The scent of hibiscus.
The pattering of rain on palm trees.
The crash of the ocean, continuous.
It is the sound of waves upon the shore that wakes her;
To understand why she wakes to the sound of the sea, we must step back in time to when she first touched her hooves to the boney white shore - -
She had come to die.
There was nothing left for her but this, death.
So she came to the only place that held a trace of the sea, the waves gray and listless and so unlike the waves of her bright island birthplace.
Her bones ached; her heart, more so. She had never been able to shake the ghost of his face - it was ingrained on her heart, oaken and old, like she is - so old! His name is an oath stricken from her lips, it echoes and rattles through the space between each rib and breaks the silence between each heartbeat. She dreams of him and her island home each night; tall cliffs, the peaks of his ears, and she dies a little more each day inside.
Lanai has been dying for years.
The light bay mare moves out onto the beach, heedless of the skeletons heaped about, their bones small grim mountains that remind her of the thing she seeks - death, release. Her lips purse, a fat heavy sigh falls out and an explosive crack stops her short. Befuddled, she looks down at her feet to discover that she is standing atop a pile of bones on that ill gleaming sand. No matter how she moves, she will further disturb the bones of some dead horse unbeknownst to her.
Lanai sighs, there is nothing she can do - those bones will turn to dust anyway. So she turns amongst them, every step carelessly stomping them further to pieces. Femur, vertebrae, they suffer the same crippling indecency of being trampled to fine dust but those bones held a secret deep in their marrow of an old dalean queen born of the very stars and earth. There was still some magic left in those old bones, and Lanai bent her head to what was left - mostly bone-dust now and inhaled long and deep of the fine powdery stuff.
She went into the arms of the gray wave after that.
She gulped in water-filled breath after breath the deeper she swam out until at last, she sank open-mouthed into the deep.
Lanai was dead, or so she thought.
The sound of the waves woke her; crashing endlessly upon the shore. She must be in heaven and a sad sweet smile touched her face until she opened her eyes, horrified to discover herself wet and alive on the same beach she had come to die on. “Those bones,” she muttered despondently as she climbed to her feet. Her left side and legs bore a light sheen of bone-dust that stuck to her damp bay fur. She knew she couldn't stay here, she wasn't dead after all.
She died hours ago, only to have the sea spit her back out. Lanai is not sure which betrayal is worse - when he left her, cracking her heart in two, or going into the sea to die only to be thrown back onto the shore. Why couldn't her broken heart stay broken and why couldn't she just die? She shook her head, surprised at the newfound lightness in her that had not been there before - Lanai was always so melancholic. It was her heart, it seemed larger and lighter somehow.
Lanai found her way back to the meadow. It has not changed, not in years anyway. But she has; there is gray in her muzzle, fragments of broken bone and dead coral tangled in her hair. The sway to her back has deepened after three foals - a lovely daughter and two large colts. She has a scrape on her knee that has bled and is speckled with sand; that bone-dust is everywhere, in the scrape, in her lungs, in the very marrow of her bones and it has changed her, she knows that, sorrows over it but only for a moment before her ever-sad eyes turn up to the sky in odd expectation.
Lanai wishes it would rain, that's when she's happiest.
there was something in the water, now that something's in me i can't go back, but the reeds are growing out of my fingertips
Perhaps it is decades spent beside the healing waterfall (piecework decades, yes, but decades nonetheless) or an innate carelessness buried deep in his bones, but whatever the cause – Texas is not afraid of being hurt. He has spent each evening for the past few years wading through the knee-deep water, knowing that he’ll emerge with sleek black legs free of the scratches and gouges of the day. For a creature as vain as Texas, a life beside the waterfall is advantageous. His smooth brown coat is unmarked by scars, and while there is a bit of grey peppered across his face, the bay stallion does not seem any older than seven or eight. He moves with ease unbecoming of a nearly-two-hundred year old stallion, but his long-legged stride is far from being graceful. Texas has always been lanky, angular, just barely slinging to the edge of attractive and awkward.
With a habit of nightly mending, Texas had not at first noticed the other effects of the waterfall. He had thought the waters were working more quickly – and he was grateful as winter sets in – but had not paid much mind at first. There are other things to worry about; the speed of magic is inconsequential. Only when he realized that the thought of the waterfall wiped away ankle cuts from sawgrass and ease the tension in pulled muscle did he take note. From there he tried more, pressed farther until he was actively injuring himself to test the phenomenon. Each injury faded as soon as he willed it to (though it had taken far longer to mend from his leap down the waterfall than he’d anticipated), and today he had finally decided it was time to test further applications of this new facet of himself.
