[open quest] Día de Muertos - Round 1

[Thia]

did the full moon force my hand? When she heard the call, she knew she had to answer.  The thoughts were immediate and the feelings that accompanied them were overwhelming. Thia has struggled to adjust to this place. Beqanna was still a foreign land to her. She did not know of how the magic worked here. But she did know of magic. Magic made up the very heart of the stories her mother used to tell her - stores that took her far away from the sad reality of her childhood.  That had been her escape then, before everything she knew was torn away and she was liberated from her prison.  Even after shaking off her shackles and finding the freedom she’d always craved, she felt lost. She had no idea what she was meant to do with this newfound freedom.  She’d fought her entire life to be free - to do what she wished, when she wished.  But now that she had the freedom, she had no idea what it was that she actually wanted.  Especially since the one who had kept her spirit alive all this time had been stolen from her. Even when she was bound in chains, she had always had something to live for. Her mother.  Her mother had been the most famous of Oracles. Equines came from far and wide for her counsel. But to Thia - she had always only ever been mother.  And her mother had always had the answers to even her most difficult questions.  She was her comfort and her confidant. Her everything. And she had been torn away. The memory was seared into her mind.  The pain of loss had inflicted a terrible wound upon the girl, one that left an ugly, invisible scar in the most vulnerable folds of memory.  She can still remember the sound of hooves scraping against stone.  She can remember the waves crashing against the jagged rocks at the base of the cliff. She can remember the exact shade of crimson in the water... Thia clung to every memory - the good and the bad.  She lavished in the simple reminders of her mother. The scent of fresh salt air. The colors of a vibrant sunrise. The sounds of muted laughter.  There were days when she felt her mother was everywhere.  But there were dark days too. And lately Thia had struggled to pull herself from the darkness. She all but stumbles upon her token.  A small fragment of volcanic rock. The memories flood her mind - unbidden and unrelenting.  Her homeland had been volcanic - the entire island built upon a volcano thought to be long dormant.  The volcanic rock was treacherous. Some was porous, while others could be just as sharp as a shard of glass. And it was upon these volcanic rocks that her mother’s body had broken. She had been murdered - killed by her own father in a fit of jealousy.  Thia’s mother had had no wings to save her as she fell from the cliffs... She carried the shiny black stone carefully - as if she had discovered some great treasure. While the hardened magma had taken her mother from her, the very same mountain had set her free. For soon after her mother’s death, the mountain had come alive - spewing ash and rock and fire to all who lived below.  It was in this chaos that Thia found freedom. So the stone meant more than just death. It also represented liberation.  That was all her mother had ever wanted for her - freedom.  She longed to tell her mother that she’d done it.  That she’d found freedom at long last.  And she longed to seek her counsel - ask what it was she was meant to do here and how she was meant to live on her own in a world so strange. She says nothing as she joins those gathered, clutching her stone like a talisman.  She hardly registers the presence of others - for all are strangers to her. Instead, her dark eyes find the spectral woman - wondering if she holds the answers she so desperately seeks. thia.

 
manip by littlewillow-art

[Rajanish]

Rajanish

There had been loss in his life, as it had in many others’. Suffering, death, torture - even as a near-newborn, the bay appaloosa had seen it all. And he had quickly learned never to get attached - again.

The call of the ghost does not elude him. One might argue that it was not meant for him to hear, but even ghosts can feel something, he’d tell them. Never will he tell them the story about the grey squirrel, of course. But in the end, that’s why he, all grown up now, remembers his first year, a year in the ever-autumnus forest, with what was the worst possible environment for an innocent child at the time.

In retrospect he was never truly innocent, but that’s beside the point.

The memory comes painfully sharp; and then more flashbacks to what happened, to what caused the death of his furry friend -he did- and put an end to his observation of squirrel behaviour. After all, Rajanish had ever been the technician, the scientist, the tester of things. Knowledge of how anything worked at all was what drove him - what drove him to take a pet, as well.

The green-marked bay had been his best friend at the time. Yet the other colt also had been taught “hunting”, a concept that the ghostlike male at the time had not known. Therefore it must be interesting to learn what it was.

His friend hunted small animals - mice, hares, birds, squirrels- and left them to die, or left them dead, pending the circumstances. There were many things wrong with that tactic; it scared off other prey, the animals were pretty useless as they were dead, and it even attracted predators and vultures. Luckily many of those were still horses in some way. They seemed to approve of what they did; or rather of what Raj was watching his friend doing.

But Raj understood what the green-spotted appaloosa did not: this was a waste of resources. He would return later, and dissect the animals left behind. Until one day, when he returned, he found that the female squirrel had had a nest, and one of the young had been left behind. Hiding, in silence, when birds of prey had come to pick the nest clean. Perhaps Raj had found a soulmate - a survivor amongst monsters. It was then that he decided another experiment was due - he’d take the young grey squirrel, to observe it’s behaviour in the new environment. An early manipulation experiment if you will - something he had repeated later on with the filly who last season had bore him a daughter - a test, for the squirrel as well.

In the time that the grey squirrel lived with him, the young (and foolish) bay appaloosa had become slightly attached, but he pushed those feelings away. It only took months for the beast to arrive in Sylva - the one with the illusions, who carried the hearts of Brennen’s daughters (not that Raj even knew who Brennen was). And Rajanish was fascinated. Here was the guy who lived the dream - who had dissected a horse and brought her heart as proof. He even taught little Rajanish through an illusion, how hearts worked.

In such awe, he returned home, and his eye fell on his squirrel friend. The furry animal trusted him fully now, even brought gifts now or then - coloured stones, acorns and walnuts. It was time, Rajanish realized, to find out if the grey squirrel’s heart was different from that of his mother at the time, now that he had befriended a horse.

And so he stuffed all kinds of feelings away, and broke open the body of the little friend who trusted him.

Rajanish learned a great deal that day: not so much about the anatomy of a squirrel, for he found that this did not change with feelings; he found out that he himself missed his friend every day he came home, and learned that he had gotten attached no matter how hard he had tried not to. And so he shut off, the incident was never mentioned again, and to this day, Rajanish would continue experimenting, but safer, more distant. The girl he had kidnapped, he had kept away from others but more importantly, away from himself as well.

With a shock, the translucent appaloosa remembers all this; the dark bay horse shakes his head but cannot completely get rid of the feeling that he owes the squirrel something still.

He travels to Sylva, and silently as ever slides through the shadows of the trees. The forest is not the same anymore, but he finds the collection of coloured stones easily. The nuts have all been stolen or disintegrated, rotten away over time, but he brings the stones and takes them to the beach just like he had been asked. He spies others, but most of them don’t see him, or notice him only when he comes really close. Such is the nature of ghosts; just like the one who had called him.

Curious about this new experiment, Rajanish awaits her reaction.

No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break.
No voice to cry out suffering.

When you said squirrel, I just had to