"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
It spits him out into the middle of a summer storm, but it is not the kind that falls underneath his thumb. He is disoriented, confused, and he throws back his massive head as the wind whips around him. His white eyes open wide to take in the tempest, but try as he might, the elements do not answer. He growls, clenching his back teeth, but the skies do not answer. They defy him with their every move. The wind grows more fierce until he can hear the branches cracking nearby. The rain falls faster.
The ferocity of it sends a thrill through him that is matched only by his anger.
His fury as he realizes that this is not his storm.
This is not his to command.
Morrowind has never experienced anything like it before. As long as he can remember, the elements have come to heel—but this? This disregards him entirely. This ignores him completely. Snarling, he glances down and the fury becomes touched by something like fear. A frown crosses his features that deepens with each passing breath. This is not his body. This is not his storm. This is not his home.
He takes a step forward and feels the weight of mortality settle across his shoulders. The aches of the living become entrenched in him—make themselves known. Fury and fear become confusion.
Where is he?
Why is he here?
He swings his behemoth’s head around but all he can see is the storm, the dark, the winds that whip around him. There is nothing around him. No-one to answer his questions.
The storms call her. How could they not? She has always been a whirlwind, and now the storm is a part of her, every beat of her wings reverberates with thunder and the lightning ripples over her feathers, sizzling and hissing with that strange sharp scent like chlorine. There is a thrill to the feel of it, to the way the wind buffets against her face, the way it feels like she might die when she wheels and dives and falls to the earth.
Her landing is a flurry of feathers and wind and rain and thunder, as much her own as of the storm that rumbles away and pelts the broad grey river. The water turns dull, opaque with the swell of groundwater the forms runnels around her feet. In the midst of it, a giant whirls and frets, and though even her eagle's eyes can't easily tell white iris from sclera, she can smell the building explosion within him, fear and fury and confusion. It sets him to dancing and swinging his head as though fighting the rain and the girl grins wide, shaking her wet and heavy wings to release a spray of water before thinking them away. They melt into her skin and she is just that much smaller when she approaches him.
"Hey," She almost has to shout of the sound of the rain and the thunder of his feet on the sodden earth, "You afraid of the thunder or somethin'?"
He feels her on the edge of his consciousness. Feels the way that the lightning sings through her bones and lights her up. Once, he might have viewed her as something like kin—would have recognized that the storm that makes her up as the same one that he commanded. But now he feels severed from such things. Feels himself cut clean from the very core of his being. It leaves him blunted and dull and lost.
Still, he turns his heavy head toward her as she approaches. His white eyes are infinite and flat at once, giving nothing away to the turmoil that lives within him. “Afraid?” His voice is quiet and yet rumbles like thunder in his chest. Cracks across his tongue with the kind of authority of someone who is used to giving orders and having them listened to—of having his presence noticed, deferred to.
He doesn’t impose such a will on the girl now though. Merely stands like a statue, carved of onyx against the winds and rains that rage against him. His mane hangs in dreadlocks around his handsome face, down his heavy neck. “I am certainly not afraid of the thunder,” he scoffs, dismissing the idea as absurd.
It is insulting to be accused of being frightened of that which he once commanded.
Insulting to be pitied like that.
His nose wrinkles and he looks back again, considering the rebellious nature of the storm and the way that it so deftly ignored him. He feels the rage again and then looks back to the thunderbird mare.
“I am furious with it,” it’s a statement more than anything.
“What is this place?”
This is a question but formed like a demand as he stares her down.
Popinjay has no use for other people's authority, and so she ignores his as though it is no more than the rain dripping in sleek lines down his leathery wings. She approaches him with her usual lack of regard - for personal space, for caution - dances round for a better view of him - giant, white-eyed, winged and horned.
And quite mad, she is sure, based on his reply.
Her grin widens, flashing white teeth, hoping for something interesting to come after the proclamation of his fury, but he only asks her where they are. Hasn't he ever seen a river before? Or has he gone so crazy he forgot what it looks like?
"This is the river. It's my river, and you are trespassing." The young mare draws herself up to her full height - which is not very much - and manages what she thinks is an imperious expression, something between angry and bored, one impish ear flicking back. The muscles of her haunches bunch and coil as she rocks back onto them, nimble feet ready to spring in any direction
"And why shouldn't it strip you clean, what have you done to deserve my magic? You're lucky I let you keep your wings." She claims the ransacking of his gifts so easily, as if it were even remotely within her power to do. It is the Fairies and Beqanna herself that make those rules, of course, but he - too new or too deranged - seems to have no way of knowing it. Poppy snorts softly into the fading storm, returning his demanding stare with the reappearance of her mischievous grin. From the place where her dark eyes pierce the grey clouds that rush overhead in perfect mimic of the swollen river, she pulls down a crackling ball of lightning that sizzles and hisses and fills the air with its thin, pulsing light. The smell of electricity fills the air.
"Maybe you should try yelling at it some more, that seemed to be working."
She is a poor actor and there is already bubbling laughter hinting at the back of her words.
Morrowind has always been straightforward—even for his kind. He had little use for riddles or creativity and his imagination, while not completely blunted, was certainly not his weapon of choice. So he doesn’t often imagine that others are lying. He takes them for their word, even when something tickles at the back of his mind that something is off. His white eyes narrow as he considers her. She seemed too small to be a river goddess, but who knew what strange things this land did to other deities and elementals.
“My apologies, I thought you were of the sky—not the water.” There’s nearly a touch of skepticism there, but nothing enough to color his voice or darken his eyes. He himself does not look like himself and so he doesn’t hold her small stature against her. Neither does he make a move to leave though. For all of his manners and learnings, he’s never truly humbled himself before the law of others. He respects them well enough, but he grew up with enough privilege and power to never truly apologize for his presence.
