"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 had been plain when she was born, but beautiful in her own right. Amongst the vibrant rainbow of colors that were so common, she was nothing – but amid a sea of the whites and grays that were her siblings, she was brilliant. There was a luster to her bay coat, framed by a forelock and mane that was black, and always tangled. There was a sweetness to her rich, brown eyes, that betrayed the spark locked away inside. She was not nearly so docile as her mother, but the fierceness that she harbored had always been kept carefully under control. It wasn’t anger; just a simmering strength that she had yet to call upon
But then she began to change.
There was no reason for it. She isn’t sure when she first began to feel as though there was an ember being stoked inside of her, that just a single breath could blow into an inferno. She cannot remember who it was that first tried to touch her, but she remembers how they had violently recoiled – their skin burnt pink and raw, the shock and alarm so plainly written on their face. She has forgotten who they were, but she has not forgotten the look in their eyes. They blamed her. They thought she did it on purpose. They thought she burnt them on purpose.
She stayed away from everyone after that. Sometimes, like now, she would creep from the mountains, carefully camouflaged by the browns of the trunks of the trees and the dappled light of the forest. She watched them, with something like longing flickering in her dark brown eyes, but she never said anything. She simply watched, flaming and boiling beneath the surface, but with a face frozen so stoic and frigid she knew that even if someone saw her, she wouldn’t have to worry about them approaching.
B R I N L Y burn until our lives become the embers
oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
Brigade cannot decide what he feels so he chooses to feel nothing.
Underneath it all, buried somewhere within him, perhaps he feels rage at what Loess did to his home, perhaps he feels fear at what has become of his family, perhaps he feels grief and self-loathing and more. Perhaps he drowns in it while he sleeps. Perhaps he wakes in a cold sweat knowing that fire rained down on Tephra and he was not there to protect her and his family. He did not join in the bloodbath for his new kingdom but neither did he rise against her and he cannot decide if that is worse.
Perhaps he feels all of these things but he decides not to—not now.
He locks it away, shoves it into the abyss and walks into the forest with his antlered head swinging. His light grey eyes are hard as stone and fierce as storm clouds and his mouth is a bitter slash. It doesn’t matter that it is night and he can still see the smoke in the air from Tephra. It doesn’t matter that he still doesn’t know where his family ended up. It doesn’t matter that he remains in the land that led the charge.
All that matters is he can’t breathe and when he wakes from his feverish dreams, he turns his head toward the forest. It is dark and quiet and he is alone. He is alone and when his hooves fall into the bramble and the leaves beneath him, he can find the knot in his chest loosening even just a little.
When he feels the tell-tale sign of someone’s eyes on him, he freezes, muscles hard beneath the rich red of his coat. His head shoots upward, face carved from rock as he finally finds her dark brown eyes. He doesn’t move, narrowed gaze instead studying her intently, feeling nothing but the distant crash of his fear and agony slamming against the cliffs of his heart. But it dulls in the face of something new.
It dulls and he doesn’t move, afraid that any disturbance would bring it all rushing back.
With muscles pulled taut and rigid underneath her mahogany coat, her slender ears catch every minute sound. The way the trees shift in the wind, and the sounds smaller animals make as they rustle across the bramble and brush. But there is something louder, then, something that makes her flinch. She sees his antlers first, and she almost relaxes. It is not until he moves between trees, revealing his equine form, that she can feel that familiar fear and tension tightening in her chest.
Their eyes lock, and she instantly wants to disappear and run forward all at once.
He freezes, and she doesn’t move. They stand in a stalemate, both of them with nowhere to go. Her eyes hold the gray of his, unwavering and yet entirely uncertain. She knows she should turn, that she should not even dare to see where this might go. But her forced solitude had eaten away at her, and she could feel that desperation for something, anything, trying to claw its way out of her chest.
They don’t have to be friends, she decides. She just wants to know his name.
She moves forward, one hesitant step, and then two. The sound of leaves and sticks being crushed beneath her hooves seems incredibly loud in the silence that has fallen around them, and she nearly cringes at it. Each step feels louder than the last, and she finally can’t take it anymore, and so she stops. She is close enough now that she can better see the storm-cloud color of his eyes, and the way the antlers twist from his brow and tangle upwards.
“Hi,” Her voice is softer than she would have liked, raspy from never being used. She is hyperaware of how it sounds, and she tries to swallow the grate of it away. “I’m Brinly.” Her own name feels thick and foreign, unable to remember the last time she had a reason to say it. There is another stretch of quiet, and it feels longer than it likely is, before asks hesitantly and a little ineptly, “Who are you?”
B R I N L Y burn until our lives become the embers
oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
Brigade wants to disappear into the forest floor.
He wants to fall into the leaves; he wants to feel them fall beneath his hooves until he is nothing but the dirt and the sky and the world that feels so very far from this one. He wants to be the sun-baked soil and the riverbed. He wants to be the wolves that chase the shadows underneath the moon’s milky light, and he wants to be the birds that fling themself into the wild abyss. He wants to be wild and free and uncaged.
But beneath her gaze, he is trapped and he stiffens, the muscles taut beneath his rich coat.
