long, rattling breath. He is trapped here, the child, too weak to summon a shadow portal to spirit him away to someplace dark and safe.
Jamie.
She does not say it again, it simply echoes. Echoes like a dawning. A realization. The light is familiar. How many times has the child cringed away from it? How many times has he tucked himself behind his sister to spare himself the pain of it?
Beyza, he realizes. Beyza. But this cannot be Beyza, he thinks. Unless, perhaps, his mother has taught her ways to manipulate time. Unless she is coming to him from some distant future where she is no longer a child as he is a child.
He turns that ugly head in her direction but cannot bring himself to open his eyes. “Beyza?” he asks and then drags in another sickly breath. He summons what strength he has to rise, eyes still closed tightly against her light. “Did my mother teach you this?”
He closes his eyes against her light and that instinct to dim her glow still exists, much to Beyza's annoyance. She hopes it is only because he is masquerading as his former self, that colt she had befriended, the one she once felt sympathy for. But she cannot believe this is anything other than a trick so her glow brightens. Just a little. Keep those yellow eyes closed, keep him from coming too close.
She reminds herself that this may be a trap and anything she can do to remind him that she is untouchable is worth it.
If saying his name aloud was strange, it doesn't come close to hearing her own rasped out. She feels the sickly inhale of his breath like a breeze against her skin, so familiar and so foreign at the same time.
"Your mother?" The truth of it was that Beyza had not thought about Anaxarete in a long time. Her life had been so filled to the brim with parental figures and mentors and she does know that at one time she had revered the grey magician. But a lot has changed since then.
And because of that, the mention of Anaxarete confuses her. Not only was she a piece of Beyza's past but she would have assumed it was the same for Jamie. The Reaper didn't seem like someone who checked in with his mom.
Then again, this wasn't exactly the Reaper in front of her now. "Did she do this to you?" She asks quietly, her unblinking gaze regarding him with a cold version of curiosity.
All her warmth is kept safe, deep in the boxes where she parcels off the pieces of her that need to be protected or buried, and she can only hope she will know which box is which when it is safe to be herself again.
Well yes, he wants to say, of course his mother has done this to him. Of course the shadow-magician has crafted him from those very shadows. She has forced those shadows into the shape of him, given him these strange yellow eyes and this strange ink-black mouth. Sometimes he thinks that she, too, put the ache in his bones (if you can call them bones). Sometimes he thinks that she must be punishing him for something. He does not know yet that he will spend his entire life trying to become something that Anaxarete might be proud of.
“You must not hold it against her,” he says, quiet, almost pleading. It all sounds like pleading though, doesn’t it? When it comes out of his mouth, sick. Weak. He cringes against the throbbing in his joints as he shuffles toward his friend. “Beyza,” he murmurs, “she only wants what is best for us.”
But this isn’t true, is it? It has never been true. But his mother has always been a stranger to him. Beautiful and unreachable. Perhaps he had thought that being a shadow-thing might have made her love him by default but that does not seem to be the case. She is more enamored with the young magician in front of him, but he does not resent Beyza for this.
“Look what she has done for you,” he continues, grimacing, referencing of course this new ability to bend time. (How it would have terrified this child-thing to know that it had been, in fact, he who had bent time. Or not time, really, but himself.) He grins, but there is worry in the Reaper’s brow. “What a gift this is.”
He shuffles forwards and it takes so much concentration to keep her body from stepping back. She feels their magnetic forces repelling against each other, the truth of how similiar they are pushing against her like something physical and reminding her that distance is best.
But she has pride, this statue of a mare. And even if this is not the Jamie that would revel in her retreat, she will not grant any version of him any sort of secession.
She focuses on his words rather than their proximity and shakes her head in such a small, subtle gesture as she replies quietly and without emotion. "She wants only what is best for herself." The dappled magician may have shown Beyza more affection than her children but she knows it was because of her magic — Beyza was a tool that could be used for power and chaos. And a tool can be discarded or broken without remorse. She doubts the same could be said of Jamie and his siblings.
It is difficult to hate this misguided child who The Reaper had once been. Before it all went both wrong and right. She regrets his pain and can no longer remember if she had ever offered to soothe the aches during their friendship. She has no idea whether her magic would even answer the call now — to heal him.
Beyza doesn't snort when he refers to Anaxarete doing something for her, giving her a gift. There isn't a roll of her eyes or laugh. Without warning, she begins to burn. White fire licks up her sides and the light from her brightens.
Still she does not move. Her near-frozen stance and unblinking gaze show no indication that she even notices the flames.
So much for holding onto her reactions. It is awfully dramatic of her, attempting to intimidate this child, but since she cannot rule out the idea that this is a trap she will remind him that she is not as retired as she might seem. When she speaks, her voice is level and firm. "This is not a gift. This is what I have created for myself." The shimmering scars that remind her of her past mistakes. The magic that had always been rooted in love. The friends she has found. The children she helped to creat and then protected. The home she kept safe.
