"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
By the time Caster reached the meadow, the mist had swallowed the path behind him. A grey veil draped against the viridian plainness of trees, of leaf, of grass. His steady hoofsteps pressed neatly into the soft, rain-soaked earth, each beat leaving a mark in its wake as the blades brushed wet against his fetlocks.
A quiet calm settled against his ears, interrupted sparingly by birdcalls, each more beckoning than the next with a sense of inquiry. Possibility held him still. The prickly feeling of ghostly whispers in the early morning air clung to him with a strange familiarity, reminding him of something, someone he couldn’t fully recall. Caster could not have said whether he hoped the mist would give someone back to him, or keep them hidden a little longer. He’d been here before, of course he had, and yet, a sense of exactly here unfurled itself against the softest portions of his thoughts.
October was soon to usher away September's warmth, and the rustle of leaves would replace this entrancing hush before he knew it.
For all the meadow’s quiet, he could not help but let his mind wander, ears flicking, tail following with a lazy swish. Caster had nearly been lulled into listening for something, and it was the sudden absence of birdsong that drew his attention with sharpness. The monochromatic pendulum of his tail stilled. Somewhere beyond the mist, something had disturbed the treeline. Caster turned an ear toward it and waited.
As a child her father had pulled thunderstorms down around her.
Understand that this was an act of kindness.
Understand that this was his way of protecting her.
But she cannot remember the last time she saw her father now. Months, certainly. Years, maybe. She had been small then, reverent. Reverent of him, her mother, the magic of them. This the curse of their children: the devastation of their love for their parents, the darkness of it.
See now that her father had been a storm, her mother a shadow, and understand the thunderous wingbeats, the lightning that flashes across her body, the fog that follows her. Understand that these things, too, are a kind of love. A testament to the bodies that created her, the children that came before her.
(Though he’d never told her, her father had hoped that she might be some reparation for the darkness her brother had unleashed on Beqanna. That she might be some proof that he himself was still capable of good, that he was not cursed. And she is good, Eleria, in some way. Or, at least, she is not as vicious as the brother who came before her and this must count for something.)
If it is she who causes the quiet, she is unaware. If it is the fog that wraps itself around her that silences the birds, she is oblivious. She herself moves quiet through the wood without any destination in mind, merely stretching her legs and reveling in the physicality of it. Thunder does not follow her here on the ground, so the birds do not cower, they merely watch.
When she emerges it is without the knowledge that this is what she has done. She merely moves, the mist intertwining with her fog, and stops only when she sees him. When she notices his gaze turned toward the treeline. And she looks, too. “Are you waiting for something?” she asks, her face turned still toward the trees, unaware that she had been the disturbance.
oh, my head’s in the clouds
But i don’t feel close to the sun
Somewhere beyond the mist, something had disturbed the treeline. Caster turned an ear toward it and waited.
The bold black and white paint waited, listening and watching. Even the mist added a certain subtle backdrop to the grayscale of his flashy coloring, and how now was it that it appeared to thicken in some areas? He was here for a reason, was he not? Pulled towards the meadow, with the nagging feeling of needing to be here. At this moment, perhaps even, at this very place where he remained a statuette in solitude.
Until he wasn’t.
It was now that the memory of this place uncoiled from his thoughts, unstringing itself like a thin silver chain. He’d been here before with his Father, although the memory was muddled and grey, the same texture of the overcast skies, and murky haze that clung to the tree line. Such a remembrance is soon snuffed like a candle, though the circumstance with which it faltered left him more intrigued with the presence that approached.
Her gray coat isn't a familiar one, not in the way he had come to know familiarity, but the bearing she commanded was no less muted. “I suppose I am,” he nods, blue eyes withdrawing from the line of trees and settling themselves upon his present company.
Caster takes a moment, looking over her stone hued shape with careful consideration until his pale face guides his topaz stare to greet her glowing gaze. He flicks an ear to an unasked question, and takes a prolonged note of the fog that treads so gently across her form.
It held on, clinging against her, much the same way as the mist persisted to cover the grassy meadow. He wondered how, of course he did, but he left the riddles to the gentle space their quiet left each other in. For a time, the weight of their meeting was held by the pronunciation of their breathing, and the gentle wave of his blackened tail - but mostly it was cradled by the perception of who he is, and affirmation of who she was.
”Do you sometimes wonder where they’ve all gone?” He doesn’t need to say who, because with a land that was spread so thin, how could anyone not notice the absence? Nor does he allude to the what, because like a memory, the absence disjoined his understanding.
