[private] i feel a bad moon rising

[Lepis]

First she rolls her shoulders, then shakes the tension from her blue and gold wings. The motion is not enough, but the relaxation is, and afterward the dun mare releases a long sigh that ends with a something that's almost a smile. 

In the woods ahead of her, she can hear the bright peals of laughter - Elio and Celina playing chase - and behind her the waves crash against the shoreline. There has been no movement from Nerine, no cries of war echoing from the south, and the golden Comtesse reassures herself (not for the first time) that she and her family are secure. 

The sun has just begun to set over the distant Tephran volcano, and Lepis watches the sky streak gold and red for some time before starting into the woods. After two years in the redwood forest, the mare knows this path well. It will take her to the heart of the woods if she follows it through, and eventually down into the foothills of Loess. A warm summer wind catches at her long mane, tugging it away from the scars she hides beneath it, but she is alone and makes no effort to hide it.

Her eyes - blue grey and curious - sweep through the evening shadows of the trees around her, as much in search for company as to keep an eye out for danger. There is little danger here, after all; Taiga is well-protected.

[Wolfbane]

Something of a year had passed, or what Beqanna would consider nearly a year. Six months or more gone by that Wolfbane can’t exactly account for. He remembers why he left: Eyas went out for a trip North and hadn’t come back after winter. Wolfbane went out to find her, but ended up finding out more about himself and next to nothing about Eyas or her current whereabouts. The harsh season faded, Wolfbane tracked his daughter who was more adept at keeping herself hidden than he’d anticipated, and in the meantime he’d been shifting more and more.

In the process he let Eyas and her disappearance fade away. Lilliana and Lepis, along with his children, faded into a gray sense of memory that felt distant when he was a wolf on the hunt, or a bird traveling north on breezy currents.

And then one morning he opened his eyes to see a pair of horses grazing, talking over their meal about Taiga and he remembered Lepis. The past came back to Bane in a jolt of electricity that sent him - disguised in the body of a wily red squirrel - darting out from the underbrush in a panic towards the redwoods and the family he’d left behind.

Lepis will kill me, he contemplated; the first logical thought he’d had in weeks. His tiny paws spread out and his nails clung to the bark of trees, helping him to scramble through a weave of branches. How could I forget so easily? Bane shamed himself, leaping from one treetop to the next with a robust flick of his twitching, red tail.

He was insanely paranoid about what might’ve gone wrong in his absence. As he worried, passing the river into the misty embrace of Taiga’s shadows, he let thoughts of Eyas, Pteron, his little one Celina and the children who’d slipped away - Marni and Tiercel - he let their faces guide him back to a sense of normalcy, and his body followed suit. The slender animal and busy tail morphed, filling out and changing color while a small pair of wings grew from his shoulders. Wolfbane tossed his head, supported on a thick neck, and breathed deeply through his widened nostrils.

From red squirrel up to a striped, pegasus stallion; the whole exchange was easy and rather quick. A few more months to a year and he’d be able to flick in and out of skins like blinking.

The smile of accomplishment on his lips faded as soon as the familiar scents of his wife and children hit him in the face. “Business before pleasure.” He muttered under his breath, heading off to find her.

@[Lepis] a little time jump for ya

[Lepis]

The forest is still. Even the fog around her has settled, the ripples of her movement long disappeared into the trees along with the echoes of her children’s laughter. The thick mist reaches nearly to the mare’s striped knees, and for a moment she is reminded of standing in the warm springs of her homeland. The image is shimmers away as the fog is disturbed by someone’s arrival, and Lepis shakes the ombré strands of her mane mostly away from her blue-grey eyes to see who it is.

For some time, she does not visibly react. Lepis remains motionless, a statue of pale gold, dark sapphire, and white marble. Then she frowns, her cobwebbed forehead wrinkling and her navy mouth drawing into a thin line.

”I thought you were dead.” She says in a voice as flat as her expression.

She remembers each minute since their last meeting; there are no hazy spots in her memory, no place where Wolfbane might have been beside her that she’s just forgotten. They’d said their last goodbye on a hazy fall morning, hoarfrost turning the redwoods around them to glittering figures. He was off the the Brilliant Pampas and she was going to see about sending diplomats to the other lands. They’d spent the night in their green bower, and she’d been reluctant to wake up and face the frosty morning.