The child feels, and has felt, that his mother’s interest in Beyza has overshadowed whatever interest she may have had in himself and his sister. Because Beyza is more special, because her magic is so clearly more powerful. She is a radiant thing. She is like the sun and the rest of them merely orbit around her. And he’s sorry for all the times he has turned his face from her, grimacing against her light. But it hurts and that’s not his fault. The shadows gather around him, even now, leaning close in an effort to protect him from her shine. (This darkness belongs to the adult Reaper, his magic unwilling to let him suffer whether he’s aware of it or not.)
He blinks those big, yellow eyes at her. He wants to crawl across this floor to her on his knees. He wants to beg her to understand. They are dark things, they cannot understand her light. The only way the shadow-magician knows how to appreciate the light is by trying to control it. Or so he believes. Because he cannot fault his mother her darkness. Because his allegiance lies with her, though the magician standing before him now is his friend.
His friend.
Livinia’s friend.
He remembers how Beyza had given his sister teeth sharp enough to feed her. How his sister had smiled! That had not been so long ago now, had it? Weeks, maybe. Months at most.
But Beyza is unswayed by his pleading. This is no gift. He is confused. Deeply. It occurs to him then that he must have underestimated her, they all must have. His mother must have been the only one who knew the truth about exactly how powerful the white magician is.
He whines, turns his face away from her burning. He can feel the heat of it on his shadow-skin. He shrieks, retreating, curling in on himself. Shuffling to the rear of the cave. But the light reaches him even here and he whimpers, turning to face the wall. He calls upon the shadows but they cannot reach him, feeble as he is. He draws in a desperate, rasping breath.
“Beyza!” he cries, his aching knees buckling. “I’m sorry, Beyza.”
Her magic weakens in the face of his whimpering and Beyza seethes as she feels it retract, her mask fracturing as a quiet "No" escapes her — directly purely at herself. There is undeniably a part of her that wants to burn brighter, who wants to send white fire after the would-be-Reaper and scorch his shadows out of Beqanna for good. It doesn't feel like it would be hard to convince herself that would even be for the better of all.
But that part can't outweigh how wrong it feels to make a child suffer. The morality of her magic weighs her down, dimming her light until she is as she is naturally. Just a faint white glow, strong against the shadows of the cave but not harsh or burning like it had been moments ago.
She snorts and looks away, briefly, examining the shapes and shadows of the rock walls. There is not a moment where Jamie does not have most of her attention, even in this moment of… reflection? shame? She's not even sure what she is currently feeling but she knows at any time, this farce of a foal could shift and then? Beyza had no idea what to expect, and she despised the uncertainty right down to her bones. So her guard would remain up, even when her magic wouldn't allow her to take certain actions.
Collecting herself, she tells the past-Jamie "I don't remember you ever apologizing to me." She can't recall, now, if there had been a reason to. Had she? Or had she just felt like she should, for being so bright? She can no longer tell the difference between the memories and what had stayed as thoughts inside of her mind. "Though you had little reason to when we were small. How I idolized you." There are far more complicated emotions, but Beyza keeps those thoughts inside. She'd wanted to save Jamie, wanted there to be a world where he could exist in her light and she felt safe in the shadows. And, of course, those two things could never truly exist in one space.
"Are you hurt?" The question is hard to get out through the clench in her jaw, and makes the marbled mare sound pained herself. She wrestles with all those boxes of emotions she has kept so carefully closed all these years, willing no more to open and for those who have snuck out to return to their hibernation. She must remain calm and collected from here on out. That was safest.
The light dims. He can tell it even with how tightly he’s pressed his eyes closed. She had always been more powerful than he could fathom, Beyza. And wasn’t that what had attracted the shadow-mare to her? That power? He can feel the skin blistering along the side left exposed to that light. Perhaps this is why his mother had not loved him the same way: he is fragile, weak, powerless beyond his ability to gather fog around him like a cloak. And what power lies in that?
He makes no attempt to rise from his knees. He does not open his eyes. He simply lays his weary head against the cave wall and whimpers. He had not meant to upset her. He is only a child, see, and there are so many things he does not understand.
He does not lift his head until she speaks again and he blinks those big yellow eyes in her direction, though it still pains him to do so. Surely he has apologized to her for his cowardice, his inability to look at her plainly, his weakness. This weakness that keeps him still on his knees while she speaks in past tense.
She had idolized him? He doesn’t understand. He frowns, though it is near impossible to tell what expressions that featureless face makes. Rather than force himself to his feet, he allows his back legs to buckle so that he is lying, propped against the cool rock, staring though his eyes burn.
“I don’t understand,” he wheezes, ribs heaving with the tremendous effort of drawing in a breath.
Aha! He realizes quite suddenly that it is a dream. It must be! This is the only explanation for the strange way she speaks. Yes, he has been so desperate for her friendship that his feeble brain is merely playing a trick on him by telling him that it had been her who had idolized him! Relief floods through him, so heady he almost laughs. Instead, he only wheezes.
“No,” he tells her, though it isn’t true, “no, Beyza.” He draws in a long, raspy breath and exhales it slow, grateful for the way the lungs twinge in protest. “We are friends, aren’t we?” And he grins.
jamie
