"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
Autumn brings warm colours, cool nights, and a host of unpleasant memories with it. Although there is a tug always on her heart reminding her how much she loved being a mother, Agetta is certain that those days are long behind her. After all, what kind of mother could she be now? After Tersias…
There is not a day that goes by when she doesn’t think of her children, each and every one of them. Today is no different as she slips under the boughs of the forest, a snow-white drop among the reds, oranges, and vibrant coniferous greens.
Her memory has certainly started to fray and she worries that there are some friendly faces she would no longer recognize, but those thirteen individual prayers that she whispers to the stars at night are, at the very least, something she will never lose.
Can a heart be heavy and light at the same time?
She feels, a little bit, like she is going mad the longer she paces alone so she begins to keep alert for signs of someone else lingering about on this crisp morning. Surely some scrap of conversation will help keep her rooted in the present. Lately, that's when she has been feeling less like a ghost and she's starting to crave contact with others for the simple things - like just having some other company aside from her own thoughts.
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
-----------------------------------------------i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
It has occurred to him that maybe he should go back to where he came from.
He thinks he will when he’s regained what he lost of his energy in swimming here in the first place.
His interaction with the healer had eradicated the ache from his muscles, but he knows that journey is more a matter of heart than anything else.
He has seen his mother, wept at her feet, delivered the news that their beloved Keiran is gone.
He has learned that his home is no longer his home and he supposes this is good enough.
There is nothing left for him here.
For now, he lingers. He loiters here in the meadow because it is the only thing that remains unchanged. He knows absolutely every inch of this place, despite the years and the miles that have separated him from it. He stubbornly refuses to think about why – refuses to succumb to the gravity of the memories he has of his daughter and the time they spent here – and instead focuses on the fact that there is some comfort to be found in the familiarity of it.
There is some distant flicker of recognition that coils around the soft edges of his mind when he sees her. She is not immediately familiar in a way that suggests they ever really knew each other. She is familiar in the way that those who visit you in your dreams are familiar – he knows her but he doesn’t know how.
He ventures closer without much hesitation, stations himself to her left, studies the lines of her face. “You’re familiar,” he muses, “but I don’t know why.”
He is quiet for the space of a breath before he adds, “my name is Kensley.”
( but you had a halo made of diamonds resting on your head---------------------------- i should be dealing with my demons but i'm dodging them instead )
10-23-2019, 09:50 PM (This post was last modified: 10-23-2019, 09:51 PM by Agetta.)
From the corner of her midnight eyes, she sees a flash of grey and her heart begins to race, her muscles tensing. But when she turns, it’s not Anaxarete. Aside from a similar coat colour, the stallion that approaches her is far different from that villain. She relaxes, and her curiosity is piqued when he comes to stand near her.
He is familiar too, but not even his name can bring back any true memories. She wonders if they ever spoke, or if they just merely passed each other now and then. She’s not sure she could recall everyone who had lived in the Gates with her either, so he could have very well been one of them. Her memory seems to have held fast to the awful and the darkness, but allowed sweeter memories to slip through and pass away into the faded years.
She worries she is standing beside a beloved friend and doesn’t even know it.
“Are you a ghost from before the lands changed too?” She asks, a sad sort of smile in her eyes. It’s been her favourite term for herself lately, and she supposes that it might fit those of them from before rather well. She wonders if Ryatah had felt like a ghost too, and makes a mental note note to ask her friend.
But she returns to the conversation at hand quickly, focusing once more on the grey stallion. “I’m Agetta. It’s nice to meet you, Kensley. Even if we might have met before.” She does not hold his lost memory over him and can only hope that he won’t begrudge her for her inability to place where they might have crossed paths. Still, if there was one place she frequented – it was her home, so she thinks it can’t hurt to see if the kingdom rings a bell. “I used to call the Gates my home,” The wistful spark of memory is overshadowed by the frown that chases it. “Only I supposed they don’t even exist anymore.”
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
------------------------------------------i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
A ghost.
Is that what he is?
He knows that she does not mean it literally, but even as she says it he can feel the edges of himself soften. He glances down at his legs, as if to check that they are still there. He expects to be able to see straight through them. But they are solid still, much to his dismay.
He quirks a tired grin that lacks in warmth and substance and never quite reaches his eyes. He drags in a shuddering breath and nods. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he murmurs. He swallows thickly and tries not to think about all of the things he has lost in this, too. He stubbornly refuses to think about Kennice in particular or what terrible fate might have befallen her at the hands of Cronus.
The name does not sound familiar but there are so many things he does not remember. He nods, commits it to memory. Perhaps it’ll be useful someday. He exhales a breath of laughter that comes out sounding more like a sigh. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify it as laughter at all if not for the slanted smile that accompanies it. “It’s nice to meet you, too,” he says, quite certain for some reason that this is the first time they have ever met despite the flicker of recognition he’d felt when he’d first laid eyes on her.
