"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
She had said she’d never come back.
But pain has a way of sending you down to the old stops, the haunted houses along your street that suddenly don’t seem so bad. Not when new trauma has burned off the stale fear and instead familiarity, a cold comfort, waits in the broken windows and sagging doorways of the past.
The trip itself was made on a whim and strong headwinds carried her back in the dead of night. A bed of bracken took her to sleep, hidden among the fronds in the blue-black of moonless night. No light to catch on gold or white.
First light creeps across the fern-bed waking her before the warmth of sunlight can, but Aloy is unbothered by the damp and dew. Her green eyes, clear as sea-glass in the piercing light, blink away sleep. Rolling onto her side to pierce open air with her twisting black horns and then rising slowly to shake out her vast wings and groom her feathers back into place. She isn't long with her ablutions. Soon her long white legs carry her away from her resting place and out toward the scent of water. She cannot get far before someone finds her.
The stranger might be drawn because they recognize something about her, something of her mother, though she is more finely built than her dam. Or Aloy draws them by her own merit, the magnetism that she cannot help no matter how she muddies herself or tangles her hair into braids of knots that hide her green eyes and gold freckled face. The stranger might be blind of nose and eye and just following the sound of footsteps. Whatever the reason for approach Aloy turns to greet whoever this might be but not with the exuberant friendliness that the former type of stranger might expect. A placid nod might be returned for a greeting, and then a question of who she is or why she is here...though it doesn’t matter because she’s looking past her company towards mountain peaks already thick with snow.
“I used to be from here.” The words may fall like crumbling ancient bricks in a thousand years dust, unnoticed and unheard and that will be okay. She says it more for herself than them, reminding her weary wounded soul that they have come to some kind of home again. There might be something to find here, hope maybe, one thing or another that she’s stopped believing in.
Everyone Shipka meets seems to be from somewhere else, and even, somehow, this other girl who so plainly states she is from right here (where you are from, too, Shipka,) even she has a taste of elsewhere, as if here and here are not the same place.
Why did you go? The question lingers on her tongue unasked. It's the wrong question, and the yearling tips her head to one side, curiously.
"What made you come back?" Shipka, too, searches for something else, some unattainable magic that hides behind the stars, and no matter how much starlight she pulls from the sky, she can never quite find it, never quite see it. It still calls to her though, makes her heart sing out to the stars above.
Grey eyes run smoothly over the Wanderer, as if they might find an answer to the question in the pattern of her coat but, of course, there's nothing for her to read there. She is too young to know the mare's mother, too untravelled to have met her sire. No, the yearling has spent her nearly two-years of life with her thoughts drifting well above the earth, her eyes searching the horizon, but her feet firmly rooted among the sweetgrass meadow of her birth.
"Did you find what you were looking for?"
The starry girl is eager to know that others have found what they sought, that there can, occasionally, be an end to eternal pursuits. She fears that her own is not one of these, but instead like Islas, dreaming emptily of resting in the velvet sky again and burning softly over the world. Shipka carries the stars, they rest across her shoulders and back, and the wisps of her mane and tail glitter and gleam with the pulse of them, but she will never walk among them. Perhaps, though, there are other places she might go, new stars to dream under, this stranger makes her think that she could.
08-30-2020, 10:13 PM (This post was last modified: 08-30-2020, 10:34 PM by Aloy.)
heaven i'll never come home
It surprises her to be heard. Often when in this temper she is taken for aloof and quickly left behind by whoever she has lured in. This time curiosity waits pleasantly before her when focus comes back into her eyes. Star-strewn girl, older than Aloy when she’d last been here. Someone she’s never seen before, could never have known before. That might be for the best.
If there was a reason for coming here specifically she doesn’t know what it was. There are a dozen other places she might have chosen as a next stop but she had shied away, and turned back to this place she is reluctant to call home. “I don’t know, I don’t remember feeling good here.” Untrue, there were times, and the half-truth weighs on her for the fragments of a second it takes her to continue. She also feels like she’s giving too much of herself away to a half grown girl she doesn’t even know. “I just came by instinct I think. I wanted to be somewhere other than where I was.”
Flight had numbed her and then this place seemed better than where she was. The need for distraction and idealization of a simpler past guided her wings. That was the best explanation Aloy could summon up.
“I think I did. Things get away from you though.” How could she explain this to someone who was likely so full of wanderlust, as she had been? Hello dear heart, go ahead and venture afield… the world will just stomp and stomp on your little head and then tear away the last scrap of whatever is holding you together just to put a cherry on top. Keeping this to herself and taking a rare self-deprecating tone she adds, “Or from me anyway. I’m Aloy.”
Shipka. A nice name, compliments are not ever quick to Aloy’s lips, but not because she does not mean them. “Yes, I’m going to stay. I’ve got to give it another try now that I’m here.” Shifting and resettling her wings as if having to fly herself off someplace else has anything to do with the decision to linger, Aloy fishes around for some means to carry the conversation onward. “Where are you from, Shipka?”
Aloy
@[Shipka] Ratty! I hope I still remember how to tag LOL
09-02-2020, 04:57 PM (This post was last modified: 09-02-2020, 04:59 PM by Shipka.)
Shipka
It's that feeling of wanting to be somewhere else that resonates so strongly with Shipka, that desire to go, except where she wants to go is not out into the world, but beyond it. Beyond the blue and green and gold of day and into the shining darkness of evening, the silver and the nearly-black blues and purples that swath the midnight sky. In the colorful autumn meadow, she is the sole memory of the night. Even Aloy shines with the day, drops of sunlight erupting from her skin as the great star climbs ever higher into a clear sky. Aloy used to be from here.