She gives her name, but he doesn’t reciprocate just yet. He doesn’t take it and tuck it close into his chest. He just holds it lightly, loosely, letting it rest on his palms and wondering at what he is meant to do with it. Part of him wants to put it somewhere for safekeeping. Part of it wants to reject it immediately. Instead he does nothing, the grey of his eyes growing stormier and cloudier, the rest of his face impassive.
The silence between them continues to stretch until it is nearly brittle, until he can feel the tension and the way that the fabric nearly rips and rends. He can hear her breathing, can feel his own swallow the space between them, and he fancies he can nearly hear her pulse pounding, thrumming, humming so lightly.
Finally, finally he straights slightly, his head coming up, the proud, twisting antlers sitting on his brow like a crown. “Brigade,” he offers, letting the name sit like a heavy stone on his tongue. The air feels warmer as she sneaks closer, but he brushes it off as an oddity and just stands still and quiet. Part of him knows he should say more, should try to ease the discomfort of the conversation, but he can’t.
He can’t, his throat closes up and so he just stands, the muscle in his jaw jumping.
She can feel that he doesn’t want her here, and she can’t blame him. Maybe he can sense that there is something different and wrong about her; maybe he can feel the heat that boils under her skin, like a wildfire that she cannot control. Her mind races in the silence between them, and she fills it with false thoughts and made-up scenarios. She can only imagine what he must be thinking of her; how badly he must wish that she would turn and come back the way she had come, so that he might not have to withstand another second of her watching. It’s something in the tension of his muscles and the way he locks his jaw that tells her that he wants her to leave.
She doesn’t know why that immediately incites an anger inside of her, but it does.
An anger at herself, not at him, but the way her demeanor changes doesn’t entirely reflect that.
The hope and curiosity dies in her eyes, replaced by something much more guarded and cold. But she doesn’t retreat, even though she is tempted to. She wants to obey the secret wish she has created for him inside of her head — the one that says he wants her to go — but stubbornly, she stays. Somewhere, tucked far enough away that she can’t understand it, she so desperately wants him — or just someone — to like her.
There is a sort of defiance that flickers briefly across her face, and she takes a step towards him. She won’t touch him; she would never inflict that kind of damage on anyone. But of course he could not possibly know that, and that small spark that had temporarily lit in her eyes seemed to dare him to be the first to back away. “Brigade,” she echoes his name back to him, and even though she knows she should soften her stance, she can’t. “What do you hide from?” She asks, because she thinks everyone in the forest and mountains must be like her. She thinks everyone must hide from something.
B R I N L Y burn until our lives become the embers
oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
In the same way that her mind convinces herself that he must see something wrong with her, he does the same with his own. He is sure that she must see into his heart and see the failures. She must look into him and know that he has let his family down. That he lives within a land that attacked his father and mother and siblings. That he didn’t lift the sword toward either side and what a coward he must be for it.
It makes him defensive, makes him angry, and he scowls against the imagined attacks.
The shame and the judgment and—worst of all—the pity she would point in his direction.
He wants to push her away before she has the chance to push him away and he is only surprised when she pushes forward instead. Surprised and then furious when she pokes at his worst insecurities. His ears flip back to press into the tangles of his wine red head, lips peeling back from his blunt teeth. “I’m not hiding from anything,” he growls, his voice thick in his mouth, gravelly from where it comes from his chest.
His storm eyes narrow at her, studying her from behind the tangle of his forelock. “Maybe you’re the one who is hiding, Brinly.” He doesn’t step toward her, cannot bring himself to be so brave, but neither does he step away from her—even though he is certain that the air is now warmer. But that must certainly be his own mind playing tricks on him. “So what are you hiding from?”
Brigade studies her face, memorizing the lines of it and focusing on stoking the anger in his belly further if only because it is so much easier to be mad than it is to be hurt and confused and lost.
She can feel that almost tangible anger as it bubbles inside of him, can almost taste the bitterness of it on his own tongue. She tricks her mind into being satisfied by it, telling herself that was what she had wanted. She wanted him to show that he disliked her; she wanted him to prove every theory she had invented inside of her head. If there is a twinge of disappointment at the way his face twists into a scowl, and the way his words growl from his throat, she is careful to not show it.
Instead, she offers him a nearly invisible smile, faint but glowing on the edges like an ember. “Everyone this deep in the forest is hiding from something,” she says as she watches him carefully through a curtain of tangled forelock.
He doesn’t step away from her, and she takes it as a challenge. She steps closer, then, and even though she could not touch him even if she reached, the heat that radiated from beneath her skin was undeniable. The smolder of her gaze is locked firmly with the storm-gray of his, almost daring him to ask, but then deciding she didn’t want to give him that power. “I burn anything that I touch,” there is an edge to her voice now, and a coolness that betrays the simmering fire under her tongue. “So I hide myself, from everyone.”
She lets the truth settle between them, heavy and uncomfortable like a ragged stone. She withdraws from him then, and this time the way her lips curve is jaded, almost defeated. “Sometimes I wonder what it’s like down here, with the rest of you, but I don’t stay long.” She doesn’t say that it always makes her feel far more empty than she did before. She doesn’t say that the disappointment and self-loathing that fills her up is far stronger than any internal fire she could ever build, and that it takes months for her disheartened acceptance and apathy to return.
