"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
It had been a while since she had been in the forest that was connected to the one that was her home. Well, in fact it had been a while since she had roamed Beqanna, as the two year old black girl had only recently found her way back home. No, she hadn’t been lost, or not in the direct definition of the world. Perhaps she had been lost in herself, in the new feelings and emotions, the new power. Jinju felt complete now and she couldn’t help but to wonder how she not could’ve missed this after the reckoning. It had taken her a while to get it back, but the ruby eyed girl wouldn’t want to give it up anymore. Without it she wouldn’t be complete anymore.
The fight with Ruan had learned her how strong her power could be. But also how destructive it was whenever she would get out of control. That was exactly what had happened and it had scared the two year old girl, yes, a girl, not yet a woman. She might rival Ruan in height by now, but she was not by far a woman. Neither in her appearance, nor her heart and mind. She had grown a lot, that was absolutely true, but Jinju also still had quite a way to go.
Her legs had carried her to the forest, curious to explore the place. Before this was the only place she had felt comfortable enough to go to alone, without either Ruan or Reagan at her side, and thus it was quite logical that her tour stared here, right? The Taiga hadn’t changed much, except for some residents more and some changes in ranks, but it was still the place her family lived and thus her home. But perhaps there were adventures to go on in the forest, and Jinju certainly could use an adventure or another.
Eventually, he knows he will choose a home. Probably he will go to the place the mare in the Field had offered – it sounded fine, and enough different from the Falls and the Deserts that he wouldn’t regret his choice ever day – but for the moment he has returned to the Forest. Not the Meadow – he avoids the Meadow now like a plague – but to the dark comfort of the Forest, where his nightmares don’t seem so far out of place.
He has other worries than where he will call home.
Even though the fairies had stripped them of their magical powers, the strange powers he had found himself with were not the end of his responsibilities. Before, every day, he had felt the weight of the seal in his very being, heavy, a reassurance that Conquest was secured away from the world. Unable to touch the ones he loved. But he doesn’t feel that now, and he wonders – is the seal still there, but he can’t feel it without his magic? Or has Conquest been released on the world? So he stands, tucked into the shadows, and watches for signs that his worst nightmares have come to pass again.
When his eyes flicker over the black-hued girl, something makes him pause, look again. Surging forward, he bumps into her (harder than he meant to) as an excuse to get a closer look. A feel. Something, anything? Rocking back on his hind end he shakes his head, tries to look sheepish (fails, because his dark eyes still catalogue every inch of her, intensely interested). “Sorry,” he snaps, and it’s every so clear that there isn’t an ounce of truth to the apology of the word. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.”
She’s not It. On closer inspection, she’s not like the terrors of his past at all. And he doesn’t start to develop boils and burns from the contact, which had been Conquest’s M.O. Rhonen supposes it was the unsettling eyes that made him nervous, as he looks into hers, uncertain of what to do now.
The forest was like a home to her, it felt like home. First she had lived in the Jungle, which had only been a couple of months, and after she had lost her adoptive mother it had been Reagan who had brought her to the Taiga. It was quite needless to say that Jinju felt at home in the forest, with vegetation all around her. And much safer here than in the open field, where hér nightmares sometimes still haunted her.
He bumps into her before she has time to move away and she silently curses herself for being too slow. This wasn’t what Ruan learned her, this wasn’t the way of the wolf. Or not like it should be at least. Surprised Jinju stumbles backwards, her ruby eyes searching the red frame of her ‘attacker’. However, he doesn’t strike again and instead apologizes. Only because of that the flames that danced at her feet disappeared again, though the scorching heat inside of her stays. ”You’re not” she states, their eyes meeting. ”But you’re forgiven.”
With curiosity she tilts her head a little to study him. Something seemed to bother him, his whole body tense and the look in his eyes hard. However, he didn’t seem bad or dangerous per say. Jinju didn’t doubt he could be if he wanted to, but far as she could see that wasn’t what lied in his heart. ”Can I help you with something, you look bothered?”
OOC: Lol, did you know Jinju is actually the daughter of the mare who gave herself to Conquest in that quest? But she is not the quest baby though. Nor raised by her mom.
He is glad to have bounced back from her, put some distance between them, as his gaze flickers down to the flames at her hooves. They are mesmerizing, and his eyes stay focused there as they flicker out, and then he slowly draws his gaze up to her face as she starts to speak, calling his bluff but not striking back with anger or the fire that had burned at her feet. That, more than anything else, keeps him interested and from walking away from her.
“Not unless you happen to know anything about the apocalypse, or have in depth knowledge of why and how the fairies leached the magic from the world.” He snarls the words, hating himself even as he hears them fall like acid from him lips. Closing his eyes, he takes a deep breath and shakes his head, mentally recalculating. “I’m sorry.” there is more truth to the words this time, an honesty, though it still sounds as if the words have to be dragged from the depths of the deepest cavern. He can’t complete the apology, though, and he lingers in angry embarrassed silence for a long moment before offering, “I’m Rhonen.”
