"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
She knew she’d been actively avoiding this place. Home. If she could even call it that. It was her birthplace, sure, but she’d never felt home anywhere save for the skies. She let out a small huff from her perch on the lowest branch of a bare oak.
She wasn’t sure why she’d come back, but blamed it on the fact she’d spent so much time in avian form. Birds always instinctually came home. And now so had she. She had no fond memories of this place. There was no nostalgia. There had been nothing for here here. Even though she’d been born of two mares, she’d never had a mother.
Beady eyes did their best to make sense of this place which had once been familiar. These were not the lands that she remembered, but deep down she knew this to be her birthplace. She shifted her raven wings before taking another deep breath. She hadn’t returned to her equine form in years, and to say she was nervous to do so was an understatement. She shifted on the branch, visibly uncomfortable, before stepping off the edge. She closed her eyes as she fell, but the impact with the ground never came. Instead, bones shifted and splintered - growing in both size and mass. She took an unsteady step forward, again walking on four legs. It was disorienting for a moment as she became accustomed to her natural mass.
The strange feeling passed quickly, and she grew more confident with each step. In the back of her mind, she’d wondered if she’d been seen...but in the grand scheme of things she didn’t care either way.
Rae didn’t actively avoid this place, it simply wasn’t home. Home was the sky, and in this, the two mares are alike though they don’t yet know it. Even now, with her feet back on the ground of her birth place, it doesn’t feel like home. She’d been raised, briefly, in the Jungle by a mare that was more sister than mother (though Draconis had tried, and Rae will always be thankful for that). It’s not as if she can return to the Jungle, to the place her mother had loved so dearly. Not that she particularly mourns a place she hardly knew, a place where the trees obscured the sky. No, Rae would be better suited to call a mountain her home, to live touching the sky always and forever, if she were to live anywhere for long.
Instead, she’s simply been lingering in the meadow, where the sky is open and vast and beautiful above her despite the cold. Her coat is long enough to keep her warm, though she calls warmer air to her easily when she finds herself too cold out here in the open elements. The day is clear though, warm enough that all the snow has melted leaving only mud in its wake. It is the type of day where it’s very hard to miss a bird falling out of the air only to land on the ground as a horse.
Yes, she sees. Why? Probably because she pays more attention to the birds around her than the horses. Rae cannot shift, but she can commune with the animals that call the sky their home. Technically, she could control them, though she has never felt the desire nor the need to do so. No, she simply asked, and they came. In the dead of winter though, there are few birds around, and she is keenly aware of the raven that is not really a raven. She knows this before the raven shifts because she cannot feel it as she can feel the other birds around (there are a few that persist through the colder months of Beqanna). So of course she’d been curious, paying attention, when the bird became a mare.
Rae moves toward the mare now, having been a decent distance away (though close enough to have spotted a raven in the tree). As she walks, she calls to the few other birds nearby, reaching out a tendril of magic until she finds a little snow bunting eager to answer. The little bird chirps, taking to the air to wing itself between the two mares for a moment before settling on the top of Rae’s head, nestling into her mane right between her ears. She grins, not having suggested the landing spot but perfectly happy to leave her new friend right there. Perhaps it’s pleasantly warm. “Hello,” she says before coming to a stop near the other mare.
She makes no comment about the whole shifting thing. What would she say? “I saw you were a raven and that’s awesome so here I am because I like sky things too,” sounds absolutely ridiculous. The bird sitting on her head is probably enough of a conversation starter, should the other mare be interested in talking about such things. “I’m Rae,” she says, and nothing more.
