"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
11-20-2017, 10:38 PM (This post was last modified: 05-10-2018, 02:16 PM by takei.)
Takei
Orion. His black and white frame illuminated by moonlight. The sound of the ocean sings quietly in front of him. The stars are spread dramatically in the sky, twinkling silently down on his ink and paper coat. There is no movement aside from the swell and recede of the waves.
Cassiopeia. Her severed head mounted atop the blood-covered rock like a queen on a throne. Her eyes gouged out, replaced by empty pits with nerve endings and blood vessels lain bare. Her delicate lips stretching into a smile that causes eyes to look away. The water surrounding the rock is painted a deep red.
Takei rises from the swirling world of dreams. They come in flashes, vivid memories kissed by the haze of fantasy. The force of gravity pushes its ugly feet down atop his muscles - so different from the lightweight sensation of floating between the crevices of reality - and he lets out a groggy moan.
Sensations of springtime crowd his mind suddenly. The weak bleat of a newborn filly. The pungent scent of growing wildflowers. The hesitant warmth of the sun on his side. The memory of the island melting away comes to his mind and, with it, the sharp taste of panic in his mouth.
Takei lurches to his feet, noticing then that - although his eyelids have slid open - the world is still dark. He blinks hard first once, then twice. There is nothing but infinite darkness, stretching out like the cold hand of death. Yet he knows he is back in Beqanna. He can smell the familiarity of honeysuckle and pine, he can hear the water rushing off the cliff into the lake, he can feel the grass against his ankles.
Despair crashes against his emotions, thick and grimy alongside the bitterness of panic and the ache of confusion. Orion… His ink and paper lover must have been lost in the swirl of the island. Takei had heard stories of the tricks played on the innocent of Beqanna.
It had granted his mother her spring life. It had riddled his father with his deathly looks. And now it had cursed him with his largest loss.
A low moan sings past Takei’s lips. He would never spend another warm night dancing along the shoreline with Orion. He would never tease the stallion’s sensitive skin with his blood and ivory lips. He would never chase Andromeda along the forest trails with glee in his heart.
He flexes his right leg, feeling the tightness of growing skin across the gashes created by Draco. They would scar - the wounds deep enough to expose tendon and connective tissue - but they would be a reminder of the separate, fantasy life he’d lived on that island. At that thought, Takei blinks again. His vision is still impaired, lost among the swirling destruction of his beloved home.
11-22-2017, 01:53 PM (This post was last modified: 11-22-2017, 01:53 PM by keeper.)
Keeper-
The grizzly sow has awoken; hunger stirs in her gut and she can sense that her hibernation, though short-lived, is over at last. She lifts her head to scent the stale cave air but nothing more than a wayward squirrel has come through there. It is possible it was looking for a reprieve from the winter cold and might have snuggled up next to the slumbering predator, or it came to leave behind a stash of nuts in a dank corner of her cave. No matter, the squirrel and it’s nuts are of no further concern to her since the hunger amassing in her gut takes precedence. She needs to hunt, to rend with claw and teeth.
The bear lumbers to the mouth of her cave, then begins the climb down the mountainside. She can smell horses, dimly knows there might be foals dropping to the ground and a foal is no different from a moose calf - sweet meat, easy kill. But something else intercepts this line of thought, a second awareness of self that determines the horses are friends not foes. The bear pauses in her climb to think on this a moment, ancestral instinct warring with this fiercer, fresher voice that tries to reason with the grizzly’s primal brain. She grunts, then continues to amble off but heads away from the horses.
Keeper awakens with blood and bits of fur smeared on her mouth.
