"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
11-24-2017, 12:22 AM (This post was last modified: 11-24-2017, 11:20 PM by Sid.)
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Raven feathers mix between the warzone of her locks, glistening against the dull threads of her ebony hair. The rope-like material tumbles messily to her knees, hanging loosely from the lithe frame of her midnight body. Against the grey of the horizon, she fits in immaculately, though her edges are far smoother than those of the landscape. The incurvature of her head marks her as distinctly Arabian, though the waves in her tangled locks suggest Andalusian as well.
Her nostrils flare, for the scent of horses alights upon them. Long has it been since a soul aside from her mothers' entered her consciousness, and longer still since she has smelt one upon the barren winds of this land. The mountain paths beckoned her as a girl, whispering to her at night as Kotaro slept. The whispering comforted the strange child in those first years alongside her dam. In the dead of night, when she slowed her breathing and listened carefully, she could hear the quiet weeping which floated through the air like ink.
Heavy, dark, frightening.
To begin with, at least.
The girl of the mountains no longer heeded their whispering, for as the moon turned its fourth time, she feels a stab in her stomach that demanded to be obeyed. She can not grasp the word for the feeling; having lived for years amongst the falcons and ravens, snow leopards and sheep, few words came to her silken lips. Had it not been for the delicate art of spying and eavesdropping as a child, Trissy might have known even fewer, leaving her a mute.
The compression of her chest adds to the pain of the stab in her belly as she turns her head away, suddenly unsure. What lays beyond the largest mountain of her wild home are people like herself. Her people. She wonders of their lives and of their tongues that so easily form words. She scrounges for memories of horses besides herself and Kotaro; few are retrieved.
Instinctually, she longs for companionship.
It is the memory of her mother's tears that dissuade her.
And dissuade her they have, for nigh on three years. Her youthful body has known exhaustion and failure. Her stomach has known hunger, and her throat, thirst. Her lungs have known air that is hard to breathe, and air that sends her sprinting up undiscovered mountains. Her knees have known rocks and sharp pebbles intimately, leaving red rivers in their wakes. Her eyes have known beauty in the summer, and death in the winter. Her heart has known freedom, and now, she realises, it knows loneliness.
The clip-clip-cliping of her hooves echo through the gorge. Beneath her skin, the knife twists, and the sky presses less leniently against her ribs, her lungs. With each step, the indescribable need for words, society and companionship swells. When she turns to leave the scents behind, and forget of the civilization just beyond the largest mountain, her instincts explode, and she is racing back, back, back.
Back to Beqanna.
Back to home.
She knows the spread of the land, and her well-worn obsidian hooves do not fail to land away in particular areas with each stride. The small stream splashes at her lean, sinewy underside. As her heart rate quickens, her skin spreads across well-defined ribs, though also across wiry muscle. The mountain creature is small, but she is tough, stringy, hard to chew and digest. Standing only at fourteen hands tall, the wildling is a child in stature, but a beast of survival.
A rugged hoof clips against a rock she has not known before, and she stumbles. She ignores the inconvenience, deeming it normal, acceptable. With each dawn, Mother Nature changes the earth; the irregularity of the rock is nature's way of creativity in small doses. When the inspiration truly dawns upon the Mother, then hurricanes rise up from the dust.
And yet the rocks seem to shift before her very eyes. Soon she no longer races the ravens of the sky, or the minos of the stream, and instead is left to navigate this new land with caution. It is then that she realizes that she has entered Beqanna once again; it is then that her onyx eyes flicker back to her homeland, to the mountains. They whisper goodbyes, and come-back-soons, the trees, however sparse, waving to her solemnly.
Knowing that her era as a child of the wilderness has finally come to an end, she turns back to the land, and begins wandering through it. Her eyes scan the horizon, make love to the great expanse of land and the mountain-free sky. Her hooves caress the long stalks of grass, more lush and green than most places from the mountainland. And as she inhales the horse-polluted air, she finds it easy to breathe.
(Little does Trissy know, she enters a new Beqanna that she truly knows nothing about. Her ignorance of the land is plentiful, and excruciatingly obvious on her feral hide and in her bladed eyes. She does not know, does not know a thing at all except the love of her long dead mothers, and even that has begun to fade. With the smell of the mountains ingrained into her skin, the filly stands, utterly vulnerable in middle of the field, head held high in absolute abandon.)
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
Each time Ivar leaves Nerine, it is with an ever-increasing weight of frustration atop his shoulders.
First she had told him to wait, and now she has told him that she won’t be coming after all. The damn piebald queen of the cliffs can have her important responsibilities; Ivar will go find his own. (The black and white stallion bypasses more legitimate responsibilities (running his own kingdom, for example) and skips straight to the Field.
