I love only that which they defend; Tickani/Keeper/Any

[Ryan]

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness,
nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory

Even this many years later, he prefers his cat form to his horse form. The panther feels like his first skin, tawny and sleek, while the equine form he was born in feels strange and foreign. Alas, here in the commons of Beqanna, the cat is not necessarily a welcome sight. No matter the high number of strange occurances and powers amongst the island’s residents, somehow, they always see a predator and think “danger!” before “maybe that’s bob from next door!”. Ryan doesn’t really blame them, for he would be quite dangerous if he really was just a mountain lion, but he detests having too shed the cat for hooves and his own awkwardness. 

If it was dark, he might risk it anyway. The denizens of the night were braver, and less likely to flee from his very existence. But the autumn sun is bright overhead, filling the Meadow with indian summer heat and the last of the year’s wildflowers, so Ryan lets his gold coat shimmer back into place, framed by his natural mulberry color. Hesitant, quiet steps bring him from shadows into the sun, green eyes searching the faces of those already here – though for what, he doesn’t know. He never knows. If he did, perhaps he would have settled down long ago. He tends to stay in Hyaline, where the locals are no longer startled when he walks amongst them with paws instead of hooves, but it has begun to feel cold and empty without Keeper. If she remains, she has lost herself to the bear, who shows no recognition of Ryan when he makes overtures of friendship.

Nobody here looks familiar. Nothing makes his heart race in recognition – not that he was expecting much. The stallion suspects his mother is long gone, and he is no longer sure he would recognize his sire. When he was just a boy, Ryan had been quite sure that if he saw Woolf he would just know it was his sire, but the older he gets, the more he wonders if he’s passed his family a million times and never recognized them. Surely he is not alone in the world – there must be someone out here for him.

Ryan

( I love only that which they defend. )

@[Bruja]/@[Tickaani] , @[Kristin]/@[Keeper] I know you put her away but just in case

[keeper]

The bear had taken over.

Taken over and trapped her inside it’s rank fur. Every impulse became the grizzly’s and none of the mare’s. Keeper lost herself along with her place in Hyaline. 

She never forgot their names or their faces. Memories stayed with her and she felt safe in their arms buried deep inside the bear. It was easier to give in and let the bear do what it does best.

Only her elusive father had managed to coerce her back into a horse to care for her newest sibling. Except she was even failing at that! Reverting back to the bear to keep him safe and alive. 

The familial obligation kept her there. But even she needed a break and lumbered off in bear-shape towards the meadow. 

Keeper is not sure why the bear gravitated towards the grasslands when it preferred the river and forest for the hunt. Apparently the grizzly sow was not hungry. Or if she was, it was not for meat that she came but other needs - other hungers. The kind that made Keeper surface in the bear’s awareness and take over. 

It caused the bear to shift back into a small wild mare. She snorted and sniffed and tilted her head to the side in confusion. One of the scents was entirely too familiar to her and before she knew it, a name left her in a tremulous rasp. “Ryan?” 

He’d be easy to spot but Keeper was afraid to look in case this was all in her head.

@[Ryan] shhh this is happening ❤️

[Ryan]

He’s creeping, moving in a fluid way that most equines can’t ever hope to replicate. Many try, because it’s a quiet way of going that those who wish to pass unnoticed envy, but they just don’t think the right way. Actually, strange forms of locomotion is one of the surest way Ryan has found to identify other shifters. It’s easy to cull the strange from a mass of similarly-moving creatures. It’s that sound of not-equine footsteps that has caused him to freeze, wishing all the more he was in feline form. When his panther freezes, Ryan all but disappears into the tall grass.

His gold-and-mulberry equine form doesn’t disappear, even when he freezes. He towers over the grass like this, and the purple isn’t great camouflage. But when Ryan freezes, soon after so do the footsteps stop. The stallion shivers and then inhales deeply, and frowns at the scent of bear and hyaline and he’s quite sure he must be mistaken. The owner of the scent is downwind from him, making it faint, but also close enough for him to have heard. Ryan is sure he is mistaken, prepared to shift again to cat to defend himself against an actual bear, but the voice is as familiar as his own heartbeat and unmistakable.

“Keeper?” he calls out in response, and darts forward in that direction, eyes searching. Now that he’s looking for her specifically, the actual finding goes quickly, and he sets eyes on the mare and a quiet smile flickers across his face, but she’s not looking up to see it. Unable to contain a low hum of pleasure (the cat again…he wants to purr, but his equine body just isn’t equipped for that), Ryan closes the distance between the two of them and presses his body against hers, seeking the comfort and warmth of a friend. More than a friend. “I’ve missed you,” the stallion admits shyly,  and even quieter, “I thought I was alone.”

@[Kristin]

[keeper]

Keeper has a heavy-hoofed unusual step. It comes from being a bear most of the time. Her hooves slap the earth in the same gruff manner that her large paws do. She cannot help it but this horseflesh has become cumbersome and too small. There is a fragility to it that she never noticed before until now. 

She sticks her nose straight up in the air and sucks in a lungful. It smells of panther and stallion and a million things unsaid. Things that probably don’t really have a smell to them but she thinks they do all the same. One more sniff and one more lonesome call into the daylight as if she had enough magic to make his name burn the air that much brighter over her head.

But that’s not the kind of magic that she has. Keeper only has the kind that lets her think of mushrooms and honey with the same kind of delight that pools deliciously in her stomach. The kind that lets her be bear or mare and love with a long capacity for it despite how her heart hibernates inside her dunskin chest. 