He is searching for a target, someone who looks vulnerable. Texas has never suffered from a lack of charm, but he’d rather not waste his skills of persuasion on any harder a target than necessary. He sees a bay mare, sway-backed and old, and pegs her as an easy mark. He moves forward, a pleasant greeting on the tip of his tongue, but then she looks up toward the sky and he freezes.
Texas realizes in a single instant that perhaps he not immune to all types of hurt.
He no longer remembers precisely where Lanai had fallen into the pattern of his life, only that she had stood at the head of a path that would have led him down a far different life than the one he has now. It would have been a quiet life, a happy life filled with the laughter of children that he knew the names of, the kind of life that he had given up hope of having when he mourned Believer.
There is time to turn away before she sees him but he feels his hooves are anchored to the earth, and all he can do is stare.
texas
 
T E X A S
immortal silver bay hybrid stallion
king of the falls
01-01-2016, 10:47 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-01-2016, 10:50 AM by lanai.)
Lanai feels freer somehow; death has changed her but she’s not dead - there is pulse and breath in her yet, but her heart is lighter instead of heavy and rich with all the sorrows she’s carried around for years. She still wishes it would rain but that wish isn’t at the forefront of her mind, as she stares up at the sky still, her eyes brighter than they’ve ever been. The sky is a blue that reminds her of home, even the green of the grass poking up through the snowmelt is a shade familiar to her - not because she’s been here for so long, this land was never (could never) be as familiar to her as the volcanic slopes of her island birthplace. What she feels is almost how she felt back then - in the time before, before everything began and Lanai metamorphosed into the mare she was now, or not quite now but in the time before this new beginning - this immortal flush of life that fills her.
She doesn’t hear the noise around her; hears whales singing in the pale sky-blue waters that she stares at in between the breaks in the clouds and she thinks that she could stay like this forever, stuck in the remembering but Lanai knows better than that. Lanai closes her eyes, face still turned upward, sunstruck - lights dance behind her eyelids from staring at so much brightness for too long and the lights take the shape of a face she once knew well and loved briefly but timelessly. Lanai shakes her head - shakes away the memory of him that rises unbidden in her mind because she is feeling too much and is momentarily freed of all the things she usually carries so heavily upon her shoulders, those old hurts that hang like stones on her back.
The clip-clop of hooves nearby breaks her odd reverie and Lanai turns her head to be met with a ghost, nevermind the fact that his smell assaults her nostrils in a most becoming way that invites up all the old familiarity they’ve shared between them. Lanai’s eyes are still ever-sad but maybe sadder still because she doesn’t think he’s real - surely he’s dead by now? Neither of them were immortal then like they are now, changed by time and magic and all the years apart and it hits her hard - the paths never taken, and why is it that she never fought harder for him to stay? She just let him go… that hurts her most despite the fact that she never stopped loving him.
Ghosts don’t stare like that though…
“Texas?” she calls out to him, unbelieving.
there was something in the water, now that something's in me i can't go back, but the reeds are growing out of my fingertips Texas has always been a shallow man, preferring the company of attractive mares and disappearing at the sight of grey hair. Some part of him considers himself kind for this – young mares can so easily start over, even with carrying the child of a man they’ll never see again. He’d tried to count – decades ago – the children he might have, but once he passed fifty there was no use continuing. Children don’t need a father to thrive; most times they don’t even need a real mother.
In that counting though, he’d hesitated at Lanai. They had children, didn’t they? Surely they had – he could still remember the things he had felt, and surely such strong emotion had been consummated and produced children. But he couldn’t remember them, couldn’t picture their faces, couldn’t even recall that he had been the one to walk away, that it is his fault that there are no children with Lanai’s love of the sea and Texas’ love of…himself.
She calls out to him and he cannot deny her. His feet move forward rather than away, until he is close enough to touch her. He does not. He hangs back, takes a moment to look into her soft eyes and at the sand and coral in her mane. She is old and grey and the most beautiful thing he has ever laid eyes on.
“You came back,” he says, the words much more of a question than a statement. She is here and she is not how he remembers her. She is better, and surely that means she is real?
texas
T E X A S
immortal silver bay hybrid stallion
king of the falls
Once, she was as innocent as a cove unspoiled by trespassers but they have since trespassed against her.
