"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
His mother had sent him to find either his grandfather or his great-grandfather and learn some of their old stories of war and failure. Naturally, he agreed to it, but he leaves their den with zero intention of finding Vulgaris or Larva anytime soon. The old kings bore him to tears with their self-pity and the way they each speak as though their words carry such gravity. The hunger! The bloodshed! The broken hearts! Crowns can’t help but scoff. He is not a serpent like them, like his mother, and so he dismisses their warnings.
Why hang out with ancient old men when he can explore the jungle some more?
And so he does exactly that, leaping over the trees that Loess burned down long before he was born and ducking the swaying vines that seem to grasp for his short mane. He laughs and occasionally flaps his dripping wings so each jump is extended just a little more. Occasionally, the sound of twigs snapping beneath heavy paws reaches his ears, but there’s never anything there when he turns to find the source. Try as he may, he never gets to see the eerie things that lurk here in the shadows and the peripheral of his vision.
A slow sigh of disappointment escapes his lungs and he prepares to bound off into the underbrush once more until something catches his eye. There’s something ahead - spotted, and slinking away from him. His ears perk straight up. A jaguar?
He skitters forward recklessly, creating quite the ruckus as he tries to catch up to the thing slipping between the trees. Crowns lunges over a broken branch and finds himself tumbling into a heap of coltish legs and dripping wings beside her. Without attempting to right himself just yet, he twists his head to look up at her.
“Hi! I’m Crowns! Are you one of the Scary Things?”
11-20-2020, 08:44 PM (This post was last modified: 11-20-2020, 08:45 PM by Olena.)
She’d always loved stories, even as a filly. Perhaps the reason being that her mother could draw up anything Olena could imagine when she was asleep, and her sister could paint her stories to life when she was awake. She lived through stories (and still does), for she had no other way to experience anything. Even now, the young girl is far too skinny and slender. Her raven wings - obsidian and blue and beautiful - have never even felt the coolness of a cloud or anything other than the stagnant, smoky air of the Tephra.
The girl is staring into the sky through the patchwork of the jungle canopy, daydreaming of crashing through the intertwined foliage of vines and palms without a worry in the world. But she can’t and so she doesn’t, spending her days wishing and imagining. Even now, her pace is slow and unhurried for anything faster leaves her heart throbbing against her chest and her lungs gasping for air. Too much excitement would trigger a coughing spasm which meant soon she would need to rest and, as the sun traverses across the sky lazily, Olena does not wish to do so at the moment.
A shudder of movement within the deeper parts of the jungle causes the buckskin girl to freeze and bring her dark eyes down from the sky. Her brow furrows, stretching her thin neck forward to peer her slender face into the shadows, curious yet frightened suddenly at what could lie within. She visibly jumps back when the colt comes crashing through the underbrush, an audible gasp leaving her onyx lips. In her fright, her face and neck tremor in waves and then disappears. She feels the coolness of water splash against her dark legs as she herself trips and stumbles - unable to steady herself, she falls with a huff right beside him.
Olena tosses her head with surprise as she regains her bearings, her dark eyes coming to his with a bashfulness on her face that had become visible the moment her body hit the ground. She tries to steady her racing heart and though it aches, she smiles breathlessly at the boy - as weak as she is, she’s always enjoyed good fun - and that’s what this seems like.
“Scary things?” Olena repeats him with confusion on her highly expressive face, framed perfectly by the deep blue leopard spots that adorn her. “You mean like you?” She laughs softly but it is cut short when her lungs refuse to give her the air she needs to do so. The winged girl winces, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply to steady her heart and herself. There is a long pause while she does this and she wonders what he thinks of her - phasing into invisibility, stumbling to the jungle floor, unable to catch her breath. She frowns. “I don’t think I’m a scary thing.” She clarifies in a breathy voice, realizing she hadn’t answered his question. “At least I hope I’m not.”
“Hi, Crowns. My name is Olena.” She smiles even though she knows that finding her feet will be something of a challenge when the time comes. “What do you think I am?”
Crowns never cared very much for stories on their own. Instead, he has always loved the night - the dark, the cold, the sounds of the jungle when all good things go to sleep. He fell in love with the glowing eyes of monsters watching him from the ink-black spaces between the trees. But each time he crept from the safety of the den, the eyes blinked and were gone before he could reach them. The hollow that they left in his heart remains crooked and in disrepair.
Perhaps this is why he was so over-eager to reach Olena, believing he had finally found one of them and he could call this one his. But it is only a girl who tumbles to the ground beside him. She’s lovely, he thinks as he stumbles up onto his hooves, even if she doesn’t terrify him. But she says he is a Scary Thing and his heart flutters at her compliment. Him! Scary! God, the smile that beams across his face would put a supernova to shame.
“Do you really think I’m scary?” he asks before she begins coughing. His smile fades to a frown of concern as he steps closer, uncertain of how to help. Her body flickers and the water’s current seems to flow over and through her legs all at once. Crowns finds her gaze again when he regains her breath and manages to speak again.
“I’m glad to meet you, Olena,” he says when he introduces herself. His grin takes its rightful place over his lips once more. “I like all terrifying things, but I like the pretty ones like you, too.”
He wonders if he should help her up or if she should rest a while in the cool waters. They’d worked wonders for him when Isilya had tried to help ease his fever this time last year. Crowns looks down then, wondering if he could ever learn to heal the way she and his grandmother did. He concentrates a moment and holds fast to the memory of how he felt that day, the way he was able to breathe and relax at long last, and he pours the feeling into the stream now. A soothing warmth spreads through the water and he hopes it is enough to alleviate whatever it is that ails her for a while.
His smile is electrifying and she finds that even though she hadn’t meant to, she enjoyed making this stranger happy. “Why wouldn’t I?” she confesses with a quirk of her brow, the sharp blue of leopard print on her face making her all the more expressive and serious. “You certainly gave me a fright,” Olena tells him truthfully, though the smile on her dark lips lets him know that she didn’t take it personally. It had been an accident, after all. But as her eyes fall downcast at the slender tangle of her legs on the forest floor, she frowns deeply at the thought of getting back up.
She doesn’t mind his closeness nor the concern that falls across his face. It’s a normal reaction (one that Olena would be glad to do away with, but is used to it all the same) and she offers him a reassuring smile. “I’m alright,” she breathes sweetly to him and she wonders if he knows it is a lie; one that