"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’s the same old shit, just a different century. Isn’t that how it always goes? War breaks out, battles are fought, the same things are always tousled for. It’s land, it’s a crown, it’s a poorly begotten hate. What truly is important enough to fight for anymore? He remembers his time of chaos and blight - setting lands on fire just to see them burn, manipulating souls just to see what he could make them do. His proclivity for mischief will never truly falter, but perhaps now it is less bent on mass-destruction, and more tuned towards the miniscule moments. When the world is your oyster, sometimes the fine grains of sand are more enjoyable to pluck than the meaty pearl in the middle.
Again he finds himself in the same old place, just a different season. Summer is here now, something he has never preferred but must endure nonetheless. How many summers has he scorched underneath? How many more must he see through? Summer, it seems, is the best time for play-things. The summer heat that starts off languid and breezy - the citizens of Beqanna stretching out in the sunwarmed lands. And by the end? By the end there is stir-crazy, sun-crazy stretches of time - where there are ripe souls to pluck and play with.
And so he stands lazily in a copse of trees drinking in the little shade it offers, his eyes trailing the horizon for his next grain of sand.
10-01-2020, 10:17 PM (This post was last modified: 10-01-2020, 10:19 PM by Aela.)
Aela is still figuring it out.
She doesn't have centuries worth of knowledge to have the kind of understanding that @[Eight] has. If a memory is particularly strong enough (and the ones that have the capability to last often are - emotions like betrayal and hatred, drowning sorrows and heartbreak), Aela might get a glimpse of it.
Aela only has two years worth of understanding but in that short time, she has come to understand some things while still striving to figure the rest out. The nearly-palomino filly is becoming determined that Beqanna will learn her name, even if she can't speak it aloud. Infamy will find Aela. There are plenty of things she doubts but that is not one of them. Her great-grandmother has said that there is greatness in her blood and Aela is certain she will rise to meet it.
It is just the figuring out how.
There are some obvious paths to the kind of immortality she is seeking. There are crowns (but they seem so trivial, so flimsy to her when the Queen of Nerine just let her granite tiara tumble and what of the Redwoods? The Forest in the North - Taiga - turned into nothing more than tinder for the fire-breathers). A crown is something that seems so easy to lose. Lands can be lost as easily as a horse might wander through Beqannan borders. There are battles, she supposes. But she recalls that day in the Nerine and Aela remembers being covered in sweat and soot and there had even been the chance that she might have been marred or maimed. No. She was far too lovely for something as blustering into battle. And well, there is martyrdom. But only fools make martyrs of themselves and Aela knows she is no fool.
So what then?
Her blood is calling with that greatness. It is pulsing in her veins, her heart begging between beats that she do something with it. Do something. Do something. Do something. It spurs her away from the canyons and ravines of Pangea. It keeps her well away from the North. It keeps her moving through the Common Lands as she tries to figure out what is that she will do.
The striped filly, distracted with those thoughts and aiming to keep herself away from others, will miss him. (He is brown, after all. Simple. There is nothing about him that gleams or dances in the dismal rays of sunlight that break through the viridian-covered branches. Not like she does.)
He might be looking for a grain of sand but what he will find is her.
Golden Aela.
What is there truly to figure out in this world? It is a constant spinning circle of the same repetitive triumphs and failures. Beqanna aches on, its descendants die - return - and die again; is there an honest question to answer? Is there an ‘ah-ha!’ moment where one turns on the light and discovers all of the answers inside? He has ceased to care. He has nothing to discover any longer, he has no keen interest in much of anything anymore. Is this what it is like to grow old and never die? Oh, to be young and golden again - to have the courage for dreams and desires and long-laid plans. What is left when you have already accomplished everything?
How does that go again? Some look for greatness, some stumble across it, and for some it is thrust upon? Which will you be, @[Aela]? Will you endlessly search until you find something you deem good enough? Will you croon to the faeries, traverse the corners of Beqanna, each quest achingly longer than the next? Will it be forced onto you (although how can you force something so desired)? Or perhaps, you have just stumbled across it now - in the so plain and simple-colored man before you. Perhaps your search has ended, your query for greatness quelled with the meeting of his man.
It is true - there is nothing fantastical about him. Though his power careens through the history of Beqanna, though he could adorn himself in every imaginable color and trait and swathe of markings, he chooses to remain simple. Bay and black and the barest of physical traits. How strange it was now, compared to when he had been born - traits were far between, and never so far fetched as the ones he saw now. Why, when his mother saw him appear with wings and a horn she had been shocked as could be. And now, they are but simple adornments in the vast plethora of the faerie’s gifts.
You, Aela, make him pale in comparison. You are an explosion of gold and the barest of blue, and he tastes in the air the traits that run through you - all light-hearted and airy, gifts that lean towards something (someone) good. But what are you really? Is your heart as pure as how you look? Does sunlight filter into the shadows deep inside you, too? Can such greatness be birthed from such sanctity and soulfulness? I supposed there is but one way to find out.
He shifts his weight, moving with the shade of the trees, watching your aureate aura go by. No, of course you would not see him - something so boring, so trivial in your grand scheme of things. But still, he calls out, as your back turns towards him and on with your way. “You seem to be on quite the destination. Where to, my gleaming girl?”
10-04-2020, 07:35 PM (This post was last modified: 10-04-2020, 07:41 PM by Aela.)
She knows nothing about him (though to be fair, she doesn't know much of many). He is dark bay stallion - slightly hidden by shadow - and there is nothing about him that commands a second look. When she passes by him, the notice that was he there flickers across her mind as quickly as walks by the older horse.
Aela is so busy searching for her own infamy that she certainly doesn't consider his.