He hadn’t come back that night, but Lilliana had. They’d met with Noah, and then Wolfbane had gone his own way back. That wasn’t so unusual, not since his change, and not until he’d been gone for a fortnight did she truly grow worried. The Comtesse hid that from her children, of course, but soon found she had to hide their absence from each other - first Eyas, and then Pteron just before winter - and then the rest of the redwood dwellers as well. Secret keeping is not unfamiliar for the dun pegasus, but not from her own family.

”I don’t know if you saw the little red boy playing with Celina,” she says, still flat, still expressionless. ”But that was your son, Elio.”

@[Wolfbane]

[Wolfbane]

A grim look and strong impression is what he’s given by way of welcome. No curiously warm smile or characteristic teasing this time from his wife; the well of patience had apparently run dry in his absence. He’s foolish and fool hearted to expect otherwise and yet a stinging nettle of annoyance flares up in his gut at her sharp tone. By all means Wolfbane should be humble - he was at fault - and yet he can’t help the indignant sneer that twists his lips into a sullen, sour frown when he questions, “My son? Are you sure?” Then, “He looks small, too young for the season.”

One whole breath of a sentence in and Bane seemed to be making a complete asshat of himself effortlessly. He knew the accusation was entirely fabricated but he felt like pushing the issue anyways. Anything to further the discussion from his own guilt and failure as a spouse.

“I’ve been out looking for our daughter Eyas - remember her? What’ve you been up to in the meantime, hmm?” He demanded to know, struggling to maintain a sense of composure against his rising irritation. The edge in his voice changed his face to sharp, visceral edges and dark shadows. His mask tinted itself and faded to near black, a visual representation of the anger boiling up to the surface.

Stop, he warned himself. Or rather, the parts of him that recognized Lepis as their partner (not their enemy) warned. Bane grit his teeth and tried - tried - to stifle a few more sharp remarks before they escaped past his lips with an audible hiss.

@[Lepis]

[elio]

Elio’s birth had been peaceful. Just a glimmer of golden sun and the soft welcoming of vibrant sprouts and fallen leaves. He remembers the scent of pine needles as it sat upon the edges of his nostrils, and he remembers the warm side of his mother. Lepis. Yes, he remembers her, the harsh face that only looked upon him with love . . . he remembers.

All Elio has ever known is his mother and his many siblings. There was no father, but he did not feel particular strife over it, considering his family filled him with enough love to wash the entirety of Taiga in a healthy, golden glow. He remembers each of their faces, though the existence of his vision-taking sister eludes him. Still, he knows in his childish innocence that he will appreciate and love her, one day—or she’ll live forever unknown, a missing point of stability for Elio to settle in.

Celina keeps him busy with her roughhousing, and he loves it (he probably loves this sister the best, though he will never admit such a thing to himself). It is only when he hears the faint murmur of his mother and the baritone of a stranger that he pulls away from his laughing sister to stare intently in the direction of the noisy undulations. He begins a clumsy canter toward Lepis, forgetting the play of his sister almost entirely in the haze this first feeling of dread leaves over his eyes.

They face off, the two of them, and Elio is just perceptive enough to notice a certain tension. He pauses, hovering behind a tree, but his gangly months old legs betray him: he stumbles from behind the trunk to find a man with the exact markings as he.

“Uh, sorry, Mom,” he sputters, wide and stone-colored eyes settling on near-bristling man before her. He goes to stand next to her, wary of Wolfbane and protective of Lepis.

---

@[Wolfbane] @[Lepis]

[Lepis]

It is a curious sensation - her thoughts without projected emotion to color them. It is not one she has felt in a while, not with the constant internal pressure to smile, to laugh, to stay positive. The emotions of the well-remembered past few months are a brassy yellow, but Lepis has never claimed to be perfect in her magic. She had been aiming for gold, after all, the bright and burning gold she’d taken for granted until he left.

