"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
03-22-2018, 06:36 PM (This post was last modified: 03-31-2018, 01:37 PM by Erinys.)
I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song your face is like a melody, it won't leave my head.
A mistake is what she was.
She had been born from an abomination—a creature not even from this world truly. It had been her mother though (strange, adorned in purple armor) in some sort of way that allowed nature to birth her. Her mother had shown nothing towards her when she had been born. It didn’t even seem like compassion or love was capable for such a being like her mother. Her mother’s specie had only seemed to want one purpose—more of them.
It had left her there in the pouring rain on a spring morning. She was left with no guidance in the world, not a hand to hold or a comfort in her times of need. But her abandonment did not stop her from living. It perhaps had been her biological nature that kicked in, instinct pushed her to survive, and live through this terrible turmoil.
Erinys—that is what she called herself. It was a name from some story she had heard a mother tell her twin children one day in the meadow. She never knew what it meant truly, but she had liked the sound of it. The name rolled off easily and yet had a sense of ruggedness ringing when spoken. It gave her a sense of identity, feeling like she was someone when she felt like a nobody.
The black filly eventually grew into an adult. She could’ve been a pretty thing with her darkened skin and bright amber eyes but she was not. She was not perfect—if that was the nicest way to put it. She has an ewe-neck, slab-sided body, and is missing her left ear. Erinys was defective—not perfect or really pretty.
Company is what she craves most right now. The darkness of living the past years of her life alone have left an empty void within her. She sometimes wonders how she even is still alive, breathing and accepting who and what she is. It was a mystery to her, but somehow and someday she is still here.
Erinys slowly makes her way across the meadow. Her amber eyes pay no attention to the others. If she is caught looking at another she acts like she never saw them there. She had no one—no friends, no family. it’s not like she had never wanted someone; it’s just that she never had found someone to accept her for who she was. She had never found someone like her—not until they had come into her life, but simply put it did not last long.
Her bright, amber colored eyes light up at the memory of them. it overplays a million times somedays. She wonders where the four have gone after their meeting together to what only seemed like yesterday. It’s been more than a couple years now, but Erinys has lost track of time as she always has. However, she is back here in the meadow—hoping, waiting for them to come back.
Behind closed lids tales of a life half-lived taunted him from the place where he’d left them buried. His past hardly felt as if it belonged to him and, yet, it continued to rain its plague upon him. In his dreams the face of his father, vicious and damning, filled his consciousness with the terror of his thrashing hooves. Hard as he tried he could not recall a memory containing a single tender look from either of his parents. Every glance bestowed upon him had been filled with venom and a wish that he should either vanish or die. However adamantly he tried, he seemed incapable of granting their wish.
Even after he’d been beat and left for dead, his heart persisted. Even when he went weeks without food, he persisted. Even as he stared over the misting cascade of a water fall, he persisted. In the end, he knew he was a coward and he found himself longing for the strength to deliver unto them the gift of his final breath. And, yet, he persisted.
Standing now at the edge of the forest, a stallion grown, he gazed out at the never-ending expanse of the meadow laid out before him. Somewhere ahead lay the same sea that he’d crossed to arrive upon this new land. A stallion grown, he found himself wondering if they ever thought of him. Cruel as they were, they were still his parents. They’d created him in a moment of passion and love, his mother had carried him inside of her for months – relishing in the anticipation of his arrival, only to be met with the disappointment of his monstrosity. Wry mouthed and completely blind in his left eye, the look of shock on their faces had forever burned a hole in his memory.
Hephaestus they’d decided to call him. A mockery of the ugliest of the gods. Scarred and uglier than compare, he’d lived his whole life on the outside of society. The other colts tormented him relentlessly and made a game of kicking stones at the deformed side of his face, whilst the fillies screamed whenever he’d wander too close. His shadow had been the only company he’d been granted. The moment he decided to leave them had been the first moment he finally felt freed.
He would never return to their shores. Beqanna was his home now.
Unmoved from his spot just outside the shadows, his eye caught glimpse of another dark figure approaching. As the horse drew nearer he began to notice similarities between them and, for the first time since he’d emerged from the sea, he didn’t feel the need to hide.
I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song your face is like a melody, it won't leave my head.
It is the small strength and hope within her that carries her through the sea of grass. This place knows her all to well—a child returning home. They welcome her with open arms, reaching up and brushing against her darken colored bodice. Her strength and hope continue to carry her now, just as it did before in the first experiences of misery she had felt from this world.
Somewhere though, there is beauty.