The inexplicable sense of propriety that they both have; it has grated on him. Kylin feels the same, he suspects, but Ivar has never asked her outright. The dark creature would simply rather not know. Neither of them are here today though. They’re both safe up north, Isobell in her kingdom and Heda in his. Ivar is alone here in the field, surrounded by strangers dozing in the warm spring sun.
Few of them look up as he walks by, but those that do seem to have trouble looking away. For all the stallion’s brooding expression and heavy scowl, there is no disguising the attractive curve of his muscular neck or the way the sun glints off the opalescent scales of his pale shoulder. A never-failing lure, the bait of the kelpie’s good looks are tempered by the darkness in his brown eyes and the heavy trod of his hoofsteps.
He’d been sure he would have found someone by now.
Yet none of the faces he sees calls to him, no appealing sound or scent draws him in. The farther he goes into the common land, the more frustrated he becomes. Ivar goes so far as to nip at the flank of an older mare that bumps against him in passing, but the sudden sight of sharp teeth is enough to startle her into an apology before he draws blood.
The black horse he brushes into is about to elicit the same reaction, but the breath he takes in to speak is filled with something he does not recognize. The bald-faced stallion stops short, half-way into an inhale, and twists his head to the side to look back at the stranger. She is small and dark, lacking wings or a taste of the water, but Ivar’s dark eyes trace her figure as though the young kelpie does not have those preferences.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Asks the smoky black stallion, his soft tenor voice more gentle than his boldly masculine figure might suggest. His curious perusal of her finished, Ivar meets the mare’s gaze squarely. Defintely a stranger, he knows, and from a place he is not familiar with. Ivar, who has been to each land in this new Beqanna, is rarely lost when guessing the origin of a native. Yet this flinty-eyed female is different; she is from elsewhere, from the beyond where he has never dared go.
king of loess minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus
11-24-2017, 11:43 PM (This post was last modified: 11-26-2017, 06:45 PM by Trissy.)
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
The easiness of her breathing is quelled by the realization that she doesn't have a damn clue what the next step in her brilliant plan is supposed to be. There are horses milling about everywhere; not many to be sure, but more than she could recall ever seeing in one place, never mind in every place she had ever seen another horse. One might expect the girl to give in to her instincts, to her genetic predispositions - but she doesn't.
Trissy stands stock still there in the field, head held abrasively high, unyielding eyes observing the going ons around her. It's all she can do not to run back - but no, she is sure of herself. When her mind's eye travels back to the nameless mountains, that same crushing weight presses against her chest. No. This is where she belongs - at least for now.
When a stallion of marked appeal snaps at an older mare not far from where she stands, Trissy slowly presses her ears to her skull, bracing herself to counterattack should the nearing creature feel so inclined as to repeat his former offense. And for a split second, her hind hoof does snap off the earth - but when the tobiano reconsiders his actions, so too does she. With her head raised as high as it is - and needlessly so - their eyes meet on the same level when he peers back to examine her. His gaze is steady. She steadies her own.
You're not from around here, are you?
His words are almost foreign to her, but that does not discourage her. The dull locks of her wavy mane trickle like water as a breeze flows past the pair. For a time, Trissy wonders if she will answer at all, despite there being no reason for her to stay silent. But the curve of the stallion's withers and the slope of his musculature inspires response; never mind the fact that he chose not to pester her, and spoke far more gently than a man with that deep a frown ought to.
"Not any more," she replies, her voice a husky echo of her mother Kotaro's - deeper than a mare of her stature might be expected to carry. "And even then, not for long." As the words trail from her delicately shaped mouth, Trissy relaxes her ears into a neutral position. Next to the giant of a stallion, her guard must stay up; he stands more than three hands her greater; but the time for hostility has passed, and in this new meeting, intrigue rapidly spreads.
Trissy
html by maat
Blegh. 2014 me wrote this character better than I did tonight. >
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
She is small, but Ivar’s curious perusal of her figure has revealed that she is not weak. The dusty black of her coat hides lean muscle and is littered with the scars of a life that has not been soft. She holds her head high, with a regality that reminds him (only for a moment) of the two that he is trying to forget. Ivar suspects that this stranger is not quite like anything he has met before, especially given what she knows – or might know – about the world beyond Beqanna.
There is nothing familiar in the smell of her dark coat, and he wonders if perhaps she has been gone from Beqanna so long that it has faded. Or, more curiously, perhaps she is from Beqanna before.