The gold had been real. Lepis had never needed to fake happiness with Wolfbane. But she’s been doing it for nearly a year now, and the unexpected sight of him after all this time has stilled more than her physical movement. She projects nothing, but the emptiness, the colorlessness, of her mind slips further toward bitter sapphire with every sour word her husband spits at her. Her blue-grey eyes are shadowed by the bangs of her navy white mane, and they flash dangerously as she takes a step forward. The sinuous line of her feathered wings have unconsciously flared partially away from her shoulders, as though she might intimidate him with their size. When she realizes what she’s done, she pulls them in with a deepening of her own scowl, but she keeps stepping forward until she is face to face with the taller stallion, until she can stare up at his unfamiliar black face and feel the angry hiss of unspoken words hot against her own cheek.

”You.” she hisses back, the flatness entirely gone from her voice to be replaced by glittering lapis sharpness. ”You do not get to come into my home after nine months with no word and act like I’m the one to blame. You. Do. Not.”

There are other things to say, accusations she might be justified to make after what he insinuates (as if the red-gold boy lurking behind the redwood could belong to anyone else!), hurtful words that might cause him to experience the same ache she feels. She could even force him to feel it, to live through that, through her sadness, her despair and abandonment and finally that deep stabbing wound when she’d finally admitted to herself that maybe he was never coming back. That she could do so easily, with less effort than unfurling her wings. She could.

She doesn’t.

Lepis has a great many less-than-angelic attributes, but she is not cruel. She cannot hurt Wolfbane, not with intent. And she cannot believe the man she loves is any different, even with his bitter words and the fury in his voice as he looms ahead of her. But the Wolfbane she knows would never say those things, and though she will not show doubt in front of the son that has just appeared beside her, Lepis feels a cold finger of doubt along her spine. The Wolfbane she knows, though, had long ago begun to change in a myriad of little ways, since the day he faced down Wyrm.

”This is Wolfbane,” she says to Elio, glancing down at his brightly colored face and the now-concerned mask that is a golden replica of his sire’s. ”Your father.” Is added almost as an afterthought, but it is not said for Elio. Her son knows the name, she has told him all the stories. It is meant instead for Wolfbane himself, as is the challenge in her glittering eyes while she waits for a response.

@[Wolfbane]
@[Elio]

[Wolfbane]

Wolfbane couldn’t help but stare at her quietly, angrily, growing more and more still when first her eyes and then Lepis’s entire demeanor turned threateningly against him. The faint gust coming off her wings when she moved them felt as real as contact to the whiskers covering Bane’s plush black nose. Like she’d already touched him, and the closer she came the closer he could feel a memory coming back to the forefront of his thoughts. He stared down at Lepis, breathing slower and focusing on the cobweb of white that touched her eyelids.

They’d fought before, but never like this.

He thinks it’s funny she calls Taiga “her” home. Then he wonders to himself, looking down with a face filled with svelte ink, if this was how she told Heartfire that Taiga was theirs. Or… hers, as it was to be called now. He blinked and considered that they hadn’t talked about that visit north yet - the one she’d meant to take when he and Lilliana went South. Perhaps we should be having that conversation,  he thinks, instead of this one.

Wolfbane registered that Lepis - his wife - was upset. He did. He stared down at her and followed the all-too-familiar edges of the white markings around her eyelids, ones that looked like gossamer cobwebs, and he neither frowned nor smiled but decided in the moment to agree with her new orders. He would stay silent and still, because she demanded it and because he could sense the boy - the one he hadn’t actually seen (when had he started to lie?)

And at the present, he was quietly much more interested in what Lepis - the Comtesse - had actually been up to in his absence.

For now the edge faded away. Wolfbane turned a curious eye and a slow smile on the boy at first, murmuring “Hello Elio.” His smile grew. The dark tint of his face mask began to fade away too. “It’s very nice to finally meet you.” The colt’s father said with a voice like the midsummer fog around them. Faint and wispy, but felt through and through.

“I like your stripes.” Bane glimmered, his mouth splitting open to reveal an average-but-loveable smile. He did like them, adored them really, and his gaze lifted to meet with Lepis’ again. He looked humbled, reaching out with gentle certainty towards those lovely cobwebs that had always been a place of comfort for him, and intended to place a gentle kiss.