Erinys’ amber stained eyes scout the edges of the forest that interlock with the meadow. The shadows conceal that hidden creatures that linger in there. She cannot quiet make out the lining of the trees deep within the forest, but the emerging of a shadow is something she does notice.
Her attention is drawn to the beast—some would call him a monster, but he is entirely something else to her. There is strength in the way he holds himself. His muscular figure draws power and prestige instantly from her. However, when her eyes meet his own a sense of shock overwhelms her.
It is not that she is scared by the hideous marks and scars that cover his face. The initial shock is that she is surprised to see another one like her has made themselves known to her. Her heart quickens a bit, a sense of relief fills her stomach and makes her feel warm.
The beast does not say anything, so she decides she must.
“Well,” it is a soft whisper, “I was not expecting you.”
At the edge of forest his onyx eyes refused to peel themselves away from her abnormally shaped figure. Though her deformities weren’t as obvious as his own, he felt a kinship with her in a way that he’d never experienced before. Surprisingly, he harbored no desire to slip back into the shadows. There was no explanation for his desire to know the black mare, but he held fast as her pace quickened to meet him.
Shafts of sunlight broke through thinly veiled clouds and he flinched against the exposure of her rays. Too long he’d lingered within the fold of the trees that sat comfortingly behind him. It would have been too easy for him to have lost himself within the never-ending expanse of trees. He believed that he would have been content there, even if he never did again find his way out. When he’d emerged from hiding, he could never have anticipated finding himself in the moment in which he now stood.
Even from afar he could feel her eyes upon him, studying him. Though, her intensity felt different to him than most he’d come to meet. Pooled within the deep amber of her stare, he felt a familiarity. A kinship. Nearly face to face she halts and considers him and, rather than hide the truth of his grotesque features, he meets her gaze. He couldn’t remember the last time that he hadn’t flinched when he’d been caught unawares by a stranger in his midst. He’d always been quick to use his blessedly full forelock to mask the bulging, fleshy deformity that had taken hold of the left side of his face. This time, he allowed the mass of hair to flow naturally down the center of his face.
He waited for the fear and disgust to plant themselves upon her dark face, but, instead, he was met with a voice barely above the whisper of wind between them. She had not expected to meet him on her travels, a sentiment he shared. He held himself taller and allowed the wind to carry wisps of his hair to cover his face, as he’d done so many times before.
I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song your face is like a melody, it won't leave my head.
It was not often you meet someone face to face and feel an instant kinship with them. There was a strange anomaly here—two strangers feeling something of a bound instantly. Erinys has felt that kindship once. It had been lost though, the years between their separation made it evident, just as she loses many of the good things she counts to be small blessings in her life.
He doesn’t hide from her when she looks at him. For a moment, she feels like she is looking at something else entirely than his physical features. It almost feels like she could reach out to him and find the very essence of his soul. She wonders what it is like, beyond the hidden scars and deep muscles that shape and mold who he is—this stranger.
The openness, displaying his vulnerability to her is something she admires already about him. It leaves a soft smile on her thin lips. Erinys is instantly curious about the shadowy stranger. She does not pull away from the moment they share. She embraces this sentimental moment presently (it is something knows will soon be lost, just as all things good in her life have faded away).
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” she says with a smile. Her voice is stronger this time. It is not a soft mouse-like tone she is used to when speaking to others that do not share the kinship her and this fellow have in this moment. “It’s just been a long time since I’ve found someone like me.” She lets out a soft sigh then. The pain of the lonely days catches up to her in just that moment. Erinys had not realized how alone she had really been. “I’m sorry,” she says weakly knowing she has been caught up in a moment of exposing herself to someone who might not care to see her vulnerable side—it was not often someone did.
The light in her eyes was captivating to him as she looked at him completely without fear. There was a longing deep within their pits, almost as though she were searching for something – something that he knew he could not give her. As the moment stretched itself between them, he felt his insides lurch away from its sincerity. The vulnerability her gaze forced upon him set his insides to quaking and he found himself stepping abruptly away.
Her words were calming to him and, though he turned the hideousness of his face away from her, he remained to listen to her. She was just as uncomfortable as he was, it seemed. Though, to him, he could not see a reason for it. Even despite her flaws she was…
“Beautiful.”
The word falls past his lips before he could stop it, riding upon the tail end of her spoken name.
It didn’t matter what others had thought about her in the past. She was imperfectly perfect, and it pained him to think that people were so cruel to look upon her with such unwarranted distaste. Though she was bent slightly askew, and though she was missing pieces, she was beautiful.
“Erinys,” he spoke her name in acknowledgement of it. “Hear me now and believe my words. You are beautiful.”