I suppose, he says and she goes on studying the treeline a beat, waiting for an explanation that does not come. It is the quiet that draws her gaze back to him, the contemplative way he goes on watching the trees a bit longer before he looks at her, too. It occurs to her that she could ask him to elaborate, but if he’d wanted her to know he likely would have offered it freely, so she does not ask.
She could continue on, she thinks, nod politely and continue across the meadow. And perhaps in her wake the mist would finally lift and whatever thing he’s waiting for would come and some years down the road she might remember that she’d come across a painted stallion in the meadow and asked if he was waiting for something. Or she might not remember it at all, perhaps neither of them would and the world itself might forget that these two strangers’ paths crossed on this drab afternoon in some small corner of some great, magical place.
But there is something in the gravity of him that keeps her there, rooted. And when he asks his question he’s correct in his assumption that he need not specify who it is he’s referencing. Everyone. They have left in droves, even she knows that. She is too young to remember exactly how Beqanna had thrived once, she has only ever known it to be quiet. But even this quiet is something else altogether. Foreboding, maybe. Unsettling, at the very least.
She has heard murmurs of the darkness that followed her brother’s winning the Alliance, the terror that had gripped Beqanna, the creatures that had come with it.
“Yes,” she says. “I heard that many died in the darkness, but that cannot be the only explanation.”
oh, my head’s in the clouds
But i don’t feel close to the sun
Along the stretch of misty meadow stood a man that waited, and somehow, he’d gained a companion for his hour of contemplation.
His memories of what was have left him wanting; they’ve left him without direction and still, he waits for them to unfold without forcing them back. Memories moving like the mist— the more he tried to catch them, to reach them and touch them, the more they slipped through his fingers and disappeared altogether.
And yet, it is her words that stir him more than the absence of his purpose, the recollection of darkness and death.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much one may wish to forget something, and he draws his pale face towards her own graphite profile, flicking his ears uncertainly and seeking a soothing breath before he admits his worry at all.
”That’s what I’m afraid of,” he doesn’t even give himself a moment to still the words, no, they slip through his fingers as easily as the memories do. Ladled with uncertainty and worry, they ebb past his whiskers and join the haze that has, for now, bewitched him. Even his body is caught by the tension her words ushered against his nerves, or was it his own that made him so unsettled?
Once more he lets the silence take him, working through his thoughts, his troubles in solitude, as he has been left to do. The time snatched away from him, just like the pieces of his puzzle had been, because it is only now that he allows himself to relent the words that caught on his tongue.
”I think my family was lost in that darkness,” and when he gives her that morsel of his grief, his eyes follow suit with a melancholy sadness…trapped in the gemstone facets of his gaze.
Eleria has never feared loss.
She has never had to.
It is not that she has no one to lose, it is simply that it has never occurred to her that losing them might be so terrible. Her parents, her siblings. She loves them in her own way, but she has her mother’s heart. She did not inherit her father’s softness, his terrible penchant for sadness. Her heart was crafted from shadow, not storm.
She watches him and thinks that perhaps it is his steadiness that keeps her there. She had grown accustomed to a certain kind of chaos–her father’s storms, her mother’s shadows, her siblings’ darkness. Her own personal chaos, too, the thunderous beat of her wings, the flashes of lighting that arced across her body when the weather turned turbulent. As if she belonged to it.
Her father had told her stories of the darkness. Of how he’d believed her brother was responsible, how Jamie had been lethal enough to swallow up the sun, and the terrible things that came with it. How there had been no rest in those days. How everything had changed.
She could tell him, she thinks. Instead, she tilts her head and studies his face, the grief that settles in his gaze. “Who were they?” Had it been siblings he’d lost? His parents? Or some other type of family altogether? Had he had to watch the darkness take his own children, his heart?
“Is it them you’re waiting for?”
oh, my head’s in the clouds
But i don’t feel close to the sun
09-27-2026, 08:53 PM (This post was last modified: 09-27-2026, 08:53 PM by Caster.)
Who were they?
Were.
And he doesn't enjoy the finality of that word, because they're not truly gone are they? It nestles itself against him in all the wrong places, digging into his very bones because somehow it had breached the sanctity of his soul.
It’s not even her fault, no, her words are innocent questions. No, the problematic portion of the conversation came from his own mind, the way his thoughts extracted that singular word and tore it apart until it was he who was left bare, and broken. There’s hurt in his eyes, but he doesn’t turn the pain he feels on her, no, yet the evidence is an open wound that looks back at her before he finds the words to respond.
”My Mother,” he begins, though he isn’t certain why the list begins there, but he knows that her face was among the last he’d seen.
