"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
He left her - -
Gone, like a wisp of smoke.
Gone, without a goodbye.
Fool! She calls herself as she broods beside her favorite pond, green and scummy, in the densest part of the forest where none of them go. There is little light in the clearing where the weeds choke out the grass and every stone holds moss, and she finds refuge in this place of hers’ but there is little solace to be had staring at the thick sick skin of algae on the pond, where no frog sits and no bug skims the surface of. Here, this is stillness and her dark self and the sick sad heart in her that hurts, that she berates and tells to shut up! Not that the slick red muscle obeys her very much, she tried to tell it to halt its beat and yet, she is still here because Loam could never just end her self. Life was a disease she preferred to the option of nonexistence and she could not stop being any more than she could will her heart to stop beating.
In the back of her mind, she knows it is not like her to brood over buckskin flesh and dark eyes - she could simply call any of her daughters to her side and be reminded that none of them are his, so how can she say that she really loved him? Gross, even her brain is betraying her and using words she would prefer her brain would forget like the L-word that should never be thought of let alone uttered. She realizes she needs a distraction, the pond that usually provides her with a strange peace is not doing the trick today and Loam needs… well, she isn’t quite sure what it is that she needs, maybe just to move since she is stiff from standing in one spot for too long, but she tells herself she needs to be around them to realize she doesn’t want to be around them or maybe she wants to play her games with them. It has been a while… she muses.
She blazes her own set of trails through the forest, so that when she finally breaks from the treeline to the fanfare of twigs snapping and cracking (it sounds like a lovely chorus of broken bones!), she is a beastly sight as usual - wild, green eyed, mossy, scratched and thus, bleeding - a true wreck as usual, and she eyes the open lay of the land before her with her usual imperial sense of disinterest, despite the broken twig caught in her forelock that snakes thickly down the sharp length of her face. Okay, so Loam looks a bit more haggard than usual - more woodsy and witchy than ever, and there is a wildness in her eyes that wasn’t entirely there before, not so present, and she thinks of who will be the next victim and if she can call up her black hound of a stallion and make him kill again but she hasn’t really bothered seeking him out much. Maybe she needs a new pet, one that would be susceptible to her charms but even the thought of that bores her and she thinks of her pond and of retreat and starts to spin around on her heel when she hears a twig snap nearby and she swings her head sharply in the direction.
“Who goes there?” she demands, as if they were trespassing on her part of the forest.
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
To the girl who would rather eat her own flesh than submit to Famine, the thing – the things – had said, and inside her something bloomed.
Inside her was a seed, a thing apart from her history, unburdened by the weight of it. Inside her was a power – not a power given to her by her parents, not a thing borne from blood, but a thing uniquely hers, a thing earned as she swallowed seals and the world thundered to an end around them.
Plants bend to her will, grow and wilt as she decrees it. She grows flowers in her mane, blowing life back into them when they begin to wilt.
(She doesn’t know which she likes more – the creation, or the destruction.)
She grows a tree – a hickory, her namesake. She thinks it’s in honor of something or someone but no names come to her lips because there is no one, not anymore. Hickory is the last in a long line of lasts, she is childless, without lovers or even friends.
(And once there had been a mare who smelled like the earth or the grave and Hickory sometimes remembers how she’d felt.)
The tree is a touchstone. The tree is where she carved the seals, to remind herself that it was not a dream. That there had been seals shattered and melting in her mouth as she bled for a cause, for a purpose.
(She had been so hungry, and ate her own flesh so she’d have something to spit in their face.)
She is quiet under the tree but all around her twigs snap, and someone’s breaths huff hot in the stillness of the night air.
A demand, made to the wind: Who goes there?
Strange, she almost knows the voice. Almost remembers how it once said her name.
She could grow nettles between them, foxglove, an array of beautiful poison stretching between them. But she does not. She is not a fearful thing.
Instead, to the wind and the demanding voice, she says, “Hickory.”
Loam is… not the first, not the last - she has seen to the contribution of her own ruin through every foal that passes the unforgiving cradle of her hips, promising that she will never be the last but perhaps in her own way, the first for forsaking a bloodline of daughters that she has scattered to the four corners of the earth.
As to the rest… she has kept their names in the back of her mouth like stones and dark secrets, careful to not spill them outward in a voice fierce and beckoning. No, she hoards them like treasure in the darkest pits of her self like the way the shadows gather nearest her hip through no manipulation but simply because she is sable and sleek like them and they are of a kind, shadow and Loam.
Snap.
Snap.
The twigs don’t stop and their protests call to her and she spat back at them in an angry huff and waits, her patience is no patience at all but a predatory sort of stillness.
A name drifts to her, sleepy and poisonous and never more beautiful than the first time she heard it and she almost feels… something. “Hickory,” she drawls in an odd singsong voice so that it sounds more like “Hick-or-y,” high and sweet and Loam is immediately soothed in a way that only her old scummy pond can soothe her, like the cool dark of the wind that blows around them and rattles the twigs on the trees and Loam turns her emerald-green gaze towards the familiar bay and she says the name much more softly, more sweetly, without an ounce of Loam’s usual manipulative intent or poison, because… because Hickory was a strange meld of air, tree, and brightness that calmed Loam’s grave-dark self in ways that even the one that almost had all of her heart could not because… because, there was always a part that called out to her in the trembling dark and said, “Hickory.”
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
She is not from a line meant to love; or so it feels now, as the years echo past and add weight to her bones. Of those who made her, some were lovers, some were not, but they all died fast, snuffed out as candles in the wind.