Her coat, a rich ebony, stretched along her lithe body, coloring her in the purest of midnights. Locks of matching tendrils billowed elegantly and the wind and, peeking out from behind the veil of her forelock amber eyes met his own made of onyx. He saw not a mistake. He saw design.
More than what he could say for himself. Pink and puckered his face would always be the cause of fright. There was no hiding the scars of his past, not the truth of his present. With one eye already blind he awoke each dawn with the fear that, one day, he would lose the other. Had it not been for the cruelty of his father’s disgust at his son’s crooked nose, he might have lived a much different life.
04-19-2018, 09:44 PM (This post was last modified: 04-23-2018, 04:41 PM by Erinys.)
I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song your face is like a melody, it won't leave my head.
He steps away suddenly.
She feels her heart drop to the pit of her stomach. It beats abruptly; the pace of her heart beating is strong and quick. She finds it hard to breath in the moment she realizes he might just be leaving her.
They always leave, she tells herself. She doesn't want to believe it, but she finds herself all ready heading towards that direction.
She doesn't know what went wrong so fast. Maybe she should not have spoken so suddenly. Maybe she should have kept her feelings and thoughts to herself—buried away like everything else.
Buried deep within her thoughts, lost away from the world for a moment, she wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. “What?” She asks suddenly, a puzzled look crosses over her face. Then it suddenly registers to her what he said.
He called me beautiful, she thinks. Me beautiful? No. He is lying. It has to be a lie. She is certain it is to make up for a fool she has been. She cannot help but feel that he feels sorry for her and what the fool she has made herself to be.
“You’re joking, right?” She wants to laugh at him. His words sound all wrong, a complete lie. A stranger telling her she was BEAUTIFUL! That has never happened to her, and likely will not EVER.
Erinys searches his face for the answers to her question. She needs confirmation that this is only just pure humor. A stranger giving her a compliment—something she dreamt of hearing from someone. Anyone really.
But she could find nothing but truth all over his deformed face. It was not a monster she saw though, like before she finds a gentle being. There beyond his physical features is someone with a gentle heart, a caring soul. He poured something out that he truly believed to be true. The monster had called her beautiful—she was beautiful to him.
And she accepts it.
She accepts it because she believes him. She cannot help but smile now. Her belly feels warm and for a moment she feels like she might be floating. Is this what it felt like to be admired? It was the first time she was feeling it (and she would cherish that feeling for a lifetime).
“I believe you,” she says softly.
Her amber eyes lock onto his face, as much as she can see the way he hides himself from her. She wishes he didn't hide himself from her. There wasn't anything for him to be ashamed of—there was never anything for him to hide from her.
“Please don’t go,” she asks. “Please,” she begs this time.
She cannot have someone leave her again. Not like this. Not him.
His retreat wounds her. He can see it in the sudden panic that lights within the depths of her gaze. The fear gives him pause and he pauses mid-step, his perfectly formed hoof lingering in the air. Her promise to believe the truth of his words is quickly followed by a desperation within her voice. She wants him to stay and he is conflicted. He wants to stay, but he does not understand why she would want him. Tentatively, he steps forward his voice lost within the depths of his throat.
”I’m afraid I do not make for good company,” he admits suddenly sheepish.
No one had ever outwardly asked for his continued companionship. He’d grown accustomed to his spot upon the outskirts of life. An observer – never a participator. To have another being call for him to remain at their side, the feeling was completely new to him and the strength of it sent lightning bolts of shock through him. Still, her pleading gaze draws him closer to her.
Physical touch was, yet another, ever illusive aspect of his pitiful existence. Throughout his life he’d grown used to being treated as a creature infected with some contagion. It’d became all too easy for him to ignore the instinctive flinching away that many of the other younglings would perform whenever he drew near. Constantly he’d remind himself that they were wrong and, one day, he would find someone who desired to feel the warmth of him.
There was only one other that he’d been bold enough to reach out to. Deep within the recesses of his mind, he saw the kindness of her eyes as she looked past the heartbreaking reality of his face. From the moment he’d stumbled onto her sleeping in the clearing he’d felt a pull…a desire to be close to her. Angrily, he shook the memory of her from his mind. She was too good for him and he was better off in Tephra where he’d left her.