The black mare does not look especially old, but she lacks the ethereal sense of ‘forever in her prime’ that so many immortals do. Time passes differently outside of Beqanna, Ivar has always heard, seconds take years to pass yet decades are gone in the blink of an eye. The stallion’s only source of information about this is less than reliable, and this stranger provides an unexpected potential for collaboration.
“Will you be staying?” He asks abruptly
He will not risk chasing her into the beyond, but if she intends to stay in Beqanna, Ivar has already decided that he will take her to Loess.
She will tell him of the Beyond, and of whatever she knows of Beqanna. The knowledge will be a distraction, something to occupy his mind. The wind catches the curl of her mane, and Ivar gaze follows it down to her neck, across her withers, down the curve of her haunches. If she stays long enough, perhaps she’ll give him something to occupy his body with as well.
“I’m Ivar,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “From Loess.”
king of loess minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus
11-26-2017, 07:21 PM (This post was last modified: 11-28-2017, 06:48 PM by Trissy.)
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
She cannot deny his beauty. As his eyes meander across the criss-crossing paths of her sinewy muscle and weather-worn fur, she allows herself the same right. Without lowering her head, the woman takes in the gleam of his unnatural scales, and the form to which they are moulded to - the muscles and the height, towering and swallowing in nature. Through her nostrils she smells the distinct and remedial saltiness of the sea, and another thread of intrigue winds its way through the unkempt one's mind. Another possibility.
Before his reply comes, Trissy is stepping closer to him. Not rudely so, and not even close to intimately - but with her tangled locks and flinty eyes and that scent of a 'notherworld, it is grave. A spike of discomfort in their already complicated meeting - another shot of adrenaline coursing through her veins, another deep inhalation of his familiar and intoxicating scent.
Intoxicating, though only if she dared to take a sip.
Her answer follows without any hesitation, without barely enough time for what he said to have been process. "Will you be taking me?" The low tones of her voice are challenging, pushing, testing. The hard-set line of her lips forms immediately after the confounding words are issued. Another mare, a flimsy, girlish one, might have smiled and blushed after such a statement. But writ clearly upon her face is stoicism and gravity - and the lack of humor to the uncultured woman is tangible. There was no time for laughter in the peak of the mountainland.
He introduces himself then, after his eyes have slid across her with a glint of ownership and hunger. She doesn't flinch, neither at his words nor his invasive gaze. "Trissy," she says simply. "Where I am from is no longer."
And although she has not heard of the destruction of her Beqanna, she feels it, and she sees it, and above all, she smells it. Her Valley home is gone; her rightful kingdom, the throne she was born to, abolished and destroyed. The knowledge does not spark mourning within her, but instead leaves her with an ever growing hungry to discover what now lies where once she stood - for that was decades ago, but in the Beyond, the sun set more slowly. The moon rose with care and thought. Here - here, it was faster, more dangerous, more exciting.
She stands there, closer than she ought to be, farther than she knows he wants. She stands, holds his gaze, the challenge still standing: will you be taking me?
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
She draws closer, the distance between them now easy to cross with a curious touch. Yet he refrains – an uncommon thing – and merely watches. It is not that he fears she might lash out, that she might try to deny him his rights as the first stallion to find her alone in the Field. Even if she were to bite him, her flat teeth are harmless, her hooves might bruise but would never cut.
Feral. That’s the word for her.
Not wild in the ways of the woods, willfully ignorant of the rules. No, she is something different, something untamed.
Something he wants.
So when she answers without hesitation, when she names his next actions before he can even enact them, Ivar smiles.
The scowl from before has faded away, replaced by a curious tilt of his pale face. “Yes,” he replies. “I will be.” Perhaps she had expected him to be flustered at her assumption, perhaps she’d hoped that social mores would strike him like a bolt of lightning and illuminate his rather uncomfortably forward actions. Or perhaps – Ivar barely dares hope – she is as forward as she seems, a fitting match for the too-bold stallion.
Trissy, she tells him, from a place that is no longer. Before the Reckoning, he decides, else she’d surely name the kingdom. In this new world, Ivar suspects Nerine might be most fitting for this dark-eyed creature: a land of warrior women with hearts as hard as their damn granite cliffs.
The idea of keeping her away from Nerine, of denying the seaside kingdom an ideal recruit…it is thrilling. Ivar wants her instead and so he will take her, politics be damned.
He will take her with him, he knows, and bridges the gap between them with this intent. His breath ghosts along the curve of her neck – this close, she seems so small, so fragile. Yet the muscle beneath Ivar’s roving mouth is lean and strong. The teeth that close over the thick flesh of her shoulder prick at her skin, not enough to draw blood, but enough to make it clear that they could. Mine, he declares with the painless nip: claimed.