She’d embraced an anhedonic life, drifting through the years like a water-bug skimming the surface of a lake. She felt little, if anything – no love, but no hate, either. No sadness. She merely was.
But that had changed, with the lamb, with the gods or demons that came after.
She swallowed seals and fought for something, her flesh torn to ribbons and the taste of stone in her throat. She’d laughed, even, laughed while war and famine and death stood as corporeal things before her, crying havoc.
She’d cried havoc too, and let slip her own dogs of war – her laughter, a fearless unplumbed.
It seems almost like a dream now, but there are scars that haunt her bay hide. They force away the apathy she’d let sit in a thick veil across her. The scars keep her here as she grows her touchstone tree and says their names.
As she says her own, to the wind, to the stranger – who echoes it back in a voice that is not so strange. Chimes it, like bells, then says it again. She knows that voice.
The voice that reminds her of gravdirt and strange warmth. If you’d asked her she’d say she’d forgotten the mare’s name but her tongue says otherwise because she says it in a tumble of confusion and a breath of something like excitement.
“Loam?”
“Yes,” she murmurs, her own excitement a hot coal that sits in her breast and stirs to life, flaming and fierce as she is remembered and recognized - things she exists for, lest she fade to little more than a ghost beside her pond deep in the forest.
Her green eyes blaze with life, or the beginnings of it because she has been dead inside for so long now that she has forgotten life is beyond the basics of eat, breathe, and sleep. Loam licks her dry lips and takes a step closer to the tree - to the mare that conjures it up from the earth and she sniffs the air around the bay mare, smelling the stink of something other than horse, sweat, and dust. Something, she thinks, like magic.
“You’re different,” she points out offhandedly, far too honest to be anything other than brutal in her talk as her emerald gaze swoops down and alights upon all the puckering and pinching of flesh that can be nothing but scars; scars that were not there before…Some are faded, dulled by time and healing, and others look too ugly and fresh. Her muzzle reaches out of its own accord, or so it seems, and her lips dance ever so lightly in a mothwing kiss across this scar and that one.
Loam never thinks to ask if Hickory is okay; they were not the same as they were the first time they met but they are not so very different from then either. She thinks of asking how the bay can do that - magick things up from the earth but she was never interested much in things like that - magic, and things growing, when she was full of so death and nothingness, until him - no, she stops herself, and reconsiders, until her - Hickory.
Her eyes are full of mare and tree, and how the tree is between them again as if Loam intends to keep her distance. But that is silly - Loam could no more keep her distance than she could be good, but she is brought to kindness by Hickory, and moves so that their shoulders can brush when they shift their bodies. Her lips press a sigh to the tangling mess of mane and neck, and the things that are usually said like “I missed you” goes unsaid because Loam said those words once, to a memory that went back to being a memory and only that.
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
Yes, murmurs the mare and Hickory suddenly feels strange, dizzied. She is supposed to be shedding her past like snakeskin, but here creeps a mare who once haunted it for a few warm hours, here comes a mare arisen from nothing, who has no blood-burden on her back.
There are flowers in her hair, ones she grew. She is different, and she nods slightly when the mare asserts so. Yes, she is different. This iteration of Hickory has faced strange demons, tasted her own flesh so she might spit it back in Famine’s face. This iteration has faced death’s stony stare, has fought in a battle she was damned to lose.
She survived it (she’d died, there, and woken up here, in the strange rhythm of Beqanna’s time and realms). She’d survived it and come out of it with a newfound power, the ability to grow her trees, her plants.
She is nervous, unsettled, because the past should be the past. She makes the grass tall beneath their feet, rattles the branches of her hickory tree.
“So are you,” she says, finally. Loam’s differences may not be so pronounced as hers, but there is a difference there nonetheless, the differences bequeathed to her by years and experience.
Loam can feel the jangling of Hickory’s nerves like an alarm that keeps going off; it is a rhythm unnatural and not altogether unfamiliar to the sable mare but she wants to press her lips to the pulse and siphon off snippets of the irregularity of it. She has never felt anything more than a quickening of her own pulse in a fit of madness like the time she manipulated a stallion into killing a mare, enslaving him to her for the sheer and simple knowledge of what he had done, or when such sweet buckskin flesh made her weak in the knees but like water, always slipped her grasp of it beyond the moment and the memory. For the briefest of moments, she wonders where that mare that she used to be had gone… who is this meek and mellow thing left in its place?
The grass grows underfoot, quite noticeably and unnaturally, and Loam bends her head down to it to feel it tickle her maw as it pushes up through the soil. She knows Hickory has done this thing, manipulated the earth and pulled the grass up tall from it and that is a very curious thing, almost a tricksy thing that Loam thinks is quite beautiful and useful though it is hardly a manipulative thought that flies through her head - merely an observation, a reckoning that Hickory was far more changed than originally implied but she had already guessed that.
“Hardly,” she counters distantly, unaware of much of a difference beyond the basic facts of age and experience, little of which have shaped her. Loss mayhap, she could argue even that really given that she had such the barest touch of what might have been love that it is more a dream now than real moments that happened in this selfsame forest that towers above them, making them small shadows standing at the feet of something both great and terrible and so much bigger than themselves, that she cannot say she really knows it as love and thus, as the loss of it. Can you lose what you never really had to begin with? Her heart wants to thump in odd staccatos of yes and then no, but Loam never listens much to her heart - it is a slick, gross, throbbing muscle.
But she is curious… Hickory thinks she has changed and really, she is only softened by the other mare’s presence, not quite made motherly but something about the bay makes the black more mild, less heartless, and something else that Loam sometimes can put a name to but often doesn’t.
