"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
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
He had searched all through the autumn, following unfamiliar trails while the trees of Beqanna slowly shifted to match Sylva. He had search all through the winter, when the trees of Beqanna stretch bare and black into the sky and snow fell along his striped back. He had searched, and it was in vain. No one has seen an antlered white stallion, no one has heard of an Aegean, son of Solace and Kagerus, formerly of Silver Cove, a literally glowing illusionist.
They had never spoken of many things, and these gaps now leave unanswerable questions. Who are his friends and family he might be visiting? Where did he grow up? Where did he want to live? Has he found someone else? Someone better? Is Pteron’s search in vain?
These melancholy thoughts – and ten thousand others – swirl around his mind like a thundercloud. They dim the early spring sunlight, the sweet smell of the wildflowers, the feel of the breeze along his neck. By any account, the weather is beautiful and the broad meadow he stands in breathtaking. The soft hills of the meadow roll down slowly east before dropping into the river. A distant dark line on the horizon, about an hour’s walk away, is the forest that sprouts on its opposite bank. He’d searched the forest last night. Today is the Meadow, and tomorrow the Field.
The thought of the gathering place of the homeless brings a wry smile from his thundercloud of emotion. He is looking for Aegean, but is he looking for a home as well? The word summons memories of his many homes: Brilliant Pampas, Loess, Taiga. He’s spent no small amount of time in each, and yet not truly feels right. Only one place has ever really felt like home, and there is where he stood looking into violet eyes. Sparkling eyes beneath a crown of antlers, mischievous eyes accented by the bright seastar beside them.
The pegasus shakes his head, banishing the thoughts of his former lovers, and takes a deep breath.
Fresh earth and growing things, he smells. That, and someone unfamiliar not very far away. He turns, a hank of his mane falling across his face before being shaken away as he looks curiously at the other horse.
03-23-2020, 01:12 PM (This post was last modified: 03-23-2020, 01:13 PM by Gwendy.)
“Gwendy… Gwendy, you have to wake up baby. It’s time to go my darling.”
The voice sounds so close, so real, like it’s right in her ear. But that’s impossible because Mama is dead, right?
“Mama? Where are you mama?”
Gwendy wakes from a much needed nap in the meadow with tears in her eyes. Why does it still hurt so much? She’s cried and cried until she thought she couldn’t possibly have any more tears left to cry. The longer she’s here and not there, the more she keeps discovering that her tears are endless and the wellspring of them inside her hasn’t dried up. Maybe it won’t ever.
The noises that she makes are sniffles and growls, all tangled up together as they leave her throat. Her face is tear-stained and snotty as she wipes it against her knee and the grass. When she looks down, her little hooves are gone and there are paws in their place. Gwendy chokes back another sob at the sight of them. It’s one more painful reminder of how freakish she is and how there are parts of her father in her too.
Except she never got to know much of him before the madness took over and he started looking at her like she was less of his daughter and more of a meal to go. She scrubs at her wet face with the paws and lets out an angry little yowl before rolling over in the grass onto her back. It makes an odd sight because she mostly resembles a fjord foal until the paws that she flexes against the sky, as if she can shred the clouds with her claws and the lion’s tail that curls around her, twitching on occasion.
Suddenly she’s not so alone; someone is nearby and Gwendy pokes her little nose up out of the grass to sniff out whether it’s friend or foe. Her sniff turns into a sneeze as she sucked in way too much air to process, so she flips back over onto her stomach, careful to keep low in the grass. Her tail snaps back and forth as she bravely peeks up above the grass just enough to see the odd bird-horse. He’s kind of pretty to look at until her mouth gets the best of her and she yells at him,
“What are you looking at?”
It wasn’t necessarily rude, and maybe a bit more curious but it was hard to tell. She was a child after all!