“To Loess first?” he asks the tangled strands of her raven mane, “Or would you like to stop somewhere along the way?”
king of loess minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus
I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
His smile is titillating, an unexpected slash of honey across his vast expanse of authority and scales. She could almost taste it, the honey, could close her eyes and imagine the succulent and viscous fluid mixing with her saliva and being slowly, oh so slowly, digested into her system. She could close her eyes, but she doesn't - yet.
Yes, I will be. Words, weightless, wandering. She wants more of them, wants only to pull the kelpie's strings with her delicate hands and to have hers pulled in return. His smile is titillating. And his assuredness, his steadfastness and low-borne calm, those can't be denied either. Trissy's uncertainty about returning is farther from her than the land from which she came; for here, in this stallion, with his honeyed smile and sea-salt smell, she hopes she has found something worth staying for. Someone who, like her, knows what he wants.
An answer needn't be given, as the towering man meets her challenging stance and closes the remaining space between them. The tension of being close to him was electrifying - but with his breath humming across the tight sinews of her neck, she is set on fire. His scaled lips are warm and strange, exciting, in more ways than one. It is nearly too much - she nearly gives in to it, nearly allows herself to be swooned as many mares have been by the stallion. No man gets this good without some practice.
As his teeth release her skin - so soft compared to his, yet rugged compared to others - Trissy presses her own mouth to the man's neck, her lips parted, her warm breath tracing every scale like trickling water. His words come again, honeyed, intoxication, so tempting and lush. Her lips form a secret smile against his coat, which causes her teeth to audibly drag and scratch against the stallion's hide. Her delicate mouth is sliding up, up, up the man, forcing him off of her neck; and at the last, she strains in all her shortness and clips her teeth against the underside of his throat, where the scales are far more like that of a snake's compared to that of a dragon's. Her tongue tastes the rivers of blood that flow beneath Ivar's unmarred skin; and as she removes herself from his throat, his life source, she knows that she will taste far more than that simple drop.
Without backing up, the little Arab pivots her hind legs until the two come to be parallel - and then she continues just a little farther, and throws a good deal of her weight into his side. Barely a nudge to him, but she can't help their difference - can't help feeling overwhelmingly feminine and exquisite beneath his great stature and hot gaze. The nudge only lasts a moment - then she has taken a step forward, and peers back at the man contemptuously.
"Lead the way, Ivar, and we shall see if I like what you have to offer."
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
The click of her teeth across his scales is a satisfying counterpoint to her steamy breath, and Ivar’s dark eyes half-close in pleasure. The stallion gives a quiet hmph of surprise as her teeth click closed at the base of his throat, but he does not jump or pull away. He only watches more curiously as she moves beside him, as she throws her weight into him. At that he chuckles, stepping to the side as she has so clearly requested.
Strange, lovely, and seemingly strong-willed as well.
Ivar’s penchant for finding the women most likely to give him trouble does not seem to have lessened with the turning of the new year, but the kelpie has hope that this one might be different. She is a no one here, not a queen, not an ambassador. There will be no one to speak up for her, to care much about what happens to her. Still, he decides as he reaches over and slides his pale muzzle down the crest of her neck: she will be good for more than decorating the ocean floor. She might end up there –they all will, eventually – but the contempt in her dark eyes as she looks back at him suggest that he might enjoy the act of putting her there far more than he usually does.
Her quip – that she will see if she likes what he has to offer – is met with an amused twist of his handsome face. She will, he knows, and even if she does not, she will adjust. She is his now, after all, and she will stay where he tells her. There is no reason to force the issue – not now, anyway – and the black and white creature is eager to enjoy this momentary distraction from the issues that await him in Loess and Nerine.
He steps back only so that he can nip at her rump, driving her forward in a most primal manner. He is the decision-maker but she is the Chooser-of-Ways; such is the way of stallions and their leading mares. Ivar has already given another that title, of course, but Heda need not know how he passes his time away from her side. She will take him back regardless of his actions away from her; she is warm and sweet and too-forgiving. Isobell too will gnash her teeth and fling stinging barbs, but as Ivar watches the dark mare ahead of him with her fluid stride and strong back, he does not mind much at all.
Ivar is glad that Isobell had spurned him earlier in the day, he realizes; had she not, he would not be here, with this newest mare to keep. He’ll have to thank her, he decides; perhaps he’ll give Nerine the first daughter Trissy bears him. That thought has him nipping a little harder at her thigh, driving her north and toward the sea. He’ll show her Ischia, he decides, the island where someday she’ll rest round and content, and pass the time by telling him stories. Then they’ll find Loess, and the hills of wildflowers and springs.
king of loess minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus
