"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
because the future's gone. praying in the dark that you won't go home. i should've said it better, i should've set fire to a letter. but i could run to your apartment, hope i get it started better than before; and i could write it in a poem, pretend i used to know you better than before.
There’s been a pain in her chest. She cannot quite label it as agony, but it is more than the pinch of a fly’s bite. It is a hundred things at once and the things are never connected yet never separated. The pain is heavy and hot. The pain is sharp and bitter. The pain is aching and thick. The pain shakes her awake in the middle of a sweat-soaked night, startling whatever nameless-faceless body might be curled next to her. The pain causes her to skip a step and fall to those knees scarred upon that lovely volcano’s face. The pain is an enemy. The pain is a reminder.
(Loess is spread before them. The image of the kingdom under their feet dances behind the haze of the steam rolling off the blue ponds. His damned hazel eyes turn to watch her as he slips into the water. Her eyes cannot help but linger on the swell of his muscles slicing through the crystalline depths.)
Pain.
(He is shadow and she is light. They dance in that moonglow game of death, each taunting the other, and her recklessness betrays her. They twine together in the darkness. They laugh together in the sprinkling of cold-water droplets. They scream when the shadow-monsters attack and they carefully nudge against each other’s bruises and bleeders when the war is over.)
Pain.
There are too many memories to count, each one bringing that God-awful pain to the heat of her chest. The sharpness of the knife melts against the butter of her heart and she feels it. She feels it. Every moment of every day spent away brings the ache, the sting, the heavy, the brutal. She lives in those wild, confusing places outside of Beqanna but it injures her in ways she didn’t expect when she first left.
It finally fades as she moves deeper into the familiar. Except it’s not familiar at all — there are sick around her and the landscape has shifted. She nearly laughs aloud at the thought of Beqanna shifting to accommodate for that restless heart of hers. It is almost as if it has whispered all this time for her to come home, to look at the wonderful gift it has given her. She wonders, deliriously, if she shouldn’t have left.
But even as the pain fades away from her chest, soaking into the soil and the flowers and the tree-roots, she reminds herself that it was necessary.
Nerine’s voice still calls her home. Despite the way Beqanna’s hips have shifted upon its seat on the Earth, her dark legs still find their way home. The bitter sulfur nearly drives her off her path, but a breeze slices through with that delicious tangle of sea-salt winds and endless sky and slick-bellied predators. When she finally crosses the border, with that dark auburn mane just as tangled as before and that sea glass stone still nestled against the curve of her neck, a heavy exhale releases the last wisps of that pain.
A smile, true and reckless and daring, crosses her lips.
Ever growing, the golden-haired twins were no longer that dependent on their Mama for food - honestly, Eurwen could and would still wish for those days, because last summer had been the easiest part of her 6-month-old life. She had no quarrels in diplomacy, despite peeking in on one such a meeting because she had wanted to see what her grandmother was like. She had no issues with the Icy island up north-east, no ‘other claimangs’ that Papa thought they needed protection from, no idea that it could potentially stir war between horses, this plague. Naive as she was she believed in the idea that surely everybody was trying their best to heal the world of this plague. Like she had, too, hoped to do her small bit.
The white, pink-spotted filly had not seen her sister today but obviously, Sheen and ‘Seis were exploring something cool and scary together. Wen had no such urges, content to help her mother when she came home from walking the perimeter that was Nerine. Whereas her father was also able to do that, he also was on Icicle Isle so very often. Guarding it, he calls it.
So today, like other days, the goldenhaired appaloosa filly was entirely alone. Not that she minded. She had fun with counting the flowers, with adoring the insects living from them, with absorbing the deafening sound of the waves crashing on rock. Never would she inspect them up closer, she would just peer at the little sprays and see little rainbows in the droplets.
