"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
Tephra was different than this place, all wide open space and blue skies that disappeared over even bluer oceans. The volcano at its heart had been both immense and beautiful, and the veins of molten red and gold lava that lay strewn around it had guaranteed that Ava was never afraid of the hazy dark.
But Taiga was different, so strange in comparison. Instead of those aching blue skies she had memorized from edge to edge, there were branches locked together like fingers, thin and skeletal and unending. She could see the sky behind them, past the wood and the thick green pine needles, but it was only in snippets, only in glimpses. Even the footing was different, inches of dried red and rust needles above the ridges of roots thicker than her legs- and it had changed something in her too, that eager recklessness. There was a new grace in the way she drifted between the trees, a learned ease with which she picked her way over the uneven footing.
Somewhere in the last few weeks, she had grown up. Between leaving the first home she had known and the friends she had made there, something had shifted within her chest. But there was something darker there too, a homesickness that had devolved into a loneliness that even her sister could not quite reach.
There is a sound to her left, and it ricochets between the trees and the fog until she cannot tell exactly where it came from. She pauses and turns, the turquoise of her brow furrowed deeply beneath the tangles of a dark and cornsilk forelock. “Hello?” It is just a single word from uncertain lips, a question rather than a greeting, and when no one answers her right away she takes a hesitant step forward, little more than a delicate turquoise silhouette outlined by the rolling fog. And then, even quieter, “Is someone there?”
01-15-2017, 10:50 AM (This post was last modified: 01-15-2017, 11:48 AM by Druid.)
He could have just stayed in the Forest, continued on with his meaningless existence. Lost himself in the familiarity of those trees, the winding paths between them but he didn’t. Druid was plopped unceremoniously back to where he had begun, his life sacrifice ended prematurely and abruptly. The endless winter indeed had ended but that didn’t matter, it was already winter in his world. She would be dying again soon,he thought with a frown and a pang deep in his chest as he walked.
It didn’t take much for him to choose this place, it was so much like what he was already used to. Here the trees towered in thick columns racing upwards forever to the skies. The trunks were thicker than any horse, their roots breaking the earth like branches of any other tree he had ever seen. Could he climb them he was sure that on a clear night he might touch the stars but horses are not meant to climb. Beneath them were a centuries worth of pine needles, red like rust and they made a surprisingly soft bed. And warm, they were warm in the night when the fog rolled through, the chill of night air kissing the heat of the ground to make a child of mist.
He left them in his hair, the needles, tangled in his rusty colored tresses because they were home now and he needed something to belong to. A purpose, a reason to carry on and Time had not given him one- so he sought to forge his own.
She was graceful as she moved, perhaps even in an overthought way. She was unfamiliar though that was not saying much, Druid had taken to once again secluding himself from others, a great divide of his own making. She was like a river, twirling between the trees to find a new path when another was blocked by a boulder or a root too big to cross. A time passed as he stood in silence just watching her, carefully tucked away in the trees he had become ever so good at hiding in. Then he shifted, throwing his weight around to find comfort and in his doing so he stepped back, just a hair and cracked a fallen twig.
It was enough to make him jerk, surprise at his own self taking him and his ears laced carefully against his skull. She asked after him, or who, or what it was that made the sound and he didn’t answer. Not right away. It wasn’t until she called once more that he found his voice, emerging from his cover and offering her a solemn, “Sorry, I did not mean to frighten you.”
The forest seems eerily quiet while she waits for an answer, the kind of quiet she would expect from being submerged miles beneath the ocean. She can hear her pulse in her ears, soft and steady at first, and then thrum deeper like a hum the longer the silence lasts. Her eyes narrow, an amber so pale they look like spun-gold, like the echo of her father’s magic, and then sift through a damp fog that is suddenly full of ominous shapes that feel carved out of her worries.
She is about to turn and disappear into the trees, to flow out and away like his river between innumerable trees, but a voice in the silence stills her. Sorry, she turns back, uncertain, that delicate blue face like turquoise and faded sapphire, I did not mean to frighten you. He peels away from the trees then, and she can see how she would’ve missed him in the close and dark of the shadowy forest. His skin is the color of deep earth, smooth and brown like the rust of the pine needles and the bark of these ancient trees surrounding them.
For a moment she wonders if he is a ghost of the clay, a creature born of Taiga itself.
But when she drifts closer, eyes wide and soft and faintly uncertain, she can see the places where bones form beneath rich skin, can see the rise and fall of his ribs with each breath he takes and the way fog forms like small ghosts around his nose.
She stops before she can reach him, pulling to a hesitant halt just a few strides away, and tilts her face up at him imploringly. “That’s okay,” she says, and her voice is as whispery as the tangling of pine needles in the breeze, “maybe it will help if you don’t stand in the shadows watching strangers pass by.” Her mouth is soft now, dark and beautiful, and there is a small smile that etches itself delicately from corner to corner. “It is very misleading.”
Feeling braver she slips closer still, extending the soft of the velvet nose to his in quiet, tentative greeting. When she speaks again she is breathless, shy, and the words are like snowflakes caught in the wind. “My name is Ava.”
Their words, while not loud, chased away the silence of the wood. Overhead a squirrell tittered and scampered across the rough bark of the nearest tree, leaping to a branch and swishing its bushy tail. The pines shook, a handful of dried nettles drifted down and several caught themselves into the nest that was his mane. Druid lifted his head to observe, automatically drawn to the sudden movement and change in his surroundings. The cherry of his skin almost matched the small creature that fled up the tree to the safety of its sprawling branches- they spread like arms above them, almost touching the next redwood in warm embrace. When once more the creature was silent, lost somewhere high above in hasty retreat, he found her everblue face again.
For a brief moment there were no words to leave him, a steady boggy colored stare, fixated on the curve of her jaw and the way her body language changed with each spoken word. He could drink those words, and follow her movements like a babbling brook and never grow tired of their familiar rhythm. The gentle trickle of them as they whispered to life like clear wetness that tumbled over smooth river stones.
She was like rain, splitting the gray, overcast sky, opening up and pouring into him life, movement, and company and he wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. It had been a terrible long time since the pleasure of interaction had found him, he didn’t even know if he enjoyed it anymore, wasn’t sure if the thirst for others was the dryness he know felt in the base of his throat. Or was it the memory that found him there, burning up his windpipe as the flash of a shrinking sphere burned his eyes until he was blind from the radiance and terror of it?
That’s okay, she offered, forgiving him with an ease as simple as breath. Ava, a whisper caught just so on the hairs of his ears and passing like a gasp for oxygen to his brain.
“Druid,” he replied calmly. “I’m Druid. Are you new here? I’ve not seen you before,” the sentence trailed into a mumbled nothingness. While he was apologetic for startling her, he could not pretend to feel regretful for taking solace in the depths of the trees.
