"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 feels… forgotten.
Because the world forgets it’s strange and marvelous children.
Ichor has lost time, or it has lost her - she cannot be certain which it is, because she feels like she is outside of it, or stuck in its innards and unsure of how to get back out. She is still just a stupid horse, not this fantastic other self that she can feel smashing itself to smithereens inside her chest. Her lungs and heart keep it neatly caged but not quietly - it rages and rages inside her, fanning small fires that inflame her veins until she just wants to scream from the pain and familiarity of it. She thinks she has dreamed of this self that she has only seen mirrored in the rock-pools on the Mountain’s harsh face; a thing that is moth and lamprey and horse, horrible but beautiful.
Yes, Ichor loves herself best.
There are other things that she loves - mother, father, the entire horrible but fantastic brood that is moth and lamprey and horse. Every inch of nightmarish should not have been or how can this be, she loves - it shines in the bug-black of her pathetically normal eyes (the world, this world, her world - so bland!). She thinks of them, how are they and what are they doing? Has seen neither hide nor hair of them since the chance encounter between sisters, and already she forgets how long ago that was!
Long enough for her to have started coming into her own; the legs are lithe and longer, the shape and girth less coltish and more feminine. She starts to look like they do: sleek and shiny, even pretty in this poor shape that pales in comparison to how they all should be (fantastic beasts!). Ichor knows that she can reclaim her heritage, it takes time and a fairy’s benevolence, but it is possible and then her true self can be, but for now, she has four limbs, two ears, flat teeth, and still has trouble forming actual speech around a normal grass-eater’s tongue.
(Ichor might be more cow, than gilled moth these days…)
“Mom?” “Dad?” “Someone?”
Each word is broken, forced. Mom sounds like maa-aam as if her throat belongs to a lamb that cannot stop bleating between every syllable. Dad is a frog’s croak, half surprise and half forget about it. Someone, well… that she almost manages if she could get past the stutter and sibilant snake’s hiss.
i'm waiting for this sky to fall, i’m waiting for a sign. i know you're out there; somewhere out there.
She’s a very different creature from the one that had washed up on Beqanna’s shores so many years ago.
She’d been so self conscious then, so aware of all the things that had set her apart from the other horses of Beqanna. She’d hidden away, keeping to the quiet hollows and secret places. Nothing more than a shadow.
Then it had been stripped away - all the things that made her unique, gone. And she’d finally realized how important it had been to her.
And now, now that she has it all back (she wishes she could thank that strange iron stallion), she doesn’t hide anymore.
She stalks the meadow, hairless head held high as she eyes the other horses that gather together against the cooling temperatures. A few heads turn in her direction, freezing in shock and horror as they notice her skin, her face, her teeth …
But for once she pays them no mind, simply continuing on her way towards the great river between the meadow and Tephra. She is what she is, she will not hide it any longer.
But as she nears the river, a voice rings out that gives her pause. “Mom? Dad? Someone?” She knows that voice!
Karris wheels about, black eyes searching for the owner of the voice. And there! There she is! Her beautiful little golden girl. “Ik-er!” Karris leaps forward, moving as quickly as she can towards the golden figure. But at the last moment, she comes up short. Ichor had been born before the reckoning, so she’d at least seen Karris’ true form. But the last time Karris had seen her daughter, she’d well, had the appearance of a more ‘ordinary’ horse. It might take the girl a moment to remember. “Ik-er! It’s -e! Your -other!” Ichor had been young then, but she should remember … Karris hopes she remembers. After all, poor Ichor is missing something too.
His dark eyes watch the bleak shadows of morning, knowing the sun will soon break through the amass of clouds traveling overhead - their shadows would soon be brushed aside by light, and though it pained his sensitive eyes to see it, he would savor its warmth and absorb its sweet embrace. A gentle stream of light begins to crawl across the plain tucked away from the line of pines, illuminating the bright, untouched snow in its glory. At last, he is drawn forth from his place of stagnation, pulling himself from broad boulders and dried out bark and descending from the hills and out into the sunlight.
