[open] feel the moon hit the blacktop

[Catcher]

She let herself go, and she wandered again.

There was no gentleness in the fall this time, no pool of silken thoughts to land in.  It's tumult and chaos when the darkness recedes and cognisant minds come-to.  Beneath the weight of the first step, the brittle world shudders and splits, impossibly leaving behind a path undisturbed.

A strike of lightning illuminates the sky, and the crash of thunder that follows rings hollow in the unicorn's bones.  Trails of fire, burning brightly, are left in the wake of each strike that tears across the sickly grey sky.  Each swaying beam that's left behind makes her shadow - now long and narrow - dance eerily against the splintered trail.    

Another step forward and the earth rumbles in pitiful protest as her wounds grow deeper.   The path grows more and more torturous for both dreamer and world alike as the tempo of the storm quickens, and the dancing shadow follows it's pace. 

As though a foreigner to her own mind, the weaver watches.  

She needs to stop, she needs to go back.  And she tries - she tries everything she knows.  But betrayal divides body and mind, and though her silent voice cries to stop, her movement carries on, still tethered to a shadow that drags her along.

The world flips - follower becomes leader, apathy succeeds sympathy, hopelessness surpasses all.

And she is lost.

[Aela]

She is sleeping.

Aela doesn’t know where. She is still young and her instinct had only told her to run. Run and run and run, as fast and swift as her spry legs could carry her. The girl had run away from the beach and the man and the only source of comfort she had known. She had run until she had only known exhaustion.

There is a storm brewing (and Aela doesn’t know her heritage yet; she doesn’t know the tenacity or the perseverance that blows in her veins).

In the other world - the real one where she sleeps in the Meadow and a silver mare keeps an eye on her (until the seeing one comes) - she is curled on the ground. In this world, in this dream, she is running but the blackness of exhaustion never finds her. She never crumbles or crashes to the ground. The child is a golden gleam of light that reflects off the fabricated lighting storms and she is trying to outrun a gale that brews on her young heels.

The wind is running wild with her.
('It’s playing with your mane,’ was one of the last things her mother had said to her. Trying to distract her from the dark shape that loomed ahead.)

This doesn’t feel like playing. She hasn’t learned the art of wind-chasing yet and all she knows is there is too much frenzy in her chest. It beats frantically and it only encourages the erratic tempo of her hooves. Too much, too much, the false Wind sings and the girl runs faster and faster as the world spirals in darkness and storm.

The world goes black (and maybe the dreamweaver sees it, the thing that Aela runs from) and then flashes bright again, lit up by the beacon of a lightning strike. There is no thing but there is someone and though the girl is wide-eyed with terror, the filly does something that she may never do in her waking life.

She talks.

"Please,” Aela cries to the Stormgiver as tears darken her gilded cheeks, "why is the Wind angry?”

[chthonie]

It feels familiar, the sundering of real to dream. But the subtle imprint of the original dreamer is not altogether familiar to her nor is it altogether foreign. It feels like father but hasn’t his brand of clinical coldness to it, which always felt like ducking your head under cold water, sharp and frigid. This felt more feminine, and a little reckless. 

The pinto almost expected to find the familiar chasm of nothingness yawning before. Or stretching more like the rictus grin of death and ending. Instead, lightning splits the belly of a sky dark and grossly swollen with storm clouds. Chthonie looks up in admiration; her eyes dance along the storm’s underbelly as it lights up again and again.

“So beautiful…” falls the murmur from her lips before something else catches her eye in this unknown dreamscape. It is a unicorn, painted like her, being rugged along by its shadow in a marionette’s dance. To her, it looks both beautiful and painful, and she continues to watch. If she is moved beyond her staring, it doesn’t yet show.

Not until the tiny child lit up in the aftermath of a lightning strike and she instinctively moved in her direction, little more than a child herself. There are tears visible on the gilt cheeks and Chthonie has never seen tears before. She reaches out with her nose, not sure if she’ll lick it up to see how it tastes or if she’ll just wipe it away. Doesn’t matter, they’re interrupted by the dancer —

“Don’t I know you?” she blurts out, the small child forgotten as her own girlish face pinches in concentration. There is a feeling that rolls along her bones as the lightning does the belly of the storm raging above them, and she thinks it is recognition or blood calling to blood. Abysm had shown her each sibling (half or not) in the dreamscape, and she thinks she has memories of playing in the common places with her mother and someone else.

“Catcher?” comes the tremulous query as she catches a glimpse of the unicorn, certain this is her older sister.

@[Catcher] @[Aela] ❤️