But today a stranger’s scent assaults her nostrils, and when she follows it there is a dark bay mare at the border. She doesn’t seem like she’s looking for something, and the young girl, so serious in her age, frowns at that a bit. Then, she approaches, with soft, small steps, and looks up at that bewilderd smile. It reminds her of her sisters, and so it is something that reminds her of her family and home.
”H-hello.” Curse her trembling breath, but she’s excited and a bit scared at the same time. So very much her mother’s daughter, but she doesn’t know that latter because Eurwen never saw what Breckin was like before she joined Nerine, before she talked to Scorch and Brennen and Wishbone... and her father. He might have told her that she was like her mother, but the spotted girl perhaps had never taken it so figuratively as he had meant it.
Never mind that. There is someone... important to talk to. She has that air, anyway.
lies the seed that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose
12-29-2018, 12:13 AM (This post was last modified: 12-29-2018, 12:13 AM by Wishbone.)
living for the past
because the future's gone. praying in the dark that you won't go home. i should've said it better, i should've set fire to a letter. but i could run to your apartment, hope i get it started better than before; and i could write it in a poem, pretend i used to know you better than before.
She can remember the days of her youth as if they had been only moments ago. The sulfuric scents of Tephra still melt into the framework of her dreams and she can feel the warmth of the Eastern ocean dance across her heels. Her mother used to tell her of the days she spent in those Tephran waves during her pregnancy, letting the salt and sand soak into her swollen legs and ease the pain. Wishbone can picture Wolfbane’s yellow-and-blue face, twisted in a smile full of fangs, as they raced through the forest and lept across the lava-streams. In truth, those days are only six years past; but the time between her childhood and this moment on Nerine’s border stretches further than she can see.
The filly approaches as a stark reminder of those playful days. Despite the wilderness of Wishbone’s heart, the reckless smile that had been dashed across her mouth softens into something gentler. Perhaps age has made her warm to children (and how her younger self might laugh and crow and taunt about this fact!), but she likes to think otherwise. Wishbone blames it on the girl’s striking appearance to a dear friend — a friend she left Nerine with.
Her voice is the same honey-whiskey song, laced with the sweetness of feminity but rough with the familiarity of Tephra’s ashen skies. “Hello.” Although the girl’s voice trips, Wishbone senses the bravery held deep within; it isn’t every day that someone as seemingly meek and young as she approaches a complete stranger. The mahogany would have done so in an instant in her own childhood (with a bold tongue and barely-held-together politeness) and the thought brings sincere warmth to her wild hazel eyes. “I’m Wishbone. Is Breckin still the Khaleesi? I’m looking for her.”
She pauses a moment, eyeing the girl with a borderline stern expression. “What’s your name?”
Eurwen’s home consists of ocean sprays and relative coolness; quite the opposite of Tephra. She’s never been to that kingdom, because fate would have it, that once again Tephra and Nerine are so distinctly separated by land masses and water alike, they’d never touch but in spirit.
She doesn’t know all the stories of the past - currently, her parents are worried about a plague, one the pink-spotted filly was simply born into. She doesn’t know any better than that her older sister has a terrible cough; sometimes the blue roan young mare just needs to pause, and that’s okay. Oisín is perhaps a little less patient, but all in all, the twins simply accept the world as it comes to them. There is wonder in everything to be found, wonder that the adults of current times might not see any more.
The mare she had approached now offers a warmer kind of smile than the distant, reckless one she had before, accompanied by a pleasant gleam in her eyes that strengthens little Eurwen in a way. There is genuine interest in this mare, no threatening stance at all like the monster she had somehow found the bravery to attack; the kind of warmth comes from the mahogany-coloured mare that strengthens Eurwen’s backbone just enough to stay and talk to her, instead of shying away again.
The mare’s voice is raspy, and warm at the same time. Sheen would surely laugh at the funny sound, but the spotted sister simply smiles and listens. Examines, and determines she can come to like it, because she likes the mare attached to this voice. Wishbone. A name she sadly hasn’t heard before, because there haven’t been much stories told of the past to her as of yet. But she recognizes everything else the bay mare says, and a brilliant smile lights up the little girl’s face.