“My mother lived in the Gates, I think,” he muses, the gaze narrowed almost imperceptibly in thought as he tries desperately to draw the memory to the forefront of his mind. “My father, too, though very briefly. He lived primarily in the Tundra,” and everywhere else, too, he thinks bitterly but does not say. “I called the Chamber home, but I never really belonged there.” He did not belong there and he had absolutely no right to love their queen. He swallows thickly and stifles this memory, too.
( but you had a halo made of diamonds resting on your head---------------------------- i should be dealing with my demons but i'm dodging them instead )
Although she is sorry that he is a ghost too, his murmur brings a smile to her that mirrors the one that he sports – tired, and certainly not a true grin. It’s heartbreaking to know that there are others that might feel the same way as she does, but also she is grateful for the company. To hear the names of the kingdoms she knew so well coming from the mouth of another.
If that is selfish of her, she hopes she will be forgiven.
It’s not fair to judge someone on their home, perhaps, but when Kensley mentions that the Chamber was his home, Agetta can feel her heart constrict. Too many painful memories to count flash through her mind with such ferocity that it makes her feel queasy. Thankfully, it’s only seconds before the pressure releases when he continues his sentence, saying that he never really belonged there.
Agetta knows first-hand what sort of monsters belonged to the Chamber. Even in this strange half-life she's living, she thinks she's better off without going back down that road.
She wants to ask who his parents were, but maybe there will be another time to dig into histories. If they are ghosts, what does that make their mothers and fathers?
“I find it is so strange to think that there are generations who have no idea what the Gates, the Tundra, and the Chamber even were.” Those kingdoms, the alliances, the wars, the friendships – they dominated Agetta’s life. She met the love of her life in the Gates, gave birth to most of her children there. The chamber was their rival, especially after her death.
And now? Did any of that even matter? Except for the lasting scars on her, did those rivalries have any effect on the world?
She’s trying very, very hard not to get too melancholy with Kensley – they only just met, after all. She doesn’t want to scare off a potential friendship with someone from before by lamenting about what has been lost. Even though that loss and all the ones tied to it are all she can think about most days.
Perhaps she’s just going senile.
It's only been a few seconds but she can feel her thoughts begin to stray so she focuses her midnight-blue gaze, the hint of a smile as she attempts to ease into something she once knew so well - conversation. Instead of asking about the past - because she's not sure she's ready for any reciprocal questions turned her way - she just sort of asks about it."Have you recently returned, Kensley? Or have you been living here all this time?"
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He no longer understands time.
Though, it’s hard to say if he ever really did.
He wonders how much time it takes for a land to be forgotten. How many generations have come and gone to erase their names from their stories, their memories? He does not know how to find an answer, so he merely offers up another slanted smile that lists dangerously to one side before it disappears altogether. “It is strange,” he concedes and then goes quiet.
He has not thought about it much, if he’s being honest. Home. He has wandered because his need to move is the only thing he inherited from his father (other than the color of his coat, the color of his eyes). He left Beqanna before everything collapsed and then rose again in different order. He raised his daughter and then he went in search of something he could not identify. He had not given himself the chance to be homesick. Perhaps because he believed that, should he ever come back, Beqanna would be just as he’d left it. Strange that he should feel homesick now, he thinks.
He drags in a shuddering breath with her question, tilts his head in her direction as he considers it. It is hard to think about coming back without revisiting the reason why he’d come back. The useless heart in his chest – which still beats, peculiarly – constricts and he clears his throat. “I just came back,” he says. Because he’d been desperate for the comfort of home. “I didn’t expect things to be so different,” he adds and it comes out skewed, sideways, as if spoken from someplace far away as he turns his gaze toward the horizon.
“But,” he says, rather abruptly, as if trying to save them both from the impossible depths of their shared sadness (because he can see it in her, too), dragging his focus back to her face, “I guess it’s more than a little naive to come back to things expecting them to be exactly as you’d left them.”
Although Agetta has certainly experienced her own form of sadness about returning, she does not feel better knowing that Kensley is experiencing it as well. There is no real way to sooth this hurt. Being in the company of someone else who had been here before, who had lost things as she has, is a bit of a balm but it does not change anything. It simply means there is more than one soul who knows exactly how it feels to return to what you think is going to be a home, only to find that time has moved on without you in so many different ways.
He mentions that it was probably naïve to expect nothing to change and she sighs quietly, as she nods. “I suppose you're right.” She smiles sadly at him, wishing that she could ease his adjustment in this new Beqanna. But she did not know what he had come back expecting, she assumes he is talking about the land changing but it could also be a family he had been hoping to return to – or a love. She has no power to help him – she can’t even help make things easier for herself.