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Raised in a post-Reckoning world by parents who had been reared in that same Beqanna, Pteron is rarely surprised by the creatures that he comes across. Impressed, certainly, and often awed, but the sight of the yellow filly’s lion tail and paws merits little more than a brief glance. He’d watched a mountain lion become a mare, after all, and walked along the ocean’s floor while high in the mountains. Her yelled question merits little more than an amused smile and a simple answer:
“You, I think.” The stallion’s voice is colored with good humor. While Pteron is not incredibly fond of children that are not his own, but nor does he actively dislike or avoid them. He would prefer they be with their parents though, for this is not the first youngling that he’s come across wandering the common lands without proper supervision. Desire had – presumably – returned to her mother, and yet it seems the universe has chosen to deposit another guardianless child in his path. A deep inhale reveals a lack of nursing mares nearby, which confirms his sinking suspicion.
“I’m Pteron,” he tells her. “And who are you?”
She doesn’t look old at all; certainly younger than the starry filly that he’d come across in the woods some years ago. Nor does she smell like any place he knows – either kingdom or common land. Perhaps she and her dam are new to Beqanna, he decides. Has the filly wandered away from the Field, perhaps? Adarra was prone to wandering when she was this age, though wandering through Taiga was far less dangerous than the meadow. He tosses the forelock that has once more fallen across his face away from his line of sight, and waits for an answer.
03-31-2020, 03:19 PM (This post was last modified: 03-31-2020, 03:19 PM by Gwendy.)
She stared at him with hard eyes of amber, like solidified tree sap and not without a tiny hint of suspicion. Gwendy couldn’t help it. She’d only ever been around mama and papa, so to be out in the open like this and left to her own devices… well he could try to stomp her right out of existence. But the mere thought of that made her flex her odd little claws in the earth, ripping the grass and making furrows in the dirt.
Gwendy knew that she’d scratch him up as good as she could if he tried anything funny. But he’s giving her a smile so that must mean not all his intentions are bad. Oh sure, he could still be up to no good but the little lion-girl will give him the benefit of the doubt! She’d just have to keep her eyes on him at all times…
“Me?” she says with a bit of a growly squeak as she looks up at him, almost sizing him up as if he were her next meal. Except she didn’t inherit papa’s teeth and she really should still be sucking her mama dry of milk but she’s had to grow up a little sooner than necessary. That makes her think about all the grass she’s lying in and how bland it tastes to her right now. Until she swipes a paw at some of it and assumes a more upright position, perched on her rump with her paws splayed before her and her lion’s tail still twitching.
Oh, he’s talking again. The unsettling realization of that sinks in and leaves Gwendy frowning as she finally shifts her eyes from him to the ground that she kneads with her paws. Mama taught her manners and as much as she wants to be brash and rebel, they rise to the forefront and she straightens up a little more to answer him. “I’m Gwendy and it’s nice to meet you, I think.” because she’s still a tad bit suspicious.
It doesn’t help that she can see him casting around for another adult, like the kind who’s supervision she ought to be under. Her face smooths out and her childish intonation goes flat as she stares him dead in the face, “No one is coming for me. They’re all dead.” She’d already cried so many tears before he came along that she’s not surprised to discover there are no more right now. Gwendy finally dried up that deep well of sorrow that she thought could never dry out.
She continues to stare but is not looking for or expecting a shred of sympathy. Pity would be worse, as well. But adults confuse her as her own parents had and she finally just looks away at no particular point in the meadow that is somewhere in the middle between earth and sky and could be a bit of both.
finger trips across my cheek---------------- ----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Despite having a daughter that is at least a spring older than the amber-eyed filly, Pteron is not especially skilled at interacting with children. He had been given few chances to interact with Adarra; Reia insisted that child-rearing was a woman’s job, and he had acquiesced. He always acquiesced, and he often regrets that. Today is no different. The filly’s sharp claws dig furrows into the earth, but the nervouseness he reads in that does not meld with the way she eyes him. There’s something predatory in it, for all that she is small and weak, and Pteron’s olive eyes narrow.
It doesn’t help that she sits oddly, but at least she is passably polite. For a moment.
They’re all dead, Gwendy says flatly. It sounds no different than if she’d said the sky was blue, or her fur was yellow.
“That’s…unfortunate.” He says, and the words are strangled. What else is he supposed to say? She doesn’t quite look like she needs comforting, and for all her diminutive size, her claws still look sharp.
“So…” his voice trails off for a moment, clearly unsure. “What are you doing in the Meadow then. Do you, uh, live here? Or…?”
