"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
05-09-2020, 04:44 PM (This post was last modified: 05-09-2020, 04:44 PM by Shipka.)
Shipka
She hadn't gotten in as much trouble as she thought she would. When she returned to her mother's side, the speckled mare had barely had breath to speak, let alone to scold or shout, and only hugged her child close. Perhaps because, by the time Shipka had finally clambered down off the solitary Mountain's broad side, more than a day of frantic searching had elapsed for Yggdrasil. For her daughter, it had been tedium and hunger and gravity that pulled her down.
How did you get lost on the Mountain? Mama had asked, but it was daylight and Shipka could not show her. Instead she yawned and buried her head into the space behind the mare's elbow, pale eyes fluttering shut against the queries. By the following evening, all is forgiven, and she is adventuring again, searching the skies for the first thin stars of night. Even now, she casts an eye up at the jagged peak and remembers how close the stars were, how they were clear and bright, and she thinks she might have stayed up there in the cold and silence if her belly had not driven her back among the mortals below. She might have stayed among the stars and the fairies and the cold that struck through her as if she were nothing but a silk spiderweb clinging to a branch. The wind in the meadow doesn't ring with the same clarity, rustling softly in the hardy grasses, and the stars feel distant and remote, for all that she can pull them down around her.
Small ears flutter against the ticklish breeze and Shipka presses close the the border of the meadow where the soil grows sandy and red, humming softly to herself as she kicks at the dry ground. The air here is warm and hints at the arid nature of Pangea, breathes its heat into the common land and wards off the worst of the winter snow that plagues the North, but it comes with a dulling red dust that coats the rocks and grasses an the few low trees that persist here. It makes her sneeze.
And sneeze.
And sneeze.
And when she finally looks up again, her eyes bleary with tears and squinting and her small nose twisted to one side as if only just holding back the outburst, she finds she is not as alone as she thought, the glowing white shape of a mare burning softly in her eyes. In the darkening meadow she is as bright as starlight and pulls Shipka to her side without trying, the dark filly drawing close enough to press her muzzle against that pale shoulder. It leaves a smear of red dust.
"Oh." she says, chargrined, looking up at the purple-eyed mare, "I'm sorry."
isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She has no sense of home, but rarely does she leave Pangea anymore. There had been a time when she wandered far more frequently, though perhaps wander is not the right word. Wander implies to move without reason or direction. Islas rarely did anything without reason. When she had traveled she had been in search of something – of someone, or somewhere. She hadn’t been sure what, back then, she had just known that there were so many puzzle pieces missing that she couldn’t even begin to imagine the full picture.
It wasn’t until she met Astrophel and Ten that everything began to fall into place, almost. She does not think the picture will ever be seamless. There will always be cracks and lines and missing pieces, she will never fit in here like she had always belonged. But she finally began to realize that she was never going home. She could stare at the stars all she wanted; she could travel to them with Ten and stay for hours or weeks or years, she could wrap herself in starlight until she was made from it, and yet she would never be a star again.
The star in her chest flickered at the thought, and that was the closest Islas came to feeling what she thinks must be sadness.
She heard the sneezing filly but she had ignored her at first. With a small twist of her head she saw her as she drew closer, and Islas debated disappearing into starlight, but tonight she decided against it. The girl seems small, but she does not find it odd that she is wandering the meadow alone in the dark. Ryatah had left her and Cavern alone countless times, and she had no reason to think that it wasn’t commonplace for other children to do the same. “Hello,” she says, and though she shifts away from the girl’s touch there is no malice on her face; just two eyes the color of a starless purple-black galaxy staring at her. “Can you talk to stars too?”
It would be a strange question to ask anyone, and her thin experience has been that most would say no - and perhaps not only 'no,' because the idea of talking to stars sounds mad if you've never done it. Shipka, red-nosed and teary-eyed, only looks at the pale mare in wonder. How did she know? In one swift motion, the girl wipes the dust from her nose and circles her attention back up to those purple eyes.