B R I N L Y burn until our lives become the embers
06-08-2019, 12:37 AM (This post was last modified: 06-08-2019, 12:37 AM by brigade.)
oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
It almost doesn’t feel fair that her body burns with anger while he remains so cold. He wishes that he could light on fire the way that she does; he wishes that he could give himself over to that kind of heat and just let it erupt in his chest. Instead he grows more and more sullen, encasing himself in an armor of his own self-loathing, turning prickly and mean and wishing he could be anyone but himself.
She continues to move toward him and the heat becomes unmistakable as the distance closes. Every inch of his prey mind tells himself to run away, to protect himself, but his stubborn streak is louder than his instinct of survival and he just grinds his heels down further, biting down so that the muscles in his jaw jump. “You’re not doing a very good job of hiding yourself then,” he retorts to her confession, and even if he couldn’t feel the very heat coming off of her in waves, he would believe her. He would believe her.
His lips pull back into a slight sneer as she pulls back, wondering why the distance that should feel like a victory rings so hollow in his bones. “The rest of us,” he repeats and the words taste bitter. “Do you not often deign to be around us lowly folk?” Something defiant flashes in his eyes and his wings shift at his sides, turning from their red feathers into black carbon, dark and dangerous and as heavy at his sides as his heart feels in his chest. “How lucky I must be to have earned the honor of your presence then.”
He hates himself for the harshness of his words.
He hates himself for the way that he lashes out at her, the way his own fury weaponizes when he knows that the only one who deserves it is himself. But he can’t stop. He can’t and he knows that he is far from the son that his parents raised. The shame burns worse than she ever could and his eyes flash away as he struggles to keep his composure. “I’m hiding from myself,” he finally admits because it’s only fair that he give her some kind of weapon to tear him apart with. “And I’m doing an even worse job than you.”
He twists the meaning of her words, and if she hadn’t already been burning, she certainly was now. “That’s not what I meant,” the words spit from her tongue like sparks, her smoldering brown eyes narrowing as the irritance settles into the lines of her face. She didn’t think herself better than anyone. If anything, she didn’t think she deserved any of the normalcy of being so close to everyone. She was terrified of accidentally burning someone; someone that didn’t know, someone that might reach out and touch to be friendly. But above all else, she was terrified of finding someone that she wanted to touch, and that she would want to have touch her, and having to come to terms with the fact that it would never be possible.
It was so much easier to just be alone, away from them, and to keep all hope locked away with her.
She can feel tears stinging in her throat, building that familiar ache that she can’t seem to swallow away, but they at least never manage to reach her eyes. “I don’t think anyone is lowly,” there is a toxic emphasis on the last word, her lips twisting into a sneer as she tries to rein in her defensive wall that was building faster than she could keep up with. She wanted to keep her temper from flaring, she wanted to apologize and calmly explain what she had meant, but instead the sword-like edge remains in her voice as she snaps back, “But your self-esteem must be almost non-existent if that was the conclusion you jumped to.”
She regrets it almost as soon as she said it. She wasn’t mean; not at her core, not when you peeled back the calloused layers she had been forced to build. Something about him though seemed to ignite every flame she had tried to keep dead, and if she wasn’t so busy putting out her own fires, she would have maybe realized that he was fighting the same internal battle. Somewhere, they had the ability to understand each other perhaps better than anyone, and yet they were so focused on waging war on each other that neither of them could see it.
“Why?” She asks him after a brief hesitation, her muscles still hard and unmoving beneath her auburn skin. She watches him warily, thinking that other than the antlers, and the wings that morphed and changed, he seemed normal. But then again, so did she.
B R I N L Y burn until our lives become the embers
oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.
It is amazing the way that they can slice at one another. They barely know each other and yet they seem to have already found all of their weak spots. Her words are daggers and they find their mark again and again; he can barely think around the way that the wounds open up beneath her touch, the way that they blossom and the blood flowers on his chest. If only he could staunch it. If only he could go back in time before they crossed paths and something about them exploded before they could contain it.
But he can’t, and they are here, and he can only deal with the fallout.
“You have no idea how low my self-esteem can be,” he says and even though he knows it’s a lame excuse for a comeback, he says it with venom anyway. He scrambles to find defenses because she pulls it away so deftly and he’s left raw and aching beneath the cold air. He’s left stinging beneath the truth because of course he hates himself. Of course he views the world through the lease of his own self-loathing.
Of course she saw that immediately.
Of course, of course.
But it only makes him want to double down and he stands his ground, hating the weakness that she has exposed in him like rot under the floorboards. “Does it matter?” he says, his ears lying flat against his skull amongst the mess of his mane and forelock. “Does it matter why I would choose to be myself?” He jerks his head to the side and his antlers sweep sharply as he looks to the horizon, his chest heaving as he tries to catch his breath. For a second, he is quiet, contemplative, the poison seeping in further.
“Could you blame me?” He glances back, quieter now.
“Can you blame me for trying to minimize the damage?”