"I'm still from here. From this place," her hoof thuds gently into the rich earth underfoot, "this meadow." She wasn't born out of the sky, or out of time, or out of some other nebulous magic, and left adrift, yearning to return to what she was. For those rare few, the option to return seems to be even rarer. No, Shipka yearns for what she has never known, instead.
"I don't really know where I'd go if I left here. The only place I want to see is the sky, but..." Her grey gaze falls briefly on the mare's wings, "Pegasi so often think they own the sky, they never seem to realize how much more of it is above them, they only feel what's under their wings. It goes so much higher up than you'd think."
And she had certainly tried. But the sky goes on forever, much further than Aloy's wandering could have taken her, so much more, even if she never stopped.
"I built a staircase out of starlight once, but I still couldn't get there." It feels silly to talk about the stars when the birds have sung the day into existence and the sun dries the well of her magic. It makes her too aware of herself and all the things she has ignored in favor of chasing the night. Shipka smiles and dips her head to the copper mare, "It does get away from you," even if you never leave home, "even if you try to hold it with magic, but it doesn't stop me from wishing. I wish I could walk through the stars, and I wish that stars torn from the sky could be put back among them."
09-03-2020, 08:44 PM (This post was last modified: 09-03-2020, 08:46 PM by Aloy.)
heaven i'll never come home
Aloy has flown through nights with none other than the stars for company. She has enjoyed the sight of them, the way they spin around her as she surges, and pirouettes and banks in the dark. They are a distant marvel though, and she knows them to be farther than she can fathom (a thought that makes her head feel as though her brain is stretching against the roof of her skull). Aloy has always been more than overwhelmed by the wonder of the earth below and the sky within her reach, but she does not discount the awe of the heavens beyond her wings. Even if she does not understand how grand it really is.
She listens as Shipka speaks, and an ear twitches at the insinuation that she believes she owns the air above their heads but she is not defensive. She knows she does not feel that way, knows too that for her the sky is another wide open space, like a hundred million miles of prairie beneath her hooves. Impossible to touch all of it. She might say so, but it’s too many words in the end.
Staircases of starlight remind her that she is back in Beqanna. That her wings that have occasionally been a novelty in her wanderings are once again as commonplace and ordinary as dandelions. They still hold value for her, she was taught to be proud of them, but here there are so many more amazing gifts. “How far did you go? Until it was very cold or further still?” Where the air becomes too thin to breathe? Or perhaps not, Aloy does not know how quickly a starlight staircase could be built and climbed though she does try to imagine.
There is something in the way Shipka so easily opens up to Aloy about her dreams and wishes to walk in those celestial places that makes her more willing to speak. Only moments before she’d been trying to curb herself, thinking that perhaps she was still tired and thus saying more than she normally would to someone she does not know. Thus she finds herself wanting to reassure the filly that her wishes might be attainable. Someday. Somehow. “Someone I know was once given the thing they wanted most. It wasn’t the chance to walk among stars but she said it meant as much to her as that seems to you. A genie granted her a wish… You’re lucky this is your home, those kind of things happen here.”
For someone who is not eager to be verbose, Aloy finds she often doesn’t consider what she is saying when she should. That might be a skill learned with years that she has not yet lived. Those kind of things happen here. They do. She knows. The aforementioned wish was supposed to mean something more for her than prettiness and moody headwear, but she doesn't think it ever will. Doesn’t think she wants it to. As for making her own wishes, the thought of which now having silenced her… No, things are probably beyond that now. Her look is pensive, and worry digs in about her green eyes but she breathes through it, swishing her white tipped tail about her fetlocks and refocusing Shipka. Eager to be distracted by what the girl thinks of genies and wishes and such things.
She's being rude, but she doesn't notice. Her only friend has never cared what silly notions burst out of her mouth, and of course Shipka can only speak in ignorance of those who have wings. What pegasus does she know? Yet they seem so proud of their wings, preening them, and fanning them out beneath the warmth of the sun, featherdust glinting in the sun as it falls about them. Proud, taking up so much space for themselves, carving it out of the meadow. It never occurs to her that the work of cleaning and smoothing feathers, even magical ones, is a necessity and not an arrogance.
"Oh, I was very high up!" She grins openly as she remembers, a child, no more than a smudge of darkness climbing that softly-glowing staircase well into the sky. The night air had been as cold and bright as the shining stars, but there is a wry twist to the grin that spreads across her dark lips. She had, of course, been very small at the time. How far could she have gone?
"It was cold and quiet except for the wind, which felt like diamonds." Funny, how it had seemed silent and deafening at the same time, "but then I got distracted." The memory of that gut-wrenching fall, of that teetering moment between a missed step and a headlong rush to eternity, is still strong. It makes her belly feel like it's twisting in her gut.
"I'm not really sure how high it was. High enough that I landed on the Mountain and didn't get back down until the next day." Her grin returns, tamed slightly. Shipka knows that wishes don't come true as often as they do - perhaps more often. Had she not wished that night to always carry the night sky with her and been met only by silence? It had been granted on another day, but not quite as she had intended. The cool, curling wisps of what once was hair are evidence of that, dark, infinite, glittering with stars in their depths. Aloy flicks her tail, but when Shipka does the same, there is no weight to it, like clouds, like smoke, her tail billows and drifts slowly back to place.
"I guess we are both lucky that way, then. What will you do, now that you've come back?"