Oh god! What has she done? The copper taste on the back of her flat square teeth is old, but not by much - an hour, at the most, perhaps. It clings to her throat and her lips feel furrier beyond that of their whiskery entrapped velvet. No, something isn’t right. Hasn’t been right since just before winter. Ever since that haunting melody of the fairy and her transformation into an old horrid legend left her…
She squeezes her eyes shut against what her brain is trying to tell her. Her heart tries to reason with her to listen but Keeper is stubborn, resistant. The musk of bear that has overlaid her scent, the blood on her muzzle and bits of fur stuck to her face from an earlier meal that is not one of grass and water… She has to stop ignoring the signs that she is still the same mare before all of that happened but the evidence is mounting against this train of thought. Keeper might still be small and thin and feral-looking, but she something else too that takes over when she sleeps - for now, until she can master it and marry the two creatures together.
Keeper opens her eyes at least and discovers no bones picked clean or a half-eaten carcass nearby. Whatever monster she is becoming, it has been decent enough to remove itself from the scene of it’s kill before she wakes in this familiar horseflesh. A ragged sigh of gratitude and despair tears from her lips, as she climbs to her feet and shakes the loose bits of grass and some other animal’s fur off of her. The bits of branch and birdbone clank together in her tangled mane, but she is used to those sounds since her days of lurking in the labyrinthine woods of the Forest.
She is not in Hyaline, either.
For that she is immensely thankful as she sniffs the air, still not scenting a recent kill but picking up the scents of wildflowers. For a moment, they are too cloying and sweet and evoke a snort from her fluttering nostrils. The sun felt good on her back, suffusing her skin with a warmth that she had missed. It also makes the still-thick winter pelt itch and she decides to seek a good tree to rub against in hopes of helping it shed faster from her flesh.
Her black eyes begin to assess the landscape and she realizes that she is in the Field, a familiar enough haunt of hers - she comes here so much to fill Hyaline with fresh faces that her scent is all tangled up in the scents of others’ that are much more travel-worn. Well, there are trees enough here to rub against, she thinks just before a high painful wail cuts the air and causes her to bolt momentarily. She’d only gone a few yards before she reined herself in with a laugh at her own silliness. Her nerves were still on edge from this morning’s discovery and she still hadn’t clean her face off now that she thinks about it as her eyes cast wildly about for the source of the scream. Something about it tugged at the strings of her heart, softened her wild look into one of compassion as she finally found the source of such a sound - a red and white stallion, all alone, and worse, covered in gashes that were deep and unmasked tendon and tissue.
Keeper couldn’t help the natural way her nose wrinkled at the sight of the exposed tendon and tissue. Nor could she help the sudden visceral punch to her gut and brain, a simultaneous thing that almost made her sink to her knees. Not because of the gashes’ depth or from disgust, but because it summoned a hunger so powerful and a need so raw and primal that it almost overtook her. If Keeper could look at herself then! Her front hooves had shrunk into paws with wicked curving claws and her pale dunskin fur has begun to darken and thicken as her spine bowed and something else flowed along her shape - a bear’s.
She moaned too, hardly aware of it as she fought to swallow back this sudden overtaking of herself and her skin. It was something that she had suspected but this only served to confirm her suspicions, Keeper was something else altogether and it felt predatory and cold to her. But she managed to master it, to change paw back to hoof and sheath the teeth that had lengthened and curved behind her lips. She could do nothing at the moment about the blood and bits of fur that still clung to her face, but she could approach him now with a soft foot and a kinder look. Except the closer she came to him, the more she realized that he seemed not to see her…
“Are you okay?”
Was all that she could manage to ask just then.
11-25-2017, 11:32 PM (This post was last modified: 05-10-2018, 02:16 PM by takei.)
Takei
They dance together. Ink and paper, blood and ivory. They twist and wind and curve around one another to an unsung melody. The ocean laps on the shore beside them, occasionally sweeping wide to tickle their heels. The stars are an endless swirl of dark navy and twinkling silver. Takei feels his nerves flare with heat as his side brushes against Orion’s. His body grows cold when they separate.