The spoils of their trespasses are grown and gone from her of course, fruits that have long since soured in her memory - she hasn’t forgotten the one lovely daughter that takes after her, or the two strapping sons that needed her less than she needed them. They filled her time, eased the ache of her loneliness for a year or two, and like a cyclonic gust of wind, they were gone and she was alone again with her lovely sorrows and the toll age once took upon her bones. She can recall their faces in brief passing like a quick rain shower in the middle of a sunbright day and they are gone again.
Never once had they consecrated their love with a child.
Their love was never so lucky or long-lived for that.
She remembers there was only time for them, then no time at all and each was gone off on a different path in life and she cannot recall how they came to such a fork in the road or why he walked off without her and she never fought for him to stay beside her. Her face shows the shadow of memory and a hint of a frown but it passes the closer he gets to her, and she is shy beneath his scrutiny. The way he looks at her is not entirely uncomfortable but she senses his disbelief - it clouds her own face actually, makes it pinch together in a not so lovely way as she regards him, feeling spry and alive and thinking just like him, that each is not how they remember them to be but they’re both real, right?
“Yes,” she says, a little more breathlessly then she would like but he still has that effect on her - to snatch her breath away, just like a sunset can, beautiful and timeless and never the same. Except she feels better - more alive somehow, not that she could explain that to him - that she had gone off to die finally, to stop pining away for him (how pathetic!) and a love that was never to be more than it had been, except… and what more is there to say then that? Except she’s here and she looks at him like she’s been given a second chance and she does what he cannot - she reaches out and touches him, just the barest brush of her nose against his same bay skin and she breathes him just that quickly and feels like she’s come home again.
Never made it as a wise man. I couldn't cut it as a poor man stealing I’m tired of living like a blind man. I'm sick of sight without a sense of feeling Only when he feels her breath against his skin, only when he can no longer deny that she is a trick of the light (for she must also be a trick of the touch too, and who ever has heard of such a thing?!), does Texas truly believe that it is Lanai in front of him. He lets go of a breath that he did not know he was holding, breathes it against Lanai’s mahogany skin and inhales the smell of salt and sea.
She is exactly how he remembers her, and entirely changed.
“Don’t leave again,” he hears himself saying, he hears his heart flutter like he is a colt fresh from his mother’s side and besotted by the first lanky filly he sees. He had forgotten how this felt; he has teased the more youthful generations for their fanaticism. “Stay here.”
There had been countless women before Lanai, and countless more since. He is the kind of man that will always be that way, the sort of man that will never understand exactly what it is to be faithful. He will try, as he has in the past, and he will fail. But this time, perhaps, the bay stallion will try again. He will continue to try, to refuse to accept defeat until the last true breath leaves his body. (It never will, of course, and Texas will never succeed at this particular task. But for the very first time he is not afraid of failing, and that in itself is a wonder)
texas
She is seized by a sudden thought to tell him how she has dreamed of him day in and day out.
She could tell time by the way she missed him - sunup and sundown were the worst times to miss him because the light was thick and watery, every shadow held his shape, every breeze his scent.
Lanai cannot say anything for the way he lets out the breath he was holding against her skin and all she can think is that it feels like home, the way their bodies touch and come together so naturally.
They cleave to one another like two halves of a whole and when he says don’t leave again, she says “Never” like Poe’s raven - croaky and the weight of that one word so final and heavy with promise. How could she leave him like this now? He is saying all the things she always wanted to hear fall from his lips like rain from the clouds above, heavy and thick with emotion and Lanai could no more leave if she had really wanted to - which she doesn’t. Texas was always a beacon for her, a lighthouse of hope and love that kept her searching for the shores of his soul so that the boat of her body could bump gently against his own flesh and anchor there permanently.
He asks her to stay and she can feel her heart solidify just that much more, hard and hurtful in its now immortal thump in her bay breast. She answers him with the clasp of her teeth to a hank of his black hair and a quick sharp tug of it then the wild skitter of her teeth down his neck to one lasting loving nibble on his wither. Lanai answers him in the only way she can - through the language of touch and breath because for the first time, words fail her and it sounds so silly to just say okay. She means it though, this agreement to try and stay and not go off in search of the sea or a summer storm or his shadow on the ground. She’ll really try this time to just stay, to just be in the here and the now with him even though in the back of both of their minds, they are setting themselves up for that same old hurt and that same old failure but isn’t that what good old timeless love all about?
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