But her name hangs in the air now and she turns her face in the direction of it. She’d know that voice anywhere, full of manly burrs and cougar purrs - a voice that even as a bear, she’d know it and heed it. Before she can even snort-squeal in happiness or smile, he’s on and against her and she’s not sure where she ends and he begins. 

Keeper is smiling and whuffling deep into his neck and the mulberry mane that hangs from it as he murmurs into her. She nuzzles an apology down the length of his crest to end up chafing his withers with her teeth. Between this grooming act of companionship and something else that she doesn’t investigate too closely, she responds back to him in hushed assurance.

“You are never alone, never.”

then —

“I’m sorry.”

She is but it’s easy to bury the tears that crowd her eyes in his mulberry mane as she buries her face there.

@[Ryan] d’awww ❤️

[Ryan]

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness,
nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory

The rest of the world moves in hurried starts and stops, great lurches of destiny and power balances. Some are destined to play on that stage – his own ancestors had been major players, once upon a time, even Ryan’s mother royalty twice over. But he knew none of them, had not met a single one, and had seen the way that had taken it’s toll on Nairne, before she had left him here in Beqanna, and he had never sought that life for himself, perhaps even actively avoided it.

He was content, for the most part, with his quiet existence on the fringes of Hyaline’s society. The urges which drew him out to the Meadow were rare, and perhaps somehow related more to her surprising presence than any real desire to socialize with anyone new. Now, with his best friend pressed against him, Ryan feels nothing but content. Someday in the future he might once more be compelled to go looking for Nairne or Woolf or any of the countless other family members he never met, but today he is perfectly pleased to just be this. Ryan and Keeper, the strangest inhabitants of Hyaline.

At least it is quiet here in this corner of the meadow, and so there are few witnesses to the way he unashamedly has thrown himself at the mercy of his friend’s affections. Ryan is loathe to put any space between them, but he wants to see her face while they speak, which he cannot do in their current configuration. So, reluctantly, he pulls away, his normal shy and wistful smile on his face. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he says with calm certainty. “Everyone must wander, and be, and live. I just missed you.” No blame in the gold-and-purple stallion’s voice, just affection. “Hyaline has been my home for a long time, but sometimes I think my home now is just wherever you are.”

Ryan

( I love only that which they defend. )

@[Kristin] sorrrrrrry I'm so slow

[keeper]

She measures the time that passed differently than he did. Not in the hurried starts and stops of the world around them, but in the way the wind sang through their hair and blew through the trees. Sometimes it sang and other times, it whistled. It even howled and groaned when it chose to. Her ears moved to the noise of it of their own volition, her brain catching up later and marking the passage of time.

Usually these became long wilderness-wandering stretches of time that passed for her. Time in which she thought of three stallions and attributed each to a phase in her life that held deep meaning for her. Keeper loved each of them in their own right, and even found one of them far aside the lands of the sunrise. Far out there, on the fringes of it all - she’d had a daughter. But she doesn’t bring that up.

Not to Ryan, one of her dearest friends that at times, she knew she thought of as something more than that. She hasn’t ever said a thing to him about it. Keeping her own secrets closer to her heart. Hoarding them like mushrooms and nuts as if she was some secretive squirrel and not a huge lumbering bear most of the time.

Keeper knew that he knew what it was like - that other self that beckoned so alluringly, that it was easy to get lost in their other shape. She never had to ask him those questions because she’d seen it in his eyes before. That was probably why she always so comfortable around him, he just knew the way that few others could.

She notes the quiet and how they stand so wrapped up in other. It’s perfect. Just perfect. She doesn’t want it to end even as he pulls away with that lovely smile on his face. Keeper almost reaches out to reassure him that she’s still there. For how long, she cannot promise as she’ll be no oathbreaker but for now is enough, for her at least.

He surprises her as he dismisses the apology and speaks from a well of understanding and affection. “I missed you too.” and others, but it goes unsaid because these are his hours and she hoards them selfishly for him and no one else. “Oh Ryan…” she sighs and trails off; how can a panther and a bear ever make it here? But she knows that stranger things have happened. So she smiles at him and reaches out to bump her nose against his.

“I like that idea though, of home being wherever you are.”

@[Ryan] ❤️ I’m sloooooower 

[Ryan]

I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness,
nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory

He doesn’t live a very adventurous life. Mostly, he lives the life of a large cat, though a particularly benign one who is more likely to play with the equine children of Hyaline than to eat them. His feline diet is mostly rabbits and birds, when he can’t be bothered to change back and graze. There’s always a little bit of regretfulness when he surfaces and knows he’s eaten something, but it has faded over the years. He doesn’t hurt anyone he could know, and it’s the natural order of life for the cat to want to hunt; he keeps control of what it hunts and that has to be enough.


But even though he is not particularly adventurous, he was born and raised on stories of heroes and villians, Kings and Queens and Princes. He craves stories like those, even now, and wonders if Keeper has been having grand exciting things happen while she was gone. Perhaps it is a childish hope, but he turns to her with a smile and more than a small hint of the little bot he was in his light eyes. Keeper would remember – he was barely more than a boy when they met, after all. “While you were gone – did you see anything exciting?”


He presses close to her even as he speaks, as if he could wrap his equine form around hers; it doesn’t work, his horse body not as flexible as his cat, but he has wrapped his cat around her enough times that she’ll recognize the gesture; recognize his strange and personal brand of affection.


Ryan knows she might not stay, but he treasures the hours they have, down to the last minute, down to the last breath. He’ll carefully hoard those memories, when he is alone again.

Ryan

( I love only that which they defend. )

@[Kristin] ILU