"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
Since her birth, she had been content in the peace and quiet of her idyllic life. The humid slopes of the volcano provided everything a young child might have wished for in marvel and adventure, cloaked in the safety of her parent’s obvious affection. But as with all young things, age comes. It is inevitable.
And with age, a yearning. The desire for something more. Perhaps this had been in part driven by the arrival of newer and younger siblings. Though she had never felt neglect, it is the very nature of brand new things to demand attention. And by that same standard, the older and less novel must find other ways to be entertained.
For days she had ventured close to the border, staring out past Tephra’s edges with a contemplative longing. But today - today is the day. With a deep breath and a furtive glance around, she bounds forward, entire body contracting and shrinking, pressing into the slim and agile form of a mink. Moments later, she is scurrying, nearly undetectable, through the long grass until she reaches the shaded copses of Sylva’s edge. An elation fills her, the thrill of someone doing something both dangerous and new. A sense of freedom she hadn’t known existed before today.
Small form finding a tree trunk, she scrambles up (a bit clumsily) before steadying herself on a branch. Breathing slowly, she closes her eyes to concentrate. When she opens them, she is a small sparrow, clinging eagerly to the limb as she tests her new wings. She hadn’t really practiced flying too much, but she really, really, really didn’t want to have to walk the whole way to… well, to wherever one might go to find new horses.
She flutters her wings uncertainly a few times before finally taking the plunge, both literally and figuratively. She wobbles wildly in the air for a few seconds, unceremoniously buffeted by the slight breeze before finally finding her wings. It takes her some time to find the right rhythm, but when she finally does and rises above the trees, a transcendent joy swells in her chest. Bursting out into a brief, trilling song, she shoots forward, flying as quickly as she can towards the unknown.
It is only when, sometime later, she begins to grow weary, that she pauses to wonder if she had perhaps made a slight error in judgment. Dropping quickly from the sky, she finds herself fumbling her way towards another thick canopy, though this one is much less colorful. She bumbles gracelessly through the leaves as she remembers abruptly that flying is NOT the hard part.
She had forgotten entirely about landing. With an alarmed trill, she flutters and stumbles through the branches until, nearly at the ground, she shifts abruptly to her own form, pale wings flaring wide to soften her landing. With a loud oomph and a jarring thud, she crumples. Just as quickly, she is back on her feet, eyes roving with wide-eyed curiosity as she tries to take in her new surroundings.
09-12-2020, 08:22 PM (This post was last modified: 09-12-2020, 08:34 PM by Malone.)
MALONE
kill me softly, your hold on me is somethin' i can't explain.
Malone has learned to accept that he is not perfect. He lacks his father’s seemingly infinite patience or his mother’s sharp mind, which leaves him floating somewhere in the middle of mediocrity. But his brothers and sisters all seem content with his presence as well as his terrible jokes. His own children roll their eyes when he offers up puns. He has seen the way they fight to hide their smile, though, so he doesn’t mind.
Today he needs a break from the crowd of his family despite his immense adoration for them. They are all too strong-willed, too loud for him to comfortably rest. Each thought between the lot of them comes drifting into his head until he can hardly find space for his own. That’s why he wanders to the forest. It feels enough like home without being quite the same - a fact he draws great comfort from.
A chaotic stream of thoughts find their way to him, though, and he lifts his head in search of the source. They sound like things that a bird might think, which strikes him as odd since he doesn’t normally hear their inner monologues. The sound of her frightened trilling draws him closer as he peeks his head from behind a gnarled autumn oak.
“Oh. You’re not a bird at all, are you?” he asks, not realizing she had been only moments before. His own golden wings lift slightly in an unintentional mimic of hers. Malone steps further out from behind the tree while his dark blue eyes examine the ruffled feathers and scrapes along her skin. He recalls his father teaching him to fly and earning similar wounds.
“I used to practice in water at first. Or snow,” he offers with a shrug.
She doesn’t realize she isn’t alone until he speaks. Her wide green eyes are focused on this place - new and wonderful and different. It is written in every line of her young body, in the slight quiver of her wings where they splay half-cocked, and in the tensity of the lean muscles of her slim form. When she hears him, she whips around, startled by the unexpected arrival.
It takes a moment for the question to register, but when it does, she relaxes slightly as a laugh escapes her lips, fueled both by humor and relief. “Not anymore,” she replies on a nervous giggle, not quite sure how to react to this stranger. He’s beautiful, and a part of her quite suddenly wishes to touch the marks glowing faintly against his cheeks. She resists the urge of course, but it reminds her of some of her siblings.
There’s an odd sort of comfort in finding such a similarity.
He offers her advice in an almost offhand manner, and she finds herself nodding in response almost without thought. She hadn’t considered that option. Of course, when it came to water, she almost inevitably gave in to the temptation to practice her ability to turn into a fish or an otter or whatever other creature happened to catch her eye that day. But the snow intrigued her. Tephra did not see much snow in the winter, so while the concept is not foreign, she had never truly experienced it.
“Is snow very… soft?” she asks a bit hesitantly, still staring wide-eyed at the stranger. After a moment, with a skeptical wrinkling of her nose, she adds, “I’ve only ever seen it make things muddy.”
kill me softly, your hold on me is somethin' i can't explain.