"How do you know about that?"
The day is truly done, and as the sky darkens, the filly becomes less visible, not by any magic, but because her midnight coat with its flecks of white seems to fade into the background of clear sky. Not so for her companion, who glows and pulsates softly, who draws her in like a moth by looking so like the stars that she does speak to in the dark of night. The little appaloosa is enthralled and her grey eyes widen. Is that how she knows? How else could she, Shipka had not told anybody, she had hugged her secret tightly to her chest, but the star-woman saw right through her.
"Are you a star?" Her voice is an awed whisper and she closes the space between them again, although she remembers not to touch, this time, "Is that how you knew?"
She had tried to reach them in the sky without ever checking to see if there were any walking the Earth, first. A small frown turns the corners of her lips down thoughtfully.
"Are there others down here? Could... could you take me up there? What's it like? I tried to get there myself but it's such a high climb, the sun always comes up too soon! Or my mama wakes up and wants to know what I'm doing and... and I haven't told her yet, cuz, well, it's just so much more fun to have a secret."
She gushes information like a fountain, splashing into the still well of the mare without noticing that her enthusiasm is not returned in kind, and without realizing how easily she gives up that tightly held secret. Secrets are fun, but only if there's someone you can share them with and if anyone will keep them, surely it's a star? They've kept all her other secrets, so far.
"My name is Shipka! What kind of names do stars get?"
06-06-2020, 03:57 PM (This post was last modified: 06-06-2020, 03:59 PM by Islas.)
isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She thinks she is getting better at blending in. It’s becoming easier to smile when she is supposed to, because she has learned they usually smile at the beginning of a conversation. It makes them appear friendlier, she supposes, though she still frequently forgets. Her smiles were different anyway, all mechanical and thin — more like a concept of what a smile should be, without actually being one. The action did nothing to soften or brighten the starless-dark of her eyes, but she offers the girl a thin smile anyway.
“Intuition,” she says, because she has learned now to not ignore that magnetic pull that others with an affinity for the stars always had; she has learned that when something draws her towards a stranger that there is likely a reason.
She asks her if she was a star, and Islas is unsure how to answer. Is she still considered a star? Is she still considered a star even though she is trapped in this equine form, even though she cannot return to the sky?
“I was a star,” is her plain answer, looking up to the night sky above thoughtfully. “I don’t know if I still am.” She pulls a few tendrils of light from the starlight above, spinning them into ribbons that spiral towards the ground, where they take the shape of small birds that flutter their illuminated wings around the girl’s head. “I’ve been back once,” she answers, letting the birds fade away into the night. “But not on my own. I can’t get back either, no matter much the stars speak to me.” Ten, had been his name. He was the only reason she had been back, though it had been brief. She knows the man considered her father could help, too, but too often she wonders if he is the reason she was trapped here to begin with.
“Islas,” she says when she asks her name, turning her dark eyes back to her. “That’s what my mother named me, at least. I don’t really remember much from being a star. I don’t think we needed names up there.”
The pale mare is solemn and quiet as she gives it, and Shipka mirrors that as she presses dark lips together and nods, repeating the strange name softly into the air between them, committing it to memory and feeling it's airy weight on her tongue. It's a thin, pulsing, word, like the starlight that they pull down to earth, and beside it, Shipka feels her own name too heavy and hard. They are opposites, sharing the night, Shipka, with her too-hard name and her dark coat and her pale eyes, blending into the night like a shadow besides the gently glowing Islas with her dark gaze.
"It's like Eyeless, though," the girl blurts out, tipping her head to one side, curiously. Islas clearly has eyes. Perhaps it is her mother that was blind and she didn't know it. Maybe if you weren't really looking, those midnight eyes looked empty against the gleam of her skin. The night sky could be like that, too, dark and empty and quiet if you were looking for the sun.
Shipka nods again, offering a comforting smile to a mare in no need of it, "She probably didn't mean anything by it."
