"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
He comes in the night like a ghost, spiriting her away. She should scream. She should fight and plead and beg to be left on the black beach of the Cove. Instead, she comes quietly, willingly, her tongue stilled by…well, she’s not sure what. Certainly some small bit of fear, but it’s not the overwhelming feeling. If it were, the black shadows would creep out from her, would surround her, and in truth she suspects she could slip away in the cover of those shadows she doesn’t understand. Curiosity stills her tongue, wondering why he takes her, wondering who this stallion is and why he’s gone to such lengths to snatch her away. Who is she but a worthless little orphan?
Ori doesn’t understand that her parentage still matters, that her parents descension is recent enough history to still make them important and by proxy, to make her important. Important seems to strong a word, she was important only in the grand scheme of politics. No one in the Cove made her feel important or even wanted though. Certainly Dawn had cared enough to make sure she didn’t die, but Dawn was busy with her twins and the twins, though they accepted her, were busy being twins and Ori couldn’t exactly relate to that. Hell, Ori didn’t even know her own siblings, having been left to rot by everyone that should have cared for her.
Maybe that is the true reason she does not protest as they slip through the night and unfamiliar territory. Though she’s old enough now to have reasonable mastery of her legs, she grows tired, stumbling on rocks and roots more than once, scrambling to get back up lest this stallion drag her to her feet. The shadows don’t come, and for once, her mother’s don’t join her either. She’s grown used to their presence, has finally begun to understand that they are figments of her imagination brought to life and not their dream selves, but she still doesn’t understand how. In her limited world, illusionism is a concept far too big. It’s bigger than the powers her mother’s wielded and so, she cannot imagine it is something she can wield.
They are long out of the Cove before she speaks, suspecting that to make a noise too close to home was to invite punishment and pain upon herself. “Why?” she finally asks, voice quiet but not afraid, simply respectful of the hushed stillness of the night around them. It’s an innocent enough question, but so unlikely for a girl who hasn’t even yet seen a year. She should be crying, should be cowering, should be trying to run back home to only safety she knows. Instead, she comes almost willingly, seeking. Seeking what, she does not yet know, but perhaps he would show her just what she didn’t yet know.
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
It was easy – perhaps too easy – to slip her away under the veil of nightfall. An obedient child, she is, even in the grasp of a stranger. Castile spares a glance over his shoulder periodically, ensuring that she still follows. In the night’s quiet, every footstep seemingly echoes. The crack of a twig is like glass shattering, but it worries him not. No one will – or can – stop him.
The muted conversation breaks once they’ve abandoned the Cove’s border. Oriash, he remembers, asks the simplest of questions, and yet the answers that spring to Castile’s mind are nothing less than complex. She wouldn’t understand the history tangled among her family and him. She wouldn’t understand if he confessed the mistake that, in turn, made her a daughter of Kagerus instead of his.
Without answering, Castile continues forging their path until Loess finally swallows them by dawn’s first light. The cacti and rocky plateaus are painted with scarlet and orange, the clouds a vibrant splash of pink high overhead. ”You’re home for the next while,” he brusquely says, practically clasping shut the shackles around her ankles. Unable to shake away her prior question – he has actually been contemplating it since the single word fell from her tongue – he turns to look at her with the sun framing her small body. It illuminates his face, glimmering across the gold band of his face and his bronze locks.
Even as his mouth opens to speak, he cannot help to hesitate. What does one tell a child?
”Unrest,” he simply states as though she only just asked when it has in fact been at least a couple hours. ”It’s time to unbalance the east, perhaps even the world. Everyone is asleep.” Oddly enough, he grins, but it isn’t amiable or paternal. There is mischief in his eyes, even an underlying fascination with the child in front of him.
She wouldn’t understand because no one tells her. No one talks to her of politics, of the way the world works. They treat her like a child when they pay any attention to her at all. She is, of course, a child, but how long can she stay a child when her mothers deserted her to fend for herself after only a few months of life? Dawn kept her from starving to death, but Ori had no family and no friends, no protectors. She knew only the figments of her imagination, her mothers that existed in her mind but did not exist in reality. She knew only that the line between imagination and reality was a blurred, tricky thing that no one but her seemed to struggle with. She knew only that she held a magic she did not understand.
She did not understand because everyone assumed a child could not understand. But children’s minds are wide open, they are sponges waiting for information, they are blank canvas waiting for paint. Now is the time to shape the image, to skew the viewpoint, to change the outcome of life, and yet no one takes it.
He is silent for their entire walk, ignoring her question. The terrain becomes rocky and the smell of sea salt is long lost behind them. The plants here are strange, prickly things and she resists the urge to poke her nose into the rather fuzzy looking needles that stick off the plants at odd angles. Your home for the next while, he tells her, and she almost laughs though manages to keep herself in check. “I have no home,” she tells him, keeping to the truth. The truth is always the most painful thing. She doesn’t say it rudely, doesn’t seem at all upset to be stolen, but rather like she really is just telling him the truth.
Then he speaks again, answering the question that she asked what feels like ages ago. It was, in truth, only long enough to be mildly out of context now, though to a child time is always long. It only grows shorter with age, when time suddenly stops feeling infinite. His answer makes her want to ask why again, to know more, to understand the point of it, but she refrains, unwilling to turn herself into a pestering child. “They are sick,” she says, which seems more important to her than asleep, an idea she doesn’t quite understand yet. At the moment she is being literal, but there’s perhaps a truth in her words that is more than literal.