But when he leaned in close enough that his lips were shaded by the thick, multicolored curtain of Lepis’s forelock, Wolfbane whispered into the crook of her waiting ear. 
“There is no you without me.” He lipped, frigid and not at all like the husband who’d left her behind in the glow of a happy, autumnal sunset just months ago. “And soon enough you will be alone with me, and then we will talk - about many, many different things.”

And he kissed her then, soft enough that she would know he meant every word with a deadly sort of certainty.

“I can see you’ve been taking good care of mother, Elio boy.” Wolfbane chuckled as he pulled his head away, eyeing the cautious bravery in his youngest. “She looks beautiful; isn’t your mother the most beautiful?” Bane wanted to know.

But of course she was. And his loving gaze seemed to say this without words when he glanced again to Lepis. “Celina?” He asked the drafty mare, a sort of hunger beginning to grow in his voice. “Pteron? Marni?” He asked her again and again, greedy for her response.

Here was one, and one was yet unaccounted for, but where were all the rest?

@[elio]
@[Lepis] if you want anything changed, let me know!

[elio]

Lepis is the caretaker Elio has known, not this mildly stranger facing her off. The colt is wary, and he is certainly right to be, but he wants to accept Wolfbane. He wants to accept him so badly that it clenches his chest and darkens his eyes—he feels a shift in his child’s heart, the first of many that will mold him into the man he is to become.

Father.

Elio peers up at Bane with wonder in his eyes. While he thought that this might be his dad, he could not be certain in the face of the tension between the pair. Lepis says his name, and he can feel all the mythical awe that surrounded this man dissipate. It sucks the air right out of his lungs, the way his father is suddenly just a man. The wonder of before fades into the churning gray of uncertainty: Elio’s eyes now twist like the clouds before a thunderstorm.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, almost half-heartedly. His chest swells with pride at his father’s compliment, but the sensation hardly turns his face into something softer. He only stares with some strange intensity before sidestepping away from his mother and peering at her curiously. 

Elio is unaware that his confliction is apparent to his parents in waves—having not felt emotion as strong as this, he has no idea that he projects just as his mom does. He cocks his head to the side and senses his magic as it vibrates in his chest. He thinks it some indigestion, or perhaps a side effect of his anxiety, and brushes it off with another glance at Wolfbane when he draws closer to Lepis. The colt’s stomach churns painfully, but he says nothing.

That same pride ripples through Elio when Bane’s attention returns to him. He almost beams, mouth curling into the smallest of smiles. He feels like he should not take kindly to his father’s sudden arrival, but that call of his blood is hard to resist.

“Yes, she is like the sun,” he concedes, dropping his eyes to the fog and dirt as he kicks at the ground. “I was just with Celina,” Elio interjects when Wolfbane continues, feeling oddly protective. “She’s fine.”

---

@[Wolfbane] @[Lepis] i am imagining he is projecting his emotions all over the place like a lil dumb baby

[Lepis]

He acquiesces without complaint, and Lepis is startled just enough that she does not think to question the sudden appearance of warmth in his gaze or the familiar warmth of his smile. She's leaning toward him with something like a sigh of relief in her voice when he speaks, and she is struck for a second time in as many minutes by the abrupt change in the man she thought she knew.

The golden happiness that had been kindling dies away in a cold white fear that leaves her still and conflicted. She has little time to react before her mind is filled with foreign emotions. It only takes a moment to overpower the flurry in her mind with a solid wall of a single feeling .

Elio's gift is a familial one, and his spontaneous emotion sharing is something Lepis has handled a thousand times before. Softly, she presses calm toward him for the space of a heartbeat. She presses it just long enough to give him a chance to get a hold of his emotions, and firm enough for him to feel the difference between the emotions he keeps to himself and those that are released into the air around him. There's something harder to the edge of a projected feeling, something that prevents it from sliding seamlessly into another's mind the way a gift like telepathy might. Over a decade of practice has honed the dun mare's magic though, and she reminds herself to exaggerate the edge of calm so he might better sense the difference.