She nearly jumps, excited now. (The word Khaleesi is a bit hard for her to speak or even think about often, but she knows it to be the important title that others sometimes still use. Old Nerinians, like Grammama.) ”Yes! I can help!” she almost leaves right away, but turns back a bit shyly as the mare asks her name. Oops. Sheepishly, she adds (much more meekly once again), her name. ”Ay-oh-rwen. But Sheen calls me Wenny. Uhm,” that’s perhaps not a name she likes for the new mare to call her. ”Wen is good, if you need to.” she tilts her head, looks at the mare. Wishbone... perhaps she’d listen to Wish, but Bone sounds weird. That’s no good name. Oh! Yes! Almost forgotten. ”We can go find Mama now. I think she’s...” frowning, the girl looks around and to the north (which is most of the kingdom). ”I don’t know. Maybe she’s walking.” Mama might not be in one place, she thinks. Sometimes she rests but, the dark-spotted mare has more things to concern her than her daughter does. She giggles suddenly when another thought surfaces. ”Or with Papa. But then we must swim the cold waters.” Darn, she wishes Sheen or ‘Seis was here to tell her where Mama was today. She wouldn’t be having an important meeting with someone would she?
lies the seed that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose
because the future's gone. praying in the dark that you won't go home. i should've said it better, i should've set fire to a letter. but i could run to your apartment, hope i get it started better than before; and i could write it in a poem, pretend i used to know you better than before.
Wishbone hasn’t quite pieced together the puzzle just yet. She doesn’t understand that the seemingly erratic behavior of Beqanna’s shifting lands indicates the desire for the earth to protect itself. She doesn’t understand that many of the coughing, bloody, and sweaty travelers she passed on her way to Nerine all carry the same infection in their vessels. For this moment, they are random coincidences; there is no pattern or rhyme or reason to the importance of her life.
Yet those very things — the plague, the shifting of Beqanna’s landscape — are potentially stealing Breckin from reuniting with her friend. This child, with her timid bravery, knows more about Beqanna’s haunts and concerns than Wishbone herself. The mahogany mare knows that the life of a queen is difficult and exhausting… It had been the very thing that drove her from the familiar and out into the world of the unknown. She doesn’t fault Breckin for being absent from this meeting; certainly, there are other Nerinians (like this filly) who can handle Wishbone just as well as the Khaleesi.
“Do you like swimming the cold waters, Eurwen?” Wishbone grew up in the warmer waters of the eastern ocean, chasing the spray of dolphins breaths and winding among the sulfur. The duty of a princess called for her to transfer to Nerine as a yearling, and Wishbone spent her adolescent years in the bitter waters of the northern ocean. She’s well-used to the temperature now and even after her years of exploration, the waves call to her. “I’m sure we can find her if we start walking.”
A smile tugs at Wishbone’s lips at the thought of twining through Nerine with Breckin’s own daughter beside her. It certainly isn’t something she ever expected to be doing, but the mahogany mare finds that she’s perfectly content with the situation. “May I cross the border, Eurwen?” She hasn’t stepped across just yet, despite knowing every curve and bend of Nerine’s landscape.
Eurwen studies the mare before her a moment. She’s not supposed to greet visitors perhaps, although she has never been told not to (or perhaps that’s because her parents wouldn’t have thought she would, and hadn’t deemed it necessary to instruct her). She does know that sick horses maybe are looking for a healer, but Wishbone doesn’t look sick to her in the moment. Others, usually come to visit someone else, like Titus who had come to find his parents, she recalls. Grammama was really good at handling situations like these - and Mama herself too. Papa always said he was an idiot but, she never quite knew if he was serious.
‘Seis would know what to do, but she hadn’t seen her oldest sister for a while now. Eurwen would be sad to discover later that she had moved away, and did not want to live in Nerine any more maybe. But for now she was blissfully unaware, and felt really glad that Wishbone wasn’t mean to her and immediately requested for someone else to show up.
