"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
THEN I'LL GO OUT BACK AND I'LL GET MY GUN
I'LL SAY "YOU HAVEN'T MET ME, I AM THE ONLY SON."
He slowly blinks sleep-entrusted eyes open and he releases a hard groan while rolling upright and pulling his limbs beneath him. Munroe vigorously shakes his head and surveys his immediate surroundings blearily. He’s lying beneath what few trees could be found growing around the small oasis. This is familiar; this is home. He last remembers trailing far behind Ima and her new winged child and then a sudden blackness.
He strains to remember what happened in the events between him blacking out and then waking up here. But he does not recall much of anything. Just flashes of extreme agony and hopelessness and eventually abandonment. But these feelings had gradually given way to a shining new hope. Munroe wonders if perhaps he had only experienced a nightmare after unintentionally falling asleep.
He didn’t know how else he could explain such an occurrence.
Briefly struggling with stiff limbs (though not as stiff and unbendable as they once had been), he finally gains his feet and makes his way slowly to the small body of water. He feels bone tired, both mentally and physically, even after what had to have been a long rest. Lowering his head, he thirstily takes in large gulps of water. He opens his eyes and remains looking at his reflection in stark horror. How could this have come to be?
What was usually a sandy cream coat color had given way to a delicate seafoam green. His hazel eyes were now framed by an azure blue-streaked black forelock. Munroe remained in wide-eyed abject confusion; baffled by his extreme appearance change.
She has no reference for pain. She barely even has a reference for annoyance or discomfort. You might think this is a good thing for her, but it's backfired and grown sour. Far from being happy and cheerful as such a life should make her, Ketterley tends to inflate every slight, and overvalue every minor inconvenience.
She could not have survived what Munroe has been through. Or if she had, she'd have been shattered by it.
But she has time to learn. She is still so young. She is a pretty young thing, all buckskin like her mother, a sweet sunrise of color. She is a small thing, recently born, but she moves across the sands with an undeniable grace. Her expression is sweet, her face kind, but her heart already hardened. Her precious face has a thin blaze down the middle, and her left hindleg a sock.
She is wandering alone when she sees the boy. She is not often very bold, and stays close to her mother, but today she's feeling a little more adventurous. She spies him as he approaches the oasis pool and bends to drink, and she watches him as he watches his reflection in the ripples. Being from Beqanna, Ketterley is no stranger to horses with strange colors. It is as natural to her to see the unnatural as anything can possibly be. But it seems strange to this horse, and his coloring seems so garish, that Ketterley just can’t help going over to investigate.
She approaches easily, not bothering to announce herself. He would either hear her as her hooves delicately crunched the oasis grass, or he wouldn't, and he'd be startled to hear her voice next to him. To say that she doesn't care which it is would be an understatement.
She walks up beside him, peering at him in the water. "You look as though you've seen a ghost." she says, but there is no genuine caring in her voice – her tone is more a mother criticizing a daughter who dares frown in the presence of a prince they're trying to impress. It's a pretty voice, sweet and lovely, but there's no true heart behind the words. "That's not a very good look for you." she warns with mock sincerity, as earnest as Regina George – which is to say, very earnest, and also very unmoved by the possibility that her opinion might be unwelcome or unwanted.
The normally alert wild child had fallen into a strange state of suspension. He didn’t know how to deal with this situation whatsoever. He didn’t have a speck of magic within him to have caused such a drastic change. Unlike Ima. But she was wondrous and warm and home. No way she would have played such a trick on him or left him completely alone like this. She knew how he would react to such extremities – not very well at all, in fact.
His time lost in the desert had only served to set back his domestication.
And he does not react well to surprise appearances or close quarters of strangers. His brief unawareness is broken by another’s face appearing right next to his within the pool’s rippling reflection accompanied with a sweet voice. But this is not Ima’s soothing words. It’s one without warmth; a voice that appears friendly but underneath lies a distinct apathy or uncaring quality to it.
He is swift in putting distance between them and he regards her with a great suspicion. He does not scent Ima on her skin and so he doesn’t consider this stranger as his to help protect. Even though she appeared to be quite young, he would turn on her in a heartbeat if he sensed any true malice. Munroe didn’t really care for the presence of others unless they were Ima’s. Even then, he barely tolerated anybody else’s touch. Ima was the only one to tame the wild child and he remained fiercely loyal to whom he considered a mother.
He doesn’t fully understand her first statement as he’s never encountered any mention of imaginary things that go bump in the night. He’s never considered that there might be a spirit world in which unknown things dwelled. He’s certainly familiar with magical things, especially since he lived in a magical kingdom. But he took it at face value and never really questioned its presence.
After her second statement, his thoughts are drawn back to the reason he had become panicky in the first place. Glancing down at himself and towards his back, he observes that the green color completely covered his body and was marred only by strange azure blue swirls that ran across his hindquarters. He didn’t understand it one bit. Hazel eyes focus back onto the stranger with a bewildered expression.
He never truly learned the fine art of conversation. The wild child had been found and partly raised by a mute mare during his first few months of life. And Ima let him learn at his own pace. His conservational skills consisted of small sentences and few details. But at least he was able to mostly communicate what he wanted to convey.
Yael is feeling very protective today. Protective and… short. Short fused. And also slightly irresponsible (how the hell does that boy keep getting lost?), which in turn makes her feel temperamental again. Yael is not irresponsible. Yael does not lose people. And yet, somehow, it keeps happening, which is both baffling and infuriating.