As the warmth envelopes his aching body, he pauses - antennae stirring on top of his skull as his dark eyes peer around, desperate to analyze the landscaping before him - before a dark, albeit slender figure pieces itself together before him. He steps forward - he is graceful, if nothing else, with his four forelegs and two hind legs – he had taken their strangeness for granted, and it felt like an undeniable ecstasy to be within his own skin again.
Something pulls him out of his mindless reverie; Ik-er! Ik-er! His heartbeat suddenly becomes irregular; adrenaline coursing through his silver-lined veins as his memory mulled over the familiar tone – he would know her voice anywhere. His complex vision vies to focus on the bleak, bleary image of something small and fleeting amble across the dry, brittle plain, and some semblance of a smile tugs at his powdery, whiskered lips. Quietly, he descends, his vivid, transparent wings settled neatly against the curve of his spine as his many limbs propel him forward. His skin is soon touching hers, the length of his body pressing against the smoothness of her own as he emerges beside her, tasting the salty brine from Karris’ skin.
After a long moment, his eyesight focuses – the faint, but discernable image of a daughter – as vivid and as gilded as he, but lacking much of what had always made her whole. What had made her like him, and his heart ached – he knew too well the weight of loss; the burden of being ordinary. Moving several of his limbs forward, the flattened line of his temple presses against the hardened line of her cheek. He longed for the familiarity of her; to see the lined gills along her neck and to share the lurid absurdity that is their condition. His gilled moth-child is perfect, nonetheless – she is so much more than the boring, lackluster skin she wore.
”Karris, Ichor –“ he breathes, ”I have longed for this day.”
Ichor is beside herself --
There is a disconnect between this self and the self she can feel just out of reach beneath her skin. This shape is bloated with blandness (to her, because it is not sensational and strange!); there is an Ichor that is not just a filly becoming a mare in sleek skin and sinewy muscle, but a fantastic beast that hides in the thick of her blood and marrow. She is cut off from it - from them, the family that exists in one extreme or the other: normal or fantastic. It feels like a limb severed, phantom pains that bolster her determination and straighten the steel of her spine but also make her want to cower inside the hideous shape of her own shadow because she knows that is not who she is or was meant to be.
She feels forgotten - as forgotten as spindrift on a beach.
Pretty to look at, there one second and gone the next.
Maybe she is spindrift…
Her nose skims the tops of the crinkly tussocks of grass; she is disenchanted by the notion of having to eat it and sometimes, she thinks her gut rebels against the thought of it because she ought to be siphoning nectar from the nearby flowers - anything but consuming mouthfuls of crunchy boring grass, and how she knows this, she cannot say except that it just feels aberrant to her nature. The thick dull tongue that crowds the herbivore teeth is no friend of hers, it lays there flat and stupid and trips up her speech. She hates it - all of it! All of this! Begins to seethe as she seeks them out, almost frantic in the way her eyes run over every shape of horse for signs of lamprey or moth. Her face is ever grim and darkened by constant disappointment --
Then!
A shriek -
A shout -
A figure that moves herky-jerky away from the river’s shimmering blue breast towards her, plain old Ichor. Her name comes stilted from a mouth unsuitable for kisses and speech but she’d know that voice anywhere; her mother, beautiful and emboldened by a return to her true self - a self that Ichor recognizes dimly through a haze of newness and hunger as a foal, but knows just the same as none other than her mother, fully restored to her hairless, toothy self. “Mother!” she barks happily, dancing forward on eager toes (hooves, really) to bury the side of her face against Karris’ cool slimy shoulder. Ichor breathes in the rich riverine scent of the lamprey-mare and sighs, a little more happy - gaining a tiny foothold in this hellish place that sees her as nothing more than a horse.
(When she is so much more! Fantastic beasts!)