She is fire and the fire is her. It lives in her, with her, and even though she had called it back into her, it still lied underneath the surface. Not that Jinju intended it to use it for anything else but protection, either herself, her family or her home. He didn’t seem a threat right now, so instead of looking at him like a danger, the black girl offers him a smile, one that shows in her ruby eyes too. ”I know a little” she answers, her head tilting a bit at the sound of his voice. Didn’t he know about the reckoning, was that what put him on edge like this. Not that Jinju couldn’t relate, she had freaked out on her way down the mountain with a fire burning behind her.
”Apology accepted, again. My name is Jinju” she introduces herself with a small nod of the head. The smile still hasn’t disappeared from her lips, but her gaze slowly travels around to look at the forest around her. She had fond memories of this place, but she had yet to find out if this moment was one to add to those. ”The fairies punished us. For greed, among other things, they say. They wanted us to earn it, the lands, our powers, but they take it back again if you do something that displeases them. Even if it’s a gift from a mother to a daughter” Jinju can’t help but to grow bitter near the end. She couldn’t say that her experience with the fairies had been good.
She had been too little to understand what had happened at first. She had been torn away from her mother, the one who took her in after her own mother had abandoned her, and later they punished her and her new mother again for the simple sake of wanting to make their bond solid. So no, Jinju wasn’t fond of the fairies. In her eyes they hadn’t brought anything good to her, same as they hadn’t done for her dear friend Lilitha, but that was not the thing she should focus on now. It is Rhonen, who still was a little mystery to her.
He hadn’t been sucked up in the Reckoning. Perhaps he had been missed, perhaps he chooses not to remember, or perhaps he had been away, looking for his family. He doesn’t know, he just knows that he returned to a Beqanna changed, and his powers missing, and swirling rumors and stories that he can’t sort out.
She smiles as she offers her name in return, eyes bright in her dark face. He doesn’t smile back, but he does relax into his stance across from her, the stiffness of his body fading. Rhonen is attentive to her words, but his expression darkens as he comprehends them, posture going rigid again. An irritated flick of his copper tail against his haunches, an uneasy shuffle of his feet as he considers.
“They overstep,” he finally says, voice gravelly and full of a dark fury that he tries hard to suppress. “Greed.” Disgust drips from the word, and he shakes his head, unaware that his ears are pinned against his skull, nearly disappearing into the strands of his mane. But it is clear the anger is not directed at her. “The fae did not give me my powers. My powers were a consequence of holding a dark force at bay keeping it away from harming anyone else; but now I cannot even tell if I hold that force prisoner inside of me anymore. If it is free, and it wreaks havoc, who then is greedy? They can deal with the consequences if it escapes before I can re-establish my control, before the other three who were in the same boat as I do, and I will watch the world burn.”
There’s a dissonance, there. Something that says despite his attitude about it, he wouldn’t let the world burn. He was willing to die for them the first time around, and chances are, he’d risk death again to protect Beqanna. But screw the fae, he thinks, for thinking they know the best. “Do they want to be worshipped like Gods? If so, they certainly aren’t kind ones.” He muses outloud, but then slowly focuses again on Jinju, warily, wondering if she will now show fear of him, of his darkness. It is what he claims to want, but really he doesn’t want them to be afraid of him.
“Have you found a home here in this new Beqanna, Jinju?” That, too, he has lost. His Falls, his family legacy; it’s gone.
She doesn’t remember much from the Reckoning. One moment she was safely with her adoptive mother in the Jungle and the next she was torn away from everything she knew. Magic had been unknown to her at that point, she didn’t have a way to understand what had happened nor what had caused the sudden change. However, soon she learned it had been the fairies. And nowadays the black girl, and soon to be woman, still doesn’t understand why they had taken her mother away.
So yes, Jinju can’t say she doesn’t agree with what the red male says. She doesn’t carry his burden and she hopes she never has too, but she does feel wronged. To her the fairies have never done something good. Only punished her for things she didn’t have a part in. And like that, they had treated Rhonen too. A fire lies underneath his spoken words, passion, a task, or perhaps it is the heavy burden on his shoulders. Even though it isn’t directed at her, Jinju takes a step back. His tension has her tense and soon little – to her harmless – sparks of fire dance around her skin. She’s simply too young and unexperienced to control it properly. ”Far as I know, the lands have been quite peaceful since the Reckoning. This dark force, I do not know of it..” she tries to sooth, though the red eyed girl isn’t sure who she’s soothing.
Hesitance and fear lie in her eyes. Not of him, but the darkness he speaks of. She can see how it consumes him, which makes it pretty clear that it is not something to take light. Jinju had only known Beqanna to be peaceful and safe, the existence of such forces was entirely new to her, and quite scary she would have to admit. ”I don’t know…” she mumbles softly, then pausing for a moment. ”But I’ve only seen them punishing others. Me, my mom, Litha, everybody. Was it so wrong of me to find a new mother..?” her voice suddenly thickening with emotion, a slight tremble as well, as she glances away. No, the Reckoning hadn’t done her any good. However, she has grown and learned.