To be short, today is not one of Yael’s best days.
She finally locates the twice-lost wild child and sighs. While she cannot come running to attend to his every need (he is physically grown, after all, though that does not mean his mental state is as such), she can watch from afar. That’s one of the beautiful things about magic - she can watch over her children without ever being there. While a tiny part of her worries what Pevensie might think, she trusts that either a - the child won’t know what’s going on, and b - a little well-intentioned discipline never hurt anyone. If one of her children were acting like a brat and torturing others, she’d hope someone nips them into shape. It takes a village, a kingdom to raise a child.
So Yael shifts into a slightly-larger than normal biting fly and zips right on over to the buckskin princess and delivers a solid bite to her left flank right after she tells Munroe that he isn’t looking very well. Let’s see how long this conditioning takes, shall we?
Yael, guardian of the desert
[let me know if this isn't ok, evie, and i'll edit]
The boy skitters away, and Ketterley watches him, more impatient than curious. He's not doing a very good job of being entertaining, and he absolutely hadn't bargained on him being boring. No horse colored like he is should ever be boring, it just isn't right.
He mumbles some words about his color, and she purses her lips and listens. He speaks haltingly, as though he isn't entirely sure how to speak at all, and Ketterley barely manages to contain her disdain. Above all, the buckskin girl thinks of herself as a lady, and tiny though she is she's quite skilled at conversation. How could this boy, a bit older than she, have managed to escape it so entirely?
She's about to say something, and it's probably about to be biting and caustic, when she feels the sharp bite of a fly on her left shoulder.
She gasps shrilly, half-rearing up in total surprise. She hasn't felt anything like this in the entirety of her young life, and she very much does not like the sensation. As it happens, she's not a fan of pain or discomfort of any kind – it's why she tends to frequent the oasis – and this is both, seeming to her on a very high order.
A tiny bit of blood stains her coat from the bite, and she purses her lips in displeasure. It's not just discomfort now, it's not just pain – it got something on her coat. Sure, it won't scar, and it won't be a problem the next time she takes a dip in the oasis, but for now, she is very unhappy with it.
Acting purely on instinct, she turns around to nip at the creature perched on her shoulder. Being entirely non-magical herself, it never occurs to Ketterley that the fly is anything but a fly. It may be huge, the timing of its bite may be far from coincidental, but in her simple world horses are horses and apart from her father's wings and her mother's sunlight magic, that's about all there is to it. Little does she know.
After trying her darndest to scratch the fly off in as dainty a fashion as possible, Ketterley remembers that there's a boy there too. And he'd been rather upset about something. "Wrong? What do you mean?" she speaks too slowly, too clearly, although she's honestly convinced that's the best way to communicate effectively with him. "It is…flashy, I'll give you that, but I think it fits you." It could be a kind thing to say, but she doesn't mean it kindly. She is lying through her teeth and she knows it - she's entirely convinced it doesn't suit him and in fact doesn't suit anyone. He's a boy, and boys aren't meant to look like he looks. They're meant to be dashing and gallant and handsome and strong, like her father. This boy is small and weak and thin. And he isn't even good with words.
The wild child doesn’t try and get himself lost. It seems that trouble has permanently attached itself to his spirit and has had a grand time of it too. First, it was that tragic mess with his first adopted mother. Secondly, he was separated from Ima with that freak sandstorm and wandered the desert alone for a couple of years. Lastly, he was plucked from the desert and dropped into utter chaos with the most evil creature to ever walk this earth (not that he was entirely clear of these details just yet).
It was enough to exasperate any mother, let alone one who had enough things on her plate to worry about.
Munroe wasn’t one to be overly bothered by pesky insects. He had quickly learned that rolling about in the dust was quite effective in lessoning the annoyance of the biting flies. He really didn’t put much care into his appearance. His mane and tail were usually ruffled and windblown and his frame still reflected the lean and harsh times he had survived on his own. He was beginning to gain back some weight but for the most part an unflattering skinniness still clung to his heavily mustang-influenced build.
He is quite startled when the fake-nice girl suddenly shrieks and half-rears. His eyes don’t see anything that would cause such a dramatic course of action and he half-heartedly glares at the girl. After a moment or two he realizes that a larger than normal horse fly has taken quite a liking to her immaculate coat and he tries to stifle a chuckle at her lack of decorum. Such a drama queen! He’s dealt with worse things than pesky flies and yet she was acting like she was on fire.
He snorts dismissively.
“Merely bug. Why carry on so?”
His previous mind-freezing panic had been broken and now he regards her with a quiet aplomb. He had never been one to shy away from confrontation. The wild child instead remained standoffish to others not of Ima’s kin. He was like a desert coyote – small and unassuming, yet vicious when threatened. But with this girl, he sensed a bone-deep unkindness. He didn’t trust her one bit at face value.
“Wrong. Incorrect. Inaccurate. Color is off.”
It rankles that this girl seems to truly believe he’s unintelligent by the way she continues to speak slowly and pretentiously at him. He doesn’t like the forced niceness that accompanied her look of distaste. But he’s never catered to the games of politics or diplomats. He remained honest and straightforward – unwilling to censor his true opinions. Munroe sends the girl a pointed look of disapproval.
“You’re a snake.”
If he was a coyote, then this girl was a hidden viper in the sand - a cobra that could mesmerize most before going in for the kill. She was something you couldn’t trust to not poison you in the end.