Solace was sick in body, yes, and many others were sick of the plague (even she is aware of a cough she’d not had before). But they were sick in mind too, and some part of her knows this, thinking of Kagerus who left a near newborn behind and chose her lover instead of her child and her kingdom.
Her mothers flicker into view then, as they often do when they come to her mind, imperfect replica’s only because her own memory of them is skewed now. She imagines them as a child does, as more than they really are and, for her, less than they really are as well. She sees them, and she knows they are not real, but she turns to the stallion looking at his face to see if he sees them as well. This is the piece she doesn’t know, the piece she doesn’t understand. What was her power? Was it internal, something more akin to madness than magic? Or was it external, something that would give her the power to shape the world to her own liking?
and underneath the layers, I find myself asking what's left a hollowed out form, the skeleton of a ghost, the pitiful echo of what once was
And why would they tell a child?
When Castile looks down at his children, he wants only to preserve their innocence and shield them from the darkness that looms most often with the breach of adulthood. Everything becomes complicated, intricate, and occasionally lethal. He doesn’t want to see his prodigy – although certainly strong – to have their childhood ripped out from underneath them. Perhaps, as good of parenting as he considers this, there is another argument that supports letting the children face the looming obstacles sooner. There are benefits of both, he supposes.
As he glances to Oriash, he cannot help to assume that she is similar to his own brood – more or less ignorant to many of the world’s happenings.
But she holds her own and defies him with an honest, flat tone. A tendril of black smoke coils reactively from his nostrils, but he holds his tongue long enough to consider her statement. It wasn’t malicious, he reminds himself as to tamper himself. A sigh rolls through him as he slowly nods in agreement. ”I can relate,” he confesses whilst reminiscing of his childhood, roaming from one place to another in search of a place that could provide for him, and he for it. Year passed until Loess settled in his bones and offered him another opportunity he couldn’t turn down. Time and time again, it has handed him more than he deserved. This chance, however, and this crown, are with troublesome expectations that he one day must address.
Loess has always been different. It needs to be fed adventure and unrest.
A half laugh escapes Castile unexpectedly when he regards her statement, still so blunt and truthful. ”Aren’t we all a little sick?” Not by only the plague, but by so much more.
Blinking, he draws his mismatched eyes away from her, prepared to drink in more of Loess’ scenery, but it’s interrupted by Kagerus and Solace. Their slender bodies are in view, seemingly solid and entirely present. Although never having truly seen Kagerus, he knows Solace all too well. His motion is frozen, paused by his surprise to them standing in his path, silently staring through them. There are minute differences that unsettle him, that fester curiosity inside his thoughts. A step inches him forward, followed by another until he halts again and glances back over his shoulder. The former Caretakers remain quiet, unreactive. ”Is this your doing?” To test the theory and solidity of the illusion, a plume of fire is expelled from his lungs that passes through the image of Kagerus – only Kagerus. ”They look almost real,” he finally mutters when the flames extinguish and the last of the smoke dissipates into the cool air. Turning, he faces her with a newfound fascination.
Perhaps in another lifetime, one where her mother doesn’t get sick and her other mother doesn’t choose her mate over her children, Ori’s innocence could have been preserved. Certainly she was far from wise, but she wasn’t sure she was innocent either. The core of her was made of shadows and uncertainty now and a power she had only just begun to grasp. In another life, perhaps, she was made of light and butterflies and her parents would have guided her power, shaping it to her instead of letting her power mold her. This is not that alternate reality though, and she knew no light and little kindness. Neither did she know pain or anger, rather she simply knew indifference. At best and worst, Oriash was a pawn in a game much larger than her and little more.
She was a powerful pawn though, one that someday, could be a force to be reckoned with. Could be, that is, if her power didn’t consume her first. She’d only begun to understand that she could control it and still, more often than not she found it still controlled her. The lines between reality and illusion were always a little unclear to her and she found herself straddling them regularly, pulling herself back into the real world without every realizing she’d stepped out of it.
His first sentence surprises her though. He can relate? He rules a kingdom, and some part of her had always assumed he’d just spent most of his life here. How else do you get to rule? It is in things like these she truly is naïve, innocent, because thrones still baffle her. She knew only that her mothers had held the throne and had given it up because Solace was sick…because Ori made her sick. “How did you end up here?” she asks, curious. Because if he can relate, maybe there’s a place for her out there yet. After all, she’d hardly lived at all, hardly knew what was waiting for her outside the Cove.
He laughs at her next comment, and she blinks, thinking through what she had said and his reply. It clicks in there, and she can only nod. Certainly she was sick, and she’d barely had any symptoms from the plague. Ori was sick in that twisted way of blurred lines that she lived between, and she knew it, but she wasn’t entirely sure she cared. Somedays all she did was wonder what she could do, given the time to practice, to master it. What worlds could she create? Certainly, she could create more than just an image of her mothers. Though they came without her asking more often than not, and together they lived the childhood she would have wanted. It was lovely, for short moments, but in some ways it hurt more than simply being able to let them go.
Now though, she conjures them on purpose, knowing she can bring them to life even if she hasn’t quite figured out what else she can do. He blinks, and she realizes he can see them. A grin spreads along her features just a little bit, pleased to have someone confirm that the illusions are not just in her own head. “Yes. I mean, I think so, at least.” Though she’s pretty sure now, watching as he tests the illusion with fire. She wonders if she could trick that too, make it seem like they burn instead of having the fire just pass right through them. She wonders, in that moment, how real she can make it all.
For now though, she turns back to him. “I’m not sure what else I can do. I’ve only ever tried things I know and have seen. Can you describe something you want to see?”