Erinys, however, had a soul whose beauty broke through the rays of her dim fate. The shine of her amber eyes, sparkled with a light that drew him from the slumber of his loneliness. Hardly without him realizing, he felt himself draw nearer to her. Though drawn by a force dissimilar to one he’d felt before, he couldn’t resist the pull any more than he’d been able to then. Afraid of frightening her, he hesitated before he reached the velvet of his lips and gently touched them to hers. The gesture was innocent and one he’d only experienced once before. It was a demonstration of solidarity, one he hoped would reach down into her as it had when it’d been performed upon him.
“I am glad to have met you, Erinys,” he whispered, his lips still only a breath away from the soft of her skin.
04-23-2018, 05:08 PM (This post was last modified: 04-30-2018, 04:40 PM by Erinys.)
I'm lying in the ocean, singing your song your face is like a melody, it won't leave my head.
It was strange the way these feelings had been formed and so suddenly consuming her every being. Hephaestus was a stranger to her, a complete nobody just only moments ago to her. She knew nothing of his existence, and here she is now begging for him to stay. She is pleading with every ounce of her strength and pouring all her hope into him to not go.
Her pleading, her pleases are ignored though.
“I’m afraid I do not make for good company,” is all he says, but she doesn’t believe it. Erinys found something more than the feelings of isolation and loneliness. She felt a sense of warmth and craved knowing more about him in the moment their worlds collided together. There has never been a moment in her life where she has wanted something so badly.
Why did she want him so much though?
She doesn’t know. Maybe she will never know. The only thing she knows is that he cannot let her go. She won’t let him slip away into the darkness he had come from.
Erinys would not have to say goodbye to him so easily.
However, something changed in the black giant that stood what felt like a mile away from her.
He began to close in the distance between them. Every step he took mindlessly made her heart quicken even more. She even finds herself mindlessly moving towards them, their two worlds coming together and becoming one.
Erinys can feel herself shaking, not in a scared and fearful way. It is a feeling she isn’t quite sure how to describe, but she more than ever craves the physical touch of him on her. Perhaps it was all these lonely years that made her want him so close.
She watches with amber eyes as he hesitates to move any closer to her. The black mare offers him a soft smile, indicting she is not scared of him. She has never been scared of him since they first saw each other. if anything she found herself in awe of the way the world had shaped and formed him.
He reaches out her, Erinys can feel herself shaking still. It is once his lips touches her own that her body comes to a standstill. She feels an overwhelming feeling of serenity within her, as if the world held nothing but beauty and goodness.
Erinys realizes now it wasn’t the feelings of lust, but something companionship she so desperately had needed all these years. And here for the first time she was finally feeling what it meant to be close to another, to feel the world without them might be terrible and maybe even unbearable.
The mare smiles at his words, feeling his hot breath so close to her own lips. “I’m glad you didn’t go,” she whispers softly. In truth, she would have found herself in a terrible predicament if he had. “I am glad we have met too,” she says honestly back in agreement with him.
And in that moment she realizes, she doesn’t even know his name yet. He was simply a stranger to her still, but truly she felt something more than needing to know his name. It didn’t matter if she didn’t have his name ever, she would always know it was him (in some way or form she would).
“Do I get to know your name now?” She says with a soft smile, her voice still low and quiet.
It was an odd feeling, to be wanted. It pulsated around him in the many different colors of his varying emotions. Erinys saw herself as he envisioned himself – a creature unworthy of time or affection. Outcasted. It pained him to think that she, whose differences were not nearly as harsh as his, knew the same pain of solitude as he did.
Inexplicably, the air around them grew suddenly colder – a reminder that dusk would soon be upon them. He’d lost track of the time they’d spent in silence, staring and considering the other. In the shocking moment of their first meeting, neither had hastened to break the charged silence. Now, however, the words flowed freely from the darkened mare’s lips – a skill that he, himself, had not yet mastered.
She was glad that he had stayed rather than act upon his instinctive need to flee. The urge was one that still clung to his nerves, shooting through him in amplified waves of anxiety. The intensity of her gaze as she watched him was almost unnerving in its unfamiliarity. Why would she want him to stay? What did he have to offer her? She deserved better than the cruel reality that was his face – she deserved happiness and someone to love her in the ways that he was so incapable of. Love was hard to master when it’d never been demonstrated. The examples offered to him had been one wreathed in hatred and the desire to see him lying lifelessly buried in the tall grass of his home.
Deep down, he hoped to one day return to them – stronger than when he’d left. He was not a fool to know that their relief to find him gone would have been potent. That morning, as he stood upon the shores of Beqanna, he imagined that he could hear his families collective exhale.
With their moment of intimacy behind them, Erinys inquired upon his name. An identity to place upon his shadow of existence. “Hephaestus,” he muttered under half-held breath. “My name is Hephaestus.”