It feels like heaven, or near enough to it as she’ll ever get to run her lips over the slime-slick skin that she remembers well before the Reckoning made them boring and ill for selves that had gone deep beneath their skins into long slumbers. (Some have reawakened, like her mother but she - she feels it beat against her bones, trapped and angry.) Her mouth travels upwards, towards the gilled neck and beyond to press a kiss to the grey-brown check. “Mother,” she breathes out heavily above that circular terrifying mouth that has never scared her. Happy but still heavy-hearted, she lays her cheek against Karris’ and thinks fondly of her earliest moments at her mother’s side; back then, the world had seemed so different, like she looked at it through a different set of eyes (she had, she knows this but tells herself it’s not true because a lie is easier to believe then knowing she was made like them - fantastic beasts).
There is a flurry, soft as a snowflake even though the pair of them could easily cause a stir --
She opens her eyes and lifts her head as she feels her mother lean away from her, lean into another and she looks over her mother’s smooth back to see the familiar outline of her father in all his moth-gilded splendor. Ichor cannot help but smile; the two of them were sensational to look at it and maybe that’s just the jaded opinion of a child that came from them but even if she had not been of their making, she would still have stopped and stared because they were terrible in their beauty and beautiful in their terribleness. Her heart grew fit to burst as Elysium moved his many limbs forward to lay his temple to her cheek; her eyes closed and kept the tears at bay - kept them from just breaking down her face in a tide of damp happiness.
“Longed for it as we have,” she echoes in the barest breathy murmur she can manage. Her troubles with speech are rapidly dissolving in the bliss of having rediscovered her mother and father. She pulls her head back, “I’ve seen Min and another.” but she doesn’t tell them that they are like her - ordinary, so sad and ordinary. Ichor tucks the tiny burden of this knowledge away into her breast, close to her heart - close to where her own fantastic self sits impatient and causing her heart to always thump faster than it should (the knowing she was other than ordinary might be the death of her one day!).
03-17-2017, 10:51 PM (This post was last modified: 03-18-2017, 12:51 AM by Karris.)
i'm waiting for this sky to fall, i’m waiting for a sign. i know you're out there; somewhere out there.
Oh her little golden girl!
Ichor had been the last of their little brood, the last of their children to be conceived before the Reckoning had struck and made such a mess of things. She’d been such an unusual creature too, inheriting most of her traits from her father – his wings, his antennae, his limbs – but with one small addition from Karris herself. A little set of gills, one on either side of her head.
A marvelous combination of moth, lamprey and horse.
But even in this form, even as a ‘normal’ creature, little Ichor is beautiful to her eyes. How could she not be? She is hers down to the bone, hers and Elysium’s, and no fibre of her being could ever find the girl distasteful, no matter what the Reckoning has done.
She nickers as the soft golden nose buries itself against the coolness of her skin. “Ik-er,” she breathes as the girl’s familiar scent fills the air. She smiles (or what passes for a smile from her mouth) as the girl’s kisses travel up from shoulder to neck, to gill, to mouth. “I -issed you.”
She can sense the need in Ichor’s touch, the desire for the unusual (the familiar) that she’s missing, and Karris’ heart breaks for the poor girl. Karris still thinks Ichor perfect no matter the shape of her body, but she understands. Oh she understands all too well.
Something soft and familiar rustles nearby, and she draws back from the girl with a wide (and unsettling grin). “Elysiuh!” She breathes deep as he moves against her, inhaling his musky scent, and shivering as his delicate wings brush oh so gently against her damp skin. Funny to realize how much she’s missed this – it’s not something she’d ever given much thought before. “I too.”
She follows Elysium as he reaches for their daughter, and as he stands cheek to cheek with their beautiful girl, she slips in between the two of them, neck pressed against Ichor’s lower shoulder, rump pressed up against Elysium’s legs.
She fills with something she can’t entirely describe, a happiness of sorts, but more than happiness. More than joy. It’s an infectious bubbling feeling that threatens to overflow her banks and carry her away. She feels full, she feels light, she feels free.
This … this here is something she’d never thought possible. A wonderful, incredible dream, and it’s all hers.
Family. Her family.
Ichor pulls away, and Karris steps back and looks up. Her joy abates (though does not disappear) at the names that fall from her daughter’s lips. "-In. -Ortia?” This here might be her family, but it is not complete. “-Ere?”