Still, she has hope.
She has to, or she would fall apart where she stands.
“I’ve been told by my friend that it will get easier to adjust after coming back. I hope she was right, for both our sakes.”
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He should have asked.
He should have asked how long she’s been here.
How long she’s had that look on her face.
How long she’s carried this same great, terrible sadness.
But she offers up an answer in her own way. A friend had told her that it would get easier, she says, and he smiles again but it is a tired and rueful thing. He shakes his head almost imperceptibly and he looks away. Would he have come back here if he’d known that there was nothing left for him here? Or would he have continued to wander until his legs gave out? He imagines himself lying prone in the desert, praying for a death that would never come.
“Do you think you’ll stay?” he asks, turns his focus back to her face. She has a friend here, he realizes, and maybe this is enough to convince most people to grow roots. But he’s never known what that’s like, has never known how to stay in one place too long. But will he stay here? Here in the last place he saw his mother, his twin, his daughter, his heart. He doesn’t know and it injects a new sense of mourning into the marrow of his bones.
“Do you think it’ll get easier?” he adds before she’s had a chance to answer his first question. He does not recognize the sense of desperation bursting and swelling in the column of his throat but he supposes it must be born from sadness. Because he’d give anything for something to hold onto.
And then, after a beat of silence, he asks, finally, “how long have you been here, Agetta?”
He asks it quiet, though he’s not sure why. Perhaps because he wants to know if there’s hope for him, too.
How long has she been here? “Only a season, this time. Hardly anytime at all.” A small pause, but she quickly gives up on the math trying to figure out, in a broader sense, how long she has been here total. “Too many years to count altogether.” She remembers she used to pay attention to her age, but dying had messed with her timeline a little. She knows she’s been alive for a very long time but as her mind fades she has lost the ability to comprehend just how long it has been.
Surely, she has no idea it has been over a century since she was a small black filly growing up in the Gates. Since she was a general and then a queen.
Another deep breath and a small sigh to follow as she looks at Kensley, responding to his other questions. Her gaze is soft as she tries to put words to her thoughts, speaking with complete honesty. “But… I think I’ll stay. I don’t really have anywhere else to go. I’ve tried living away from this place, but if I am a ghost now than outside of this continent I am nothing. A shadow.” Given the choice between one or another, she keeps choosing the first.
She continues, and finds it’s not hard for her to be hopeful. Despite all of her constant worrying, despite the ever-present fears, she’s survived this long on hope for peace in her life. What’s a little while longer? “I do think it will get better. I… I’ll never fully detach myself from the life I lived here once but if I can find new roots here I might be able to grow again. A new purpose, even if it’s just something small.”
Her voice quiets and her gaze shifts away from him when she continues, unable to speak the truth while looking at him. She does not wish to see if he thinks her foolish. “I’m so afraid that there is no future here for me, that I will wither away into a shadow once more and be lost and forgotten... But still, I hope there is a future for me.”
And here she looks back to him, her smile brightening a touch. “And for you, too Kensley. I don’t think you are destined to be lost either.” If he's in need of some hope, there's enough in this small white mare for them both.
headshot by Leah! <3
@[kensley] I'm gonna keep tagging you until you yell at me to stop
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
He has lived so long as a shadow that he doesn’t know how to be anything else.
Will he also find new roots here?
Will he find anything here worth staying for?
But she thinks that there is hope for him, too, and that has to count for something.
He had loved once and he had done it fiercely. He had hinged his heart on the edge of Anaxarete’s darkness, let it consume him and had known better than to ask for anything in return. Perhaps he is naive, too, to think that love is the only thing in the world that matters.
He drags in a shuddering breath and he nods but remains quiet for several moments. “I’m glad I found you,” he says and then that same tired smile, slanted and listing, sad. He studies her face, commits the soft plains and angles to memory. He will remember her the next time he sees her and he will not have to question how he knows her. He will consider her a friend, he thinks, even if only in passing. Two lost souls trying to find their way back to a world that made sense.
He swallows thickly. “I don’t think you have to worry about ever being nothing,” he adds after a brief pause. Rolls one shoulder in a kind of shrug, finally looks away. From anyone else, it might have been considered flirtatious. But, coming from him, it is merely a quiet observation. “You strike me as the sort of woman who will always have a future.”
And him?
He’s not so convinced.
“Even if the rest of the world forgets you, you’ll always have at least one wayward friend who remembers you.” He smiles again, a breathless thing as he looks back at her.
And then a storm in his heart passes a cloud over his face and exhales, long and slow. “Even if there is no future for me here, my past was here. My family, the woman I loved, our daughter. Even if they’re not here anymore, this is the last place I ever saw them and I guess that’s enough to keep me.”
