paradise is in my soul; raul

[Larva]

i will be brutal

As is the norm for his new life, sleep eludes him, and so he strolls the familiar regions as well as the foreign. The spring rain is gentle across his back tonight as mud cakes on his hooves but he doesn’t seem to mind. His pace is steady despite the way he squints in the moonless darkness. Trees have sprung up and grown strong since his absence or perhaps this is a new land entirely, forged by the rearranged continent. The drowned kingdoms are missed but he’s doing his best to adjust to all the changes.

He pauses beneath an oak that looks roughly as old as he truly is, though he doesn’t notice, and he admires the hush of night. There is no sound of life around him beyond the gentle pitter-patter of rain on new leaves. All the birds are in their nests with their hatchlings while the deer and foxes have bundled down with their young. He breathes in slowly through his nose and then exhales the breath just as carefully. There was no smell of rain when he was dead. He couldn’t even smell the gray ocean he often stood beside.

Larva smiles and the expression is genuine across his old face. Despite the spattering of scars across his head and body, he is a handsome creature with a statuesque physique. His broad shoulders have not withered in spite of time. But he was always too stubborn to let things like age or logic rule over him, wasn’t he? The thought draws a rasping laugh from him as the rain begins to drip lightly from his chin.

A twig snaps underfoot somewhere behind him and his left ear swivels to listen for further noise. Slowly, his head turns to face the stranger so that he might be able to stare with those sage green eyes. His smile fades from the edges of his lip but he does not glower or posture himself against the stranger. Instead, he remains calmed by the soothing weather as he offers a soft nod of his head.

“I’m afraid I can’t see as well as I used to. Come a little closer so I don’t have to strain my eyes,” he says, and years ago that might have been a trap with sharp teeth and agonizing venom waiting for the stranger. Isn’t is funny, how his lies have become truths? His smile gradually begins to return to his face.

@[Raul]

[Raul]

It had been the weather that had drawn him out, or so he thought. The warm wetness of a spring shower had darkened his coat, made the blood red markings of his face and throat look far more fresh than they were. The rain made him edgy, the pressure of the shifting clouds an invisible weight on his spine. He could look toward the far off horizon where thunder rolled occasionally, and think of the last time he had seen his mother. She had been thunder and lightning and little else by then. 

With the rain came restlessness. An itching need to move that he succumbed to with little resistance. What was the point in delaying relief? Besides, it was too long since he'd ventured out from kingdom walls, a structure he had yet to acclimate to. So long he'd wandered on his own, it was some days a fight to remember that he needn't wander any longer. 

The grey drizzle persisted as he walked. When the staggered trees seemed so suddenly to converge over his head in a patchwork canopy, his body dripped with the moisture he'd collected. The rustle of leaf and needle underfoot seemed quieter beneath the patter of drops on the forest, his motions ghost-like in their passing. How often was it he felt like a ghost; silent, watchful, the impression of a horse that was and would like to be again.

That his thoughts dwelled on spirits seemed prophetic when in the next moments it was a pale figure that loomed in the dark. He was not as careful as he should have been, let a hoof come down on a brittle stick that cracked sharply in the gloom. A startled snort and a few hurried steps ensured that if the twig hadn't given him away, he was surely known now. The stranger's voice came low but clear through the spatter of droplets against the loam, and the sunset maned stallion found himself cautiously obeying their command. 

"Fine weather we're having." He rasped, in a tone flat as milk. He stood near enough now to be polite, just out of the elder's reach. There was something timeless about this fellow, in the bleached nature of his coat and the lifetime of crosshatched scars that scattered through it. Raul had long since grown into himself, a burly stallion who favored his rugged father in build. Perhaps that made it easier to recognize that this ghost he had come across was far older still.

@[Larva]

[Larva]

i will be brutal

Back when scales were a permanent part of him, he liked the rain. He thought it made it easier to shed his winter skin when he dragged himself lazily against coarse tree bark. Now that the years have reshaped his world and taken his quirks from him, he keeps a sense of affinity for the weather. Somewhere in his mind he remembers storms that crushed and pulled the kingdoms apart into something new entirely. This drizzle is hardly anything in comparison, he thinks with a smirk.

He watches the distant blur of the stranger come into focus without his sage green eyes squinting in the dark. No one familiar, as he had expected, but he offers a light nod just the same. The other is not a child in the traditional sense of the word but he is not nearly old enough to recognize the old serpent either. The world knows of Raul but he has only known this nation for a minute. Those are the best years, Larva thinks, and he finds himself envious.

“We’ll miss it when the summer scorches our backs,” he replies with a laugh. But that was always the way of things. They miss the snow when the heat is unbearable and likewise ache for it when winter bites at their ears. “My name is Larva, of.. Tephra, I think it is?”

And then he laughs once more, still fumbling with the new regions and their thrones. Raul could tell him where he calls home and the viper would only smile and nod as though he understood perfectly were that even was. But these facts are mostly trivial to him either way. They don’t hold the same histories as the Valley or the Gates, so they are surely more agreeable than those old rivalries.

“What has you wandering so late at night? Or are these your normal hours?”

He tilts his head, his eyes wandering to the markings of the stranger curiously. Everyone had been such dreary colors in his time that he finds himself fascinated with the red across Raul’s face.

@[Raul]