"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
She is a peculiar thing, there amongst the rubble.
Her sunrise eyes could be alluring, if they weren’t so unnaturally bright. Her face could be comely, if it wasn’t drawn and serious, focused on her latest obsessive task. A sound pulls her attention from it, momentarily, and she looks over a teal shoulder to find the source. Others are drawn away from her like opposing magnets, usually. They feel a sense of increasing doom or perhaps the brush of death the closer they get to her. It is engineered by her to be so.
Or had been.
Vael twists her spine further to eye the now vacant bit of mane her seashell ward had once occupied.
Right.
Loneliness gripped her heart and squeezed under the light of the last full moon. That too, was peculiar. Because she had never been lonely before in her life, not really. She had so many friends: bugs and bats, snails and seagulls, foxes and frogs. Even the ferns and the oaks and the clover. How could loneliness happen upon her like a sneaker wave?
Oh, what a silly thing. To be lonely when life blossoms and grows and exists all around!
Vael had tried to banish the shadow over her heart, but it persisted. So even as she turns back to the Ruins and shaves the rockface with her fortified horn (pulling the remnants towards her with a hoof), she has one ear swiveled behind her. Hoping that it is not impending doom they feel but curiosity. She already feels it within her.
He tries to be alone, but he is drawn to them. Not just their rage, or their sorrow, but their happiness, too, because it is something so vibrant that he cannot fathom it.
It seemed cruel that the emotion that shone the brightest did absolutely nothing for him, that he could only feed on their rot and their torment. His father had always considered this affliction to be a curse, but to Evade it was not so much the nature of the curse, but rather the fact that none of them seemed to possess the heart of the monster. It was why so many of Torryn’s lessons had revolved around isolation—stay away, never get too close to anyone, because nothing good will ever come of it. He had taught him and his twin the art of hunting without the prey ever knowing they had been hunted; how to strike without ever leaving a mark.
And for most of his life, he had listened.
There is no one outside of his family that knows his name, or even of his existence, and he knows that it should be kept that way.
It’s why he most often frequented the Ruins. So few came here, especially at night. The rumor being that it is haunted, but Evade didn’t think ghosts were the worst thing one could happen across. He came here when he did not want to hide, when he did not have to worry about the moonlight illuminating the strange, shadowy shape of his body. Sometimes the lingering sorrow that clung to this place was enough to twist ever-present ache in his gut, that feeling of never being satiated, but the solitude was worth it.
Except for tonight, it seems.
He hears her before he sees her; an odd scraping sound, like rock against rock. When he realizes the source of the sound, he freezes, and while usually he would soundlessly slip off into the night, indecision keeps him rooted to the spot. He could ask her what she’s doing; it was so simple, really. His father’s teachings as a child have not been silenced, and instead they echo in his head. But there is something else alongside his ever-present hunger and current apprehension—selfishness, maybe, a reckless need to for once cave to his desire to speak to someone outside of his family.
He shifts towards her, his steps nearly silent, his dark eyes (black, nothing at all like his father’s glowing red or his mother’s arresting white) glinting like wet stones in the moonlight. “What are you doing?” He asks her, his voice strange, nearly vaporous, as if it too is made of shadow.
10-19-2026, 09:27 PM (This post was last modified: 10-19-2026, 09:28 PM by Vael.)
it's very strange to me
Because loneliness is so very new to her, Vael is quick to turn fully once the stranger speaks.
“Me?” She asks, as if there is anyone else wandering around on this brisk night of early fall. As if anyone else would linger nearby the odd woman doing her odd work. She imagines how it must look, the scraping of the stone. She wagers she would hasten her footsteps if she was in someone else’s position. They don’t know what she knows, or perhaps they don’t care to know at all. Everything has a purpose. Everything has a reason.
And he hadn’t run.
It is a start.
“Collecting knowledge.” Her voice has a wondrous lilt to it, like a songbird who has just discovered it can sing. She takes a step towards the stranger and takes him in completely. Shadows gather around him. No, she shakes her head gently, he is the shadows, made of their billowing black. In all of her travels, Vael has never seen anything like him. It brings a smile to her face. That there are still mysteries to be discovered makes her heart beat faster like that same songbird. That their world is not so traipsed and muddied one cannot find the sprouting seed beneath gives her a fiery hope that ignites in her veins.
But he is no specimen to be studied, as much as she yearns to.
With a steadying breath, Vael takes a step back, feeling her backside brush the Ruins. She blinks away the excitement burning in her gilded eyes, softening her gaze as best she can. “You are magnificent.” There is no courage or cowardice in her voice when she says it, no fear or rebuttal or retribution - only plain objectiveness.
Seashells and rocks and twigs tinkle in her hair as the teal mare tilts her head towards the rising stone. “There is power in the between. Between what was and what is lost to time and memory.” She frowns then, unknowingly letting the silence stretch out too long before she remembers she is not alone. Her eyes are luminous again and far too wide when she looks back at the bewitching figure. She is nearly pleading when she asks, “I can’t imagine being so utterly forgotten, can you?”