The method is the one her mother had used with her, and that Lepis has in turn used with her own children, Elio's older brothers Pteron and Tiercel. It is her boys that inherited her gift, she thinks distractedly for a moment, and not the girls. She withdraws it, and is then left with just the echoes of the red boy's emotions for the instant before her own start to trickle back.

Wonder and uncertainty, pride and protection. She smiles reassuringly, stretches out to reach him and plant a kiss on his soft forehead. She is reluctant to let him go, but Wolfbane fires off the name of her children. Their children, she mentally concedes, though they've been just hers for the better part of a year.

"Pteron is with Reia."  Lepis names the piebald filly from Loess - the eldest daughter of Castile, a girl Pteron considers near-family. "Marni is probably in one of the meadows."  Elio has explained Celina's absence, and neither of them name their missing boys. Until Wolfbane had hurled Eyas' name like  a dagger, Lepis had assumed their middle child was with her father. Days-long trips away had not been uncommon for Bane and the children, and at first Lepis had let herself believe it was something like that. But then they didn't come back after a week, or a month. And then she had the other children and a heavy pregnancy and a territory to run and the weight of a thousand dreams for the future precariously balanced on her shoulders.

She cannot bring herself to admit aloud in front her her son that she has failed, and so Lepis does not tell her husband either. Soon, she thinks to herself, when they are alone. And remembers the earlier threat with an uncomfortable chill down her spine  as she meets his gaze. He looks like himself again, but the ease with which he has shifted  between the two extremes leaves her on edge. She has stood here before, on this precipice of uncertainty in front of a man, but it had not been Wolfbane and she had not thought to ever find herself here again.

She frowns, but asks "Where have you been?" Without any hint that she feels anything but perfectly delighted at the arrival of her husband and the reunion of her family. "The children would love to hear new stories of your adventures. They claim I tell the same ones, over and over."

@[Wolfbane]
@[Elio]
i present to you a novel

[Wolfbane]

Once upon a time he loved the way Lepis could make him feel emotion like he’d never been alive before having met her. He loved that her gift passed on into their children who, despite their outward expressiveness, could give him further insight to their feelings and needs. It’d made him a better father in the past, but after Gale’s death that receptiveness had changed. The openness to feel and be felt was left buried in Loess soil with his youngest triplet, and he’d closed the door to true fatherhood after snapping first at Lepis, then Eyas when both had tried to comfort him with false emotions.

But Elio was young, and the current of energy radiating from his center in invisible waves is baby-magic: Wolfbane is patient enough to reel back from threatening Lepis while maintaining his composure in the face of Elio’s unruly powers. He can still appreciate the strength of his son’s gift above his own irritation at it, but nonetheless felt himself sighing with relief when Lepis intervened. At least his nest-mate was adept at child rearing, if nothing else these days, Bane thought dryly.

“That’s my boy, taking care of mother and Celina while I’m away.” He gushed, wings ruffling over his back with pleasure. “The others are big and strong anyways - they’ll be O. K.” He seemed to be convincing Elio, and smiling calmly for Lepis.

“I went to the frozen lands, of course.” Her husband elaborated about his trip to Icicle Isle, but his gaze fell away from hers so they could pretend not to see into each other’s thoughts, and his voice changed to pure silver, “A place so cold it could freeze your blood and turn your snot into icicles!” The story-teller regaled to Elio, painting an image of barren tundras over the boy’s thoughts.

“Your big sister Eyas went there and I just don’t know why.” The stallion shook his head, waving his bristly mane back-and-forth each time the thick coils of muscle along his neck twisted. “I tracked her as far North as I could, and then the trail went cold - literally.” Wolfbane sighed again, much louder this time. The last part had been strictly for Lepis; a tired, sincere look of concern passed like a shadow across his face. “But we shouldn’t worry, Eyas is strong and brave. She’ll come home soon… your old dad can feel it, Elio.”

Sinuous and regal, Bane eased sideways a step or two until he and the red-gold colt stood somewhat face-to-face. “The real question is why I’ve been standing here this whole time and haven’t gotten a single hug from you?!” The Commandant wanted to know, a twisted look of rejection and sorrow contorting his otherwise mischievously handsome mask. “Didn’t you miss me at all?”

@[elio]
@[Lepis]