The confusion on his face must be visible in the way he tilts his head with furrowed brows. Not anymore? Was she a bird before, then? He hums softly as he thinks on the question before her own thoughts echo across his mind. His dark eyes drift from her wings to her face now. Others had found him beautiful before and so he isn’t entirely surprised by that part of it. Instead, he is curious as to why she’d touch the glowing lines of his face.
“You can touch them if you want. I don’t mind,” he says with a light shrug of his broad shoulders. And then he steps closer with his neck extended to offer his cheek to her. “I guess they’re common in my family. We all got them from my father.”
Malone has always enjoyed seeing the glowing lines in his reflection across the water’s surface. They make him feel connected to his children as well as his father, while the stars across his skin are reminiscent of his mother. Ophanim had often told him that he was the perfect embodiment of their love. He often wonders if he will ever know the joy of seeing that in one of his own children.
“If you find a good snowdrift, sure,” he says with a nod as he shifts his weight. “But if it isn’t deep enough then it can still hurt. I learned that the hard way.”
And then he laughs, unashamed of his past follies. They all make wonderful stories for him to retell now that he’s older and wiser.
Had she the ability, she would have turned the most brilliant shade of pink upon realizing that he’d somehow discerned her desire to touch his glowing cheeks. It doesn’t occur to her (at least not immediately) that he had plucked them directly from her thoughts. Instead she imagines she must have let something slip by accident, which is quite possibly more embarrassing than the alternative.
“Oh, uhhh…” She drops her gaze in chagrin, shuffling her feet as though it would distract from her faux pas. When he offers his cheek to her however, she blinks up at him in surprise for a moment. It had been a silly impulse, but when she finds it offered to her on a proverbial silver platter, it suddenly seems a little less silly.
Hesitantly, she reaches out. She flinches when she first touches his cheek (the barest whisper of her muzzle). Emboldened by her success however, she brushes the golden line again. She’s not quite sure what she had expected, but she feels only the faint warmth of his skin. Quickly withdrawing, she finds herself a bit at a loss as she peers at him with a bit of a baffled expression. Not quite sure what else to say, she replies, “My mom glows too.”
It’s almost a relief then to talk about snow instead. It’s hard to imagine a snowdrift, but it certainly sounds fascinating. Who knew snow could drift? Or that it would make it soft?
A laugh escapes her lips at his last statement, quickly muffled. She hadn’t meant to laugh at what must be an embarrassing memory, but she couldn’t help it. Especially when he too laughed. If nothing else, the humor allows the remnants of her own discomfort and embarrassment to drain away, leaving curiosity in its wake. “Do you have a lot of snow where you’re from?”
kill me softly, your hold on me is somethin' i can't explain.
Malone watches her fumble with her embarrassment for a while, though the kind smile of his face never fades or grows critical of her. Having always been an affectionate sort of creature, he finds himself humming softly when she traces the glowing lines along his cheek. A soft laugh comes flowing from him then as he watches her skitter back.
“Glows like you, with your whole body?” he asks as he closes the space she left between them with a few long strides. He reaches out and touches her cheek then, mapping his way to the curve of her jaw and the delicate skin behind her ear. And then he pulls away almost as quickly as she had. Malone laughs once more, pleased with himself.
“Not usually. I have to travel if I want to see a lot of snow. Sylva has too many trees to really let a good layer of snow form on the ground,” he explains, still grinning. “Sometimes I like to shake the branches and make all the snow fall on whoever is standing beneath the tree.”
He does not tell her that it was in fact Larrikin who taught him this trick, nor does he mention that he had been the first target. Azure cannot know all his embarrassing stories in one day.
“Nerine is a good place to visit if you want to really experience winter. Maybe this winter we can visit there and test out your wings?” he suggests with his dark eyes growing eager now. It’s been ages since he made plans with anyone who wasn’t related to him, he thinks.
She shivers beneath his scrutiny, almost forgetting for a moment that she had been asked a question. Almost forgetting what they had even been discussing. She is far too naive to comprehend her own naivete, but to any observer, it would no doubt be painfully obvious that she lacked any sort of worldliness.
It had been entirely luck then that she had found someone kind rather than someone who would seek to take advantage of such a thing.
“Uh, yes,” she replies when she finally remembers he had asked a question. Whatever disappointment she felt at his withdrawal however is quickly replaced by delighted curiosity. It doesn’t occur to her how awfully good-natured of it is of him to humor her childish whimsy. But then, why would it? She’d never actually known anything less.
She giggles as she imagines him perching on some tree-limb, shaking snow onto unsuspecting passers-by. The amusement is as much from imagining him somehow perching on a thin, spindly branch as it is from imagining the dismay of someone being doused by wet and cold. “That sounds fun!” she exclaims between giggles before adding a bit plaintively, “It makes me wish we had real snow in Tephra.”
The offer that he makes next, however, causes her green eyes to brighten as her head lifts abruptly with excitement. “Would you really bring me there?” she asks on an almost breathless rush. “I’ve never been anywhere but Tephra.”