”My brothers,” their faces are less clear, though they ripple through his memory the way rain touches water, spherical patterns ebbing away from him quicker than he can find his grip.
’Is it them you’re waiting for?’
His heart nearly skips a beat before it sinks into the very pit of his stomach, dropping below the safety of his ribcage until it was left with the acid of his stomach. He might be sick.
”I didn’t wait for them,” the words are hollow, and severe. Scraping themselves against his tongue like a sticker patch. Were his legs shaking? No, but his limbs felt weak as the weight of his admission dropped like an anvil where he stood.
It occurs to her that she does not know his name, but she knows his shame.
He wears it plainly on his face in the heavy silence that follows his admission.
She knows precious little about the cost of survival, Eleria, but she knows enough about fear to know that it can blind you. She’s heard stories of the screams that echoed. Even worse, she’s heard stories of the silence. She has seen that the darkness still haunts, even so many years later, as if it had dug its way into their veins. It lingers in them, those who survived it.
The daughter of storm and shadow, it is not in her nature to comfort. She feels no inclination to tell him that he’d done what he’d had to do, that those he left behind would have wanted him to be happy. What she does is this: takes several careful steps toward him, closes up the distance that she had intentionally left between them when she’d stopped. This close the fog reaches for him, too, curls around his ankles, settles heavy as the anvil at his feet.
“Would they have waited for you?” she asks. And perhaps there is some small part of her that hopes he will think no, they wouldn’t have and this will absolve him of his guilt. Not because she has not inherited her mother’s darkness but because she is still her father’s daughter.
oh, my head’s in the clouds
But i don’t feel close to the sun
09-30-2026, 02:25 PM (This post was last modified: 09-30-2026, 02:26 PM by Caster.)
For a time, he’s stuck, attached to the ground so completely that it’s difficult to gain leverage to move. Heavy legs that root him, and refuse to take seed so that he could simply remain there forever.
His uncertainty would serve as his marker when the dreadful passing of time, the rejecting earth, and the careless wind had had their fill of him.
The meadow takes a round of long breaths, or was it the tobiano who slowed his breathing? Accommodating his internal demons and self-soothing whatever turmoil explicitly found him. Even still, he found he wasn’t as alone as he had come to believe. A featherlight presence coaxes its way towards him, slowly nearing as he stiffened once, twice, before relaxing with a great inhale of air preceding his recaptured calm. He blinked once at her face, uncertain of her purpose, then his azure eyes glinted at the fog.
It draped itself across his hooves, before it coiled gently around his heels and sought his calf soon after.
”You brought the mist?” The question leaves his lips as softly as the fog clings, a single ear rotating towards her proximity, his eyes daring for another glance before another heartbreaking sound unbound his relief.
’Would they have waited for you?’
”I don’t know,” desperately he squints his eyes, narrowing his vision to emulate the way his emotions felt caged. ”She told me to run,” and so he did. Maybe they wouldn’t have waited for him to come back the way that he had, maybe the worst befell them that day, maybe it didn’t even matter. He gave her the words anyways, as though he sought to justify his actions to her—but maybe to himself.
10-14-2026, 02:44 PM (This post was last modified: 10-14-2026, 02:44 PM by eleria.)
eleria
It is not so unique a thing anymore, the fog. When Beqanna emerged from its Darkness, the fog remained. In this, she thinks, Jamie had left his mark. For better or worse. She glances over her shoulder then, back toward the treeline, where the mist settled heaviest. She shakes her head and smiles something humorless as she turns her focus back to him.
“No,” she muses, “I am not that powerful.” In a family of magicians, she is one of the most unremarkable. She does not command the fog the way some of the others do, it is merely a companion. “Only this belongs to me,” she adds, tipping her chin toward the tendrils snaking around their legs. Or does she belong to it? It’s difficult to say, though she has never questioned its allegiance to her or her allegiance to it. It is the one thing that tethers her unmistakably to her brother, the first of them who had manipulated it.
She, the stranger says, and she knows without asking that he means his mother. She does not have to wonder if her own mother would have commanded her to run. Anaxarete, the shadow-magician, had never feared the darkness. Surely her mother would have encouraged her to embrace it. “Where did you go?” she asks then. Where had there been to run to? What she wonders, really, is how far he’d had to go in order to escape that crushing blackness. If he’d escaped it at all.
Does anyone wait for her? She studies his face a long moment, as if trying to gauge the danger in his asking it, and then shakes her head. “No,” she tells him, though she thinks of her father, his terror, his shame. Surely he would wait for her. “But, even if there was someone to wait, there would be no reason to."
oh, my head’s in the clouds
But i don’t feel close to the sun