They are separated now - whether by the forces of dimensions or the forces of fantasy. Takei is cold now, shivering beneath the warmth of the sun and the longing for his partner. He sobs to himself, grieving over everything he knows he has lost. A scent draws his attention, musky and warm and coppery.
A bear.
He’s seen one before, lumbering in the darker corners of Beqanna. The scent was distinct then, and he has clearly not forgotten it. Takei’s muscles tighten and he swivels his ears around rapidly, trying desperately to locate the predator. In the back of his mind there is a voice (“Do you hear others running? No one is afraid!”) but it is quiet compared to the roar of instinct. He prances in place for a moment, limbs tense and ready to bolt.
Panic grips him for a quick moment as he realizes he can’t run. If he can’t see, he won’t be able to run. He might head straight into a tree and end himself there, or careen off an unforeseen cliff, or plow over gentle children. The scent of a woman floods his sensitive nostrils then and his anxieties are calmed.
Takei shifts his body in the direction of the voice, his red and white face a swirling pattern of varying emotions. Her question nearly undoes him, but the stilling of his panic is enough to shock him away from sobbing into a stranger’s shoulder.
“No.” His voice breaks, low and forlorn. “I’ve been able to see my whole life, but I just woke up and now I’m blind.” Takei leaves out the most important pieces (washing away from Beqanna by the storm, falling in love on a foreign island, getting attacked by those he considered family, watching that island melt away into nothingness), though perhaps they might come out someday.
12-06-2017, 01:49 AM (This post was last modified: 12-06-2017, 01:50 AM by keeper.)
Keeper does not know how to reconcile this new part of herself with a horse’s innate instinct. Instinct is something that is so ingrained in them that she understands the reaction it has upon the shape of him as he tenses and tries to locate the source of his inherent distrust that she knows is because of her - because of how she smells, of how she was earlier and is later on, unable to shed despite the fact that she does not wear that skin now. The bear stays with her, just beneath the surface and she can feel it more and more as it merges with her soul and her horse-skin.
But the longer she stands there, just stands there, the calmer he seems to get because the scent of her - a mare - starts to push through the thick musk of bear. Keeper has no idea to tell him that it was all her, both scents, the presence of predator and prey in one shape that has no idea who she is these days as she becomes aware of the bear like a second self that is separate and struggling to usurp the horse that she had always been. Apologizing seems like a start but she has no idea how to begin it because it would require an explanation that she also doesn’t have.
The blur of emotions on his face is too fast and too much for her to follow but she understands that her question is one that he cannot offer up a genuine answer to. Of course, Keeper never fully expected him to say that he was okay when he clearly did not look it. But the break in his voice pulls at her heart and she cannot help how she goes to him, unthinking as he presses her small nose to his neck and tries to breathe a calm breath out against his painted skin. “I’m so sorry,” she mumbles into him. “I have no idea what that is like and cannot even imagine the horror of seeing then not seeing the next day.”
Despite the fact that he is a grown stallion, Keeper feels an odd motherly instinct towards him. Or since she does not consider herself old enough to mother anyone, it is perhaps more of a sisterly instinct and she moves her nose to his mane and smooths a few strands of it against the thick set of his neck. “You shouldn’t be here alone then,” she murmurs without trying to come across as chiding. Her concern is evidenced by the way she tries to press small sisterly touches into the curve of his cheek and the nook of his knee, as if assessing for other smaller hurts that she might actually be able to help him heal through non-magical means.
“I know a place where you could recover from whatever has left you this way.” because she has no idea if his blindness is permanent or a transient thing. What she does consider is that the bear in her would protect him fiercely, as much as the little pony-sized mare would and that he should come back with her to Hyaline where the wisteria and the blue lake would treat him with more kindness than this cold old field.
@[takei] sorry for the long wait! and the fact that keeper is very touchy lol <3
12-12-2017, 06:13 PM (This post was last modified: 05-10-2018, 02:16 PM by takei.)
Takei
The battle of good and evil.