He calls out to her and she suddenly stops. There often many who pay Aela no mind; growing up in the North, it had offered her some flexibility on reneging on slipping past the borders of Taiga and out to the Common Lands where she was free to do as she liked. (She was free to do as pleased in Taiga and Nerine, too. It was just that she was told to stay. It was just that there had been implication she was not to go outside the restricting borders of the North.) Those who thought because she couldn't speak must mean that was dumb as well as mute were often surprised to find that the filly was adept at wielding her gift - using it as a 'voice' - and Aela found that she rather enjoyed leaving them overwhelmed.
As she got older, there were fewer Northerners who seemed to think that because she couldn't speak that Aela had nothing to say. No, the Taigans (and some Nerinians) learned that the girl with gold striping adorning her knees had a rather loud personality, even if her voice never echoed in their ears. The trepidation she sometimes saw when they came across her again was far better than anything she could have ever said.
The adolescent thinks this interaction will be no different than the others. When he addresses her, she whips her slender head behind her to see the stallion emerge from the shadows. He is darker than she assumed - he could almost pass for night. His horn glints in the sunlight that comes to greet him and there is a glimmer of respect on Aela's face when she sees his wings. (It was unfortunate that she was born without them, she thought. Aela thinks she was destined for the sky as much as she is destined for greatness.)
Her ears flick back but there is no further sign of irritation on her golden face. Your gleaming girl? she thinks. Who is he that he thinks he can address her in such a way? Her growing flaxen tail flicks behind her and Aela takes a step around, turning to face the stranger. She goes to read him as she does so many others - she waits for a wave of some emotion to wash over her, some memory to try and carry her away - and yet nothing comes.
Odd.
Trying to keep her own uncertainty out the image she projects to him, her brow furrows slightly with concentration and the girl frowns. She flashes images (echoes) of himself - dark and stoic, still partially submerged in shadow - to the stallion. The question she thinks might come clearer than her memories: You are real, aren't you?
He could know everything about her in a breath. Her thoughts and wishes and desires are all his for the taking. Her lack of discern for him, her aching desire for so much more. There is nothing to hide- nothing to fear. There is nothing but him and her; a moment in time that could stretch eons if she lets it - or it can break in an instance. Because that is all anything ever is - something so simple and sweet and delicate as a placeholder in time. In a way, it is just like power - fleeting and fierce, but oh so gentle to the touch.
(But she does not. And of course she does not. Because there is so much more for her out there.)
He doesn’t know if he exists or not anymore- maybe that’s what happens when you get too old, when you are too far gone, when so much life has passed by. What is real and what is what you’ve wished for? And you cannot take a claim to anything you have ever done, or will do.
How strange to see the future before him - a girl who wants to taste everything, who wants to feel the world, who wants to conquer everything she steps upon. In his old age, it is almost nostalgic. It is almost like seeing himself as a small thing in Gallows’ band of conquestidors. Once upon a time, he was the same kind of hungry. Once upon a time, he had the same gall that she did - and it is a blessing to see. Remember, remember? There were days where everything was not possible - before magic, before might, before the faeries infected his blood and bone.
How could you ever know that he could be a key to salvation - the answer to everything you wanted? He is so simple. So plain. In the course of your golden path, he is a dark and slumbering shadow - something to overlook and see beyond.
” I am real enough. He speaks to her the best way it seems she knows how. Her head cracks open to him, a way to communicate (and yet somehow he does not push further. Words are enough - he does not wish to know the desires and thoughts deep inside). He steps closer, now that she has stopped her wayward movement. “You’re looking for something that’s not here. What is it?” It is floating and fleeting, a thought into the wind - but he knows she will catch it.
She is golden, and she is almost fire, and she will be his.
10-30-2020, 11:53 AM (This post was last modified: 10-30-2020, 11:56 AM by Aela.)
Aela certainly knows she exists.
There has never been a doubt in her mind. She has known since the moment that greatness existed that she was destined for it. Aela doesn't know the shape or the shade or the how yet; but those are the specifics, things to be sorted out when the moment finally arrives.
She just makes sure that she always arrives and thus is always ready for the moment.
This one starts as nothing spectacular. It is another day but there is still promise for it because Aela has decided to walk this way. She has chosen her path and she chooses her steps without being told where to go or what direction to take. (There are storms bred into Aela - generations of windmakers and she is the daughter of a cliffdancer - and so the girl carries freedom in her flowing stride.) Aela is glancing him over - this stranger that chooses to emerge from the shadows - because he answers her with a surety that she has only encountered from very few. Her whiplash of memories seems to change nothing about his indomitable nature. He steps closer but there is nothing coming from him; there is nothing for her to see.
The golden girl has gotten too sure of herself. Aela didn't expect him to crumble into sadness or fall into a rage as some do. He was far too stoic for that. But she had wanted a tremor of... something. She likes the visual reminders that her gift is a powerful one and that Aela - a mere slip of a girl - is the one to make them react as they do. But her dreams of leaving another knock-kneed and trembling will have to wait for another day (or at least, for someone who is not @[Eight]).
She makes no motion to come closer to him. Aela simply peers up at him from beneath her thick lashes. Despite his lack of luster, he carries a presence with him. She can feel him in her mind - not prying but drifting through like a breeze. (Some part of her bristles against it - a brief but brilliant spark - but Aela isn't daft; the mindreaders and Magicians have taught her that this is the easiest way to communicate.) The dark stallion asks her a question and for a moment, Aela merely looks at him like he ought to know the answer.
But the girl rolls her slender shoulders, coming to understand the power that roils off him in waves. Even if she doesn't know what (or who) he is, like calls to like; Aela understands the power of him because of the untapped potential with her. My future, she tells him, somewhat toying with the Magic in front of her. Do you know where I might find it?
image credit to footybandit
so this was started with bourbon the night before and ended this morning with a PSL - enjoy.