The idea of trespassing is foreign.
So he just angles his head. “Your magic?” Another thunderous clap of his voice. “I should hardly think that I need to beg you for that which is rightfully mine.” His tail flicks at his haunches and his lips nearly pull into a snarl—pulling back in the corners just slightly. He nearly goes on. Nearly shows his teeth when she calls on the lightning that had once been his own to command. So she was of the sky.
When he glances back down, he notices the laughter creeping in her voice.
It stokes the flames of his fury once more and he takes a step forward.
“Are you—“ his voice is incredulous “are you mocking me?”
He steps forward and she bursts into laughter, dancing lightly to the side on her merry hooves, and releasing the ball of lightning so suddenly that it fizzes and whirls erratically around them like a lost thing. As an after-thought, she leashes it with just enough control that it never hits the large stallion directly, though it hisses at them both as if mirroring the thunderous anger in his voice. Most likely, it will find her after a time - the lightning often does, though it cannot harm her - or perhaps an unlucky tree will attract the thing and be destroyed in a shower of sparks and flame and chaos. The idea of chaos sings to her blood, it sets her nerves to tingling as she skirts the flames of his fury.
"Are you mocking me?" She mimics in as deep a voice as she can manage, and then she rolls her eyes, her grin turning wry, "How stupid! I'm not the one angry at a thunderstorm." She laughs again, ducking out of range of hoof and tooth and wing as she does so, "It's the Fairies you wanna talk to if y'think they took something from you, but they'll prolly just throw ya off the Mountai-- oop, look out!"
The ball of lightning slices suddenly past his shoulder, crashing into her chest like a snowball that skitters and whines as it spreads out across her body from the impact. The young mare shakes her head with a snort and bright sparks drip from her mane like water, falling to the earth with a hiss and the smallest tendrils of smoke when the grass barely burns from being so wet. The earth at her feet turns black and scorched as the lightning grounds itself and she looks back up at the towering stallion with her mischievous eyes.
Morrowind doesn’t think to flinch at the cracking of lightning, never stopping to consider that he could be vulnerable to it in this world. It is a flaw in his thinking—yet another piece of the puzzle that he has not quite put into place. He is not himself here. He does not stop to think that the one thing that he could previously wield could be the thing that kills him in this life. It would be his undoing, potentially.
Instead of thinking of his own vulnerability, of his own mortality, he focuses instead on the way that she continues to mock him. It reminds him of the tricksters back home—the small things that would poke and prod. Useless things, he had thought in his past life. Good for nothing but angering others.
Perhaps she is such a thing.
It sours his mood even further to think that he would be greeted here with such a pesky thing, let alone one who wielded the same powers stripped of him. He scowls, barely hearing her giving him the answer that he seeks, instead watching as the lightning crashes between them and straight into her. His white eyes narrow, the black of his forelock falling down his massive head, nearly obscuring his vision.
“Am I crazy?” he echoes, incredulous. Of all of the things that he had been accused of in the past life, he had never once been accused of not being in complete control of his faculties. He had always been stern but reliable. Serious but intelligent. What kind of place was this for him to be the crazy one.
“Are you?” he asks, his voice a little quieter as he chews on the idea.
If she was, it would at least make sense of one thing in a place where nothing else did.
The mare tilts her head at him, first one way, then the other, a bit like a bird trying to judge a distance or a shadow against the leaves, a bit like a dog coyly considering a command it does not like. Her eyes sparkle like the lightning that fades out against her chest as he questions her and for a moment it almost looks as if she is reflecting on his question.
She isn't.
She is, instead, thinking about how when someone is crazy, they don’t think that they are. She is taking his refutation as confirmation of the thing and if it were at all possible for that madcap grin to grow wider or wilder, it would.
“I knew I was gonna like you,” the seal bay chirps in answer to his question, jigging sideways a bit so that her haunches swing her closer to him, "and since I like you, I'm gonna help you."
No sooner do the words leave her lips but she arches her neck, looking down to the wet ground, striking it sharply with grey forehooves several times in quick succession. The mud flies, clods of it spattering into the air around them, bursting against faces, chests, and shoulders. A gob of it has marred the bright star on her forehead that struggles gamely to beam out from beneath her curling forelock until, breathless, she stops abruptly and looks up at the great behemoth again.
"There now, not so clean anymore, right? See? I told you I could help." But she frowns and rolls an eye at him anyway, "You'll want to smile though when you go see the Fairies. I bet you're almost handsome when you smile!"
She mocks and laughs and stares at him as though he was talking in tongues.
The conversation in and of itself is perhaps more confusing than the fact that he is here at all, and yet he does not find it in him to walk away just yet. She’s the first soul he has found since he had been spit out in this world, and he can at least understand her language. They can converse and she had answers, although she seems to prefer handing them out in riddles rather than giving them to him straight.
Perhaps she is more like the jesters from him than he had even thought.
He sighs as she strikes the ground, as the mud flies and then lands across his dark face. He sputters slightly, blinking the mud from his eyes, although some remains caked on his eyelashes. “And you ask if I’m crazy,” he finally manages, incredulous. Glancing down, he looks at the way the mud has splashed across his massive chest, at the way it now laces up his legs. He is practically covered in it now.
“You remind me of my sister,” he breathes heavily. If he could pinch his nose, he would. Instead he reminds himself of how he had dealt with Regn in her youth. “Which means that your help is more trouble than anything else.” Then, without further warning, he charges at her, aiming to tackle her to the ground, where the ground has begun to become covered with muddy puddles turning small lakes.
The lightning cracks overhead as the rain begins to come down even heavier—
and there is almost the sound of laughter as he rushes forward.