The moon-eyed filly considers the thought that the stars don't have names, don't need them, and the way Islas answers her question so openly. Most of the time her dreamy questions are brushed aside as silly or childish and the mare's earnestness soothes that place in her that yearns to be taken seriously. It roots in her heart a deep appreciation for the star-mare. Her small ears flicker as she decides what question to ask next, there are so many.
"I bet you just knew each other from the way you shone. They all flicker a little differently, that's kind of a name, too." Shipka turns to the sky again as Islas's birds fade into a rain of glittering light, "I'm sorry you've forgotten, but if you were a star, then it's gotta still be inside you. You'll remember some day."
She offers a bright grin to the night, and her words are filled with all the confidence of childhood as she asserts her belief that Islas will find her way back, will find those memories again.
isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She can recognize the awe and wonder on the younger girl’s face, and she tries to understand what that must be like. When she had been newly born into this world she had been mostly confused. Trying to understand this strange body, this peculiar heartbeat, and the sister she had been born alongside and the mother that raised them. She had not even fully comprehended what she was at that age, and the confusion had left no room for childlike wonder. The relentless feeling of being lost, of not belonging, of being trapped had been consuming. Her childhood had been spent wondering why she was not like the rest of them, wondering why she felt virtually nothing when her mother held her, and why she didn’t care when she eventually stopped.
Discovering who and what she was had only offered minimal relief; realizing that she was, in fact, not meant to be here had at first cemented her to desire to leave, to get back to the sky. She isn’t sure if there is more of her missing, but a part of her thinks that regardless, some things are simply not meant to be made mortal. That whatever part of her is still gone might be unattainable from here.
“My mother has peculiar naming conventions,” she reasons to the young girl with a small quirk of a smile. It would be impossible to delve into all the idiosyncrasies that made up her mother, and not even Islas herself understood the relationship between her and her father. “I’m sure she had her reasons for choosing it.”
She nods her head at what she says, her slender neck arcing to touch her nose to her breastbone when she says, “It’s in here. I can feel it sometimes, I think, inside of my chest.” The star is different from her heart, has a different pulse and feel to it. She can feel when it gets restless, can feel when it is soothed. And she can feel when it calls to someone familiar, like the little star girl in front of her. “Maybe I will remember everything one day. And maybe then it will make being here easier.” Because maybe the pieces that are missing are what have created such a great divide in her – maybe it will be the key that unlocks all the parts of her that feel stuck, that feel so separated from everyone around her.
“It was….strange,” she begins slowly, but honestly. She tries to remember what it had been like to go back — it hadn’t seemed that long ago, but time passed so strangely here. “I didn’t go back as a star. It still felt like watching them from down here, but just, closer.” Something peculiar stirs behind her breastbone; an uncomfortable sensation that she can’t name — an almost sadness, if it had to be given a name. “I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore, just like I don’t belong here, either.”
She wants to touch her, when the mare gestures to the place in her breast where that bit of starfire still burns, Shipka wants to reach out and press her small nose there as well. It is, in part, a gesture of sympathy for all the things lost to @[Islas], but it is also her own longing for the impossible heights between the pair and the stars above them.
She wants to, but she doesn't. Instead, she mirrors the softly glowing mare, brushes the small point of her dark chest, and imagines what it must feel like to have that flickering flame burning cold beside her heart. Unfair, is what she thinks to herself as her own breath softly stirs the midnight-colored hair that curls there. Unfair that Islas is a creature apart, neither star nor horse, and that her life is spent caught between worlds.
Shipka, though she longs for the stars, is truly part of this place below. She is fully a creature of emotion and feeling and though she is coming to understand that Islas does not experience those things - at least, not in the same way or with the same fervor - she feels a flood of grief and anger, as though the white mare's lack doubles the bite of her feelings.
"But that's not fair!" Her small ears flick back and she stamps a foreleg, denting the soft red-sand dirt with the edge of her black hoof, firm lips curling into a petulant frown. "Things should be fair," she insists again, childishly unaware that the world isn't fair, "everyone should belong somewhere."