And that shows in the smile as he asks her about her home. ”The Taiga. It isn’t quite like the Jungle, but it is home. It is where my family lives.” To her that was what a home was, the place where her family was. First it had been Lexa and the Jungle, now Reagan, Ruan and all her siblings in the Taiga.
As the tension rises between them, his swirling fury and stress causing her to step back, stiffen herself, and start to catch fire again, despite her soothing words, he knows that as the adult he will have to diffuse the building storm. It isn’t his first instinct – his first instinct has always been to burn brighter, even as a child – but his mother had spent many hours teaching him to control his temper and those more sudden impulses. She’d done it with a teasing voice and a smile, a laugh, always in control; but underneath it all Rhonen had known that she must have had a temper of her own, as a youth, to understand him so well.
So he takes a deep breath, and another, and forces himself to relax. Starting at the top of his head, the tips of his ears, the chestnut boy imagines his beloved waterfall as if it cascades down from the high cliffs and streams down, carrying the fury away in the crystalline blue waters, the cool healing touch leaving calm in their wake. A mental exercise that makes him long for the Falls, now gone forever, but an effective one.
When he opens his eyes again, not remembering closing them, he offers Jinju a sympathetic look, a half-smirk that passes for a smile on his face nowadays. “I am quite sure it was not wrong of you to find a family, no matter what the fae think,” he says firmly, and when the mention of the fae threatens to bring the anger back he lets it wash away again and gladly accepts the change of subject they have embarked on.
After all, if she had seen Conquest, she would have known. It’s not like you could miss him, or his companions War, Famine, and Death.
“I never visited the Jungle, but I heard it was quite a thing to behold,” Rhonen says about homes, pondering the places in the old Beqanna he had gone. “I was a Falls child myself,” he says, and wistfulness softens even his hardest feature, leaving him looking perhaps once more the young man he truly is. “I’ve accepted an invitation to go to Sylva, where I heard some of my former Kingdom-mates may have settled, but it’s not the same. There isn’t a waterfall anyplace in this new world they have created for us to rival the one I grew up under.”
He confuses her. He intrigues her. But most of all, he makes her curious to the thing he hides within. The secret he carries. Yet, she’s also careful enough to be afraid of it. She had known distress herself too, but now that she was slowly getting older she knew that her worries as a child were nothing like an adult’s ones. Something really horrible must keep him busy. Jinju wouldn’t ask, she was raised to not be impolite like that.
So instead she focusses on their conversation. She’s not able to hide the small smile as he tells her she wasn’t wrong. It was nice to hear that from someone. After it happened her mother had never ever talked about it with her. They hadn’t spoken about it at all and Jinju found it nice to hear someone tell her that she had done right finding a family. So she smiles at him, and dips her head lightly as a silent thank you.
She gladly accepts the change of the subject then. Jinju cannot help it but to smile a little as she gets to talk about her home. ”I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with the Falls. I was but a child when it happened..” she excuses herself with another small smile. Just like her own, his face brightens up as he talks about his home, or his former home, and she cannot help it but to get curious. ”What was it like, the Falls I mean? Did it really had a waterfall?” Oh, what she would’ve given to see that.
It is easy to allow himself to distracted by her words, ease into the flow of the conversation, and lose himself in this easy thing. It’s nice, to have an easy thing; he has not had an ‘easy’ thing since before the catastrophe. And even then, before the disaster happened, he’d been mostly alone since the quest. He’d talked to a few people in the Falls and his grandmother in the Deserts, but his family is missing and he has not had their easy companionship for a while.
Her questions make him nod, giving his sharp-edged smile that is all he has left (there is nothing left of that boy he had been, except in the rarest of moments). But it is nothing if not a true smile, however sharp. “Yes, we had a waterfall. It fell from a cliff like a mountain, with crystal clear waters below. And all around we had meadows, and some trees. From the top, you could see everything. And the sound of the falling waterfall was my lullaby from the earliest age.”
In between the lines, there are other things. How sometimes, without the Falls he is nearly an insomniac at night. During the day he listens for it on instinct, and when the world is quiet and still or there are other noises, it hurts his heart. More than that, without the Falls, there is no homing beacon for his far-flung family, and he cannot be sure he will ever see them again. His golden mother, ever the sweet and eager. His nearly shimmering father, copper and bright, and so in love with mother. His older sister, with her stubborn need to return home and her banked fires. And most importantly, his twin. With her copper pelt, so like his, but the bright blonde of her mane and tail contrasting to his.
“What do you remember most, about your home as a child?”
![[Image: U5duKtst_o.gif]](https://images.imgbox.com/2f/f9/U5duKtst_o.gif)
But she is not the quest baby though. Nor raised by her mom.