It’s an eternal concept of life — with no beginning and no ending — but every living thing must go through it. Each day, decisions are made. Whether to fight or run, whether to hate or love, whether to comfort or bully, whether to live or die. The war is widespread and deeply-rooted, extending its arms through every period of life and beyond.
Takei doesn’t know how furiously she is fighting in that battle. He will not ever understand the sins and sorrows that grip her today and will grip her in the future (when she must eat, as all animals do, but it comes from the flesh and blood of another creature), or the way she will have to combat the more sinister side of her. Takei used to wonder what it might be like to hear inside someone else’s mind — to listen to their thoughts and see their imagination and touch their emotions.
It’s most likely a good idea he has not had that wish granted.
Her apologies barely soothe the coiled snares of grief and confusion that twine beneath his skin. It will take a long time for Takei to accept condolences with grace. His teeth grit, barring the sobs that want to escape from his thoughts. She touches his trembling, sweaty neck. He is startled by the sudden action, but the touch of another soothes him more than his words could have.
He is swimming in the cold abyss of darkness, but her touch grounds him.
She offers him someplace to stay — safety. Takei has seen the predators of Beqanna before (not just the other animals who prey on horses but also predators of the same species) and he is immediately grateful for her protection. He realizes that he has yet to say anything in response to her murmuring words.
“Would you mind harbouring me? I would prefer not to be a sitting piece of meat for predators to fight over when the sun sets.” His voice hitches, climbing in tone with the tightness of anxiety. Yet her embrace and her warm words and her sweet smell — so different from the whiff of bear he had just scented a moment ago — still his terror even so.
Good and evil.
Predator and prey.
Beginning and end.
Keeper tries to take it all in stride but the bear’s emergence has complicated that as she faces a new set of challenges in embracing what the bear has to offer. Through a gradual progression, much like the slide of rocks down a mountainside or the creep of moss across the tundra, she is beginning to embrace the nature of a predator and find ways to marry it to the nature of prey. Some things end, others begin and some things are rooted in good and others, in evil. That is just the way of it and Keeper can no more shirk the natural order of this than any other can. The struggle is real though. For all of them.
She cannot comprehend what he is going through; to endure all that he has is foreign to her and it is a tale that she does not push him to spill from those trembling lips that suddenly mash together in an effort to keep back more sobs. Her heart is forever his in that moment, so full of compassion as to be fit to burst if it must beat one more time with such a heavy throb of emotion to back it up. Of course her heart does not burst at all, it beats and beats, but she can feel some nameless emotion choke up her throat - no amount of soothing can take away the pain of what he is feeling.
But she can see that her presence has some kind of effect on him that keeps him there, stuck to the spot. Her nose continues to smooth down the rumpled strands of his mane, and sometimes she chews a little tuft of fur here and there on his neck with her blunt teeth. Grooming has its benefits, she believes, even if it is just to make him realize that she is here, in the now, real and realized, and isn’t going anywhere at the moment until he is ready to make that decision with a step of his own.
“I would be honored!” her enthusiasm is demure, softened by the creep of anxiety in his tone. Her nose finds his cheek in a chaste touch, no more than a little rub of her lips over the skin there before her mouth climbs to his ear, “I’ll take you to my home, Hyaline. It is beautiful there and you will be safe from all harm.” She tries not to make it sound like a promise because she cannot promise safety from even the simplest things like a hole in the ground or a hissing snake, but she’ll try. Keeper will be damned if something happens to him whilst under her protection.
She gives him one more nudge, turning his head towards the proper direction that will see them off to the mountains that hem in the blue lake and all the wisteria and maple trees. It gives her a thrill to think of going home, and bringing him with her so that he can heal and reclaim some measure of himself that seems to have been lost. Hyaline will be good for his soul, she thinks.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[takei] let me know if you'd like me to post again, introducing him to Hyaline or if you'd like to just post there and carry on. <3