Wishbone acquires about liking the cold waters, and that is something the rose-golden tinted filly haden’t thought about yet in her young life. Her face distorts in a deep frown, then she shales her head. ”They’re dangerous. Makes you feel stiff, and you have to really concentrate to get to the other side.” She always wondered how Papa didn’t seem to feel the cold as much but then again, it was also strange that ice clung to him so that was just one of the many things in the world that Eurwen would take for granted. Mama didn’t like it as much as him either, though perhaps from experience, Breckin just did it without thinking.
Wishbone proposes to start walking, too, and Eurwen nods gravely. ”I’m sure we can find someone! And I can show you the ice-land if you like!” she agrees, then adds gigglishly: ”Prettier to see it from here. Once out there it’s pretty boring,” she thinks. Or, well, maybe that’s just because Oisín had forced her to inspect every single rock or tree there was to find, while the spotted twin hadn’t seen the difference between one or the other.
She’s about to leave again, but now Wishbone asks a rather formal question. Ears perked, she looks at the bay mare in deep thought. Why would she ask? Is she here on a diplomatic mission after all? Is she dangerous? Mama would not be mad if Eurwen let Wishbone in, would she? Wish seems like a nice enough mare and she knows Mama’s name and the Important Title That Can’t Be Pronounced. Hmm. But leaving the mare alone on the border is also not an option, that would mean waiting until someone passed by. She’s gotta gamble it then. ”Well. We can’t find Mama if you’re staying there.” she reasons out. Let logic prevail where sudden insecurities cannot.
lies the seed that with the sun's love in the spring becomes the rose
because the future's gone. praying in the dark that you won't go home. i should've said it better, i should've set fire to a letter. but i could run to your apartment, hope i get it started better than before; and i could write it in a poem, pretend i used to know you better than before.
Eurwen’s innocence is pure and heartfelt. It brings a syrupy type of warmth into Wishbone’s heart, sliding through her vessels and rejuvenating her senses. It is too easy to get swept away in the darkness of the world. She knows the sharp pressure of being pinned beneath the finger of despair and shadow, lost to the swirl of hopelessness and solitude. That dense weight across her back occasionally found her in the silence of her travels. She realized, in those moments of isolation, that she is a creature destined to form relationships and twine with bodies. Eurwen seems to feel similarly, despite the shyness Wishbone sees like a haze across her young face.
Her dark mouth tugs into another sincere smile at the girl’s decision about the northern ocean. Wishbone knows she would’ve already nearly-drowned from the brutality of the weight of the waves and the numbing chill they bring if she were living in Nerine at Eurwen’s age. Despite their similar heights and their equal amounts of innocence upon birth, not all children are the same. “I would love to see the ice-land.” It’s a new place, born from Beqanna’s chaotic struggle to protect itself and its residents.
Wishbone turns to scan the horizon for the foreign land, but it seems to be just past her line of vision. The familiar expanse of Nerine stretches out around them, dotted with hardy foliage and the dark height of the pine-tree forest looming to the west. She is distracted for a frozen moment at the comfort Nerine brings her. Even seeing the northern kingdom soothes the aching in her joints and the breathtaking pangs in her chest.
Eurwen’s acceptance swings Wishbone’s thoughts back to the present. “Thank you, Eurwen. I only want to be respectful to enter Nerine. It’s a polite thing to do as a diplomat.” Her mother’s teachings are swarming through her mind, Wound’s voice pushing against the noises of her own thoughts. Wound, Warrick, and Scorch taught her the politics and responsibilities of kingdom-life unnaturally well, and pieces of that training suddenly found itself in the mahogany’s mouth. “Let’s go on an adventure, shall we?” Wishbone steps easily across the border before making her way deeper into Nerine, relief warming her chest with each beat of her heart.
credit to eliza of adoxography.
@[Eurwen] / i figured this would be a good place to close it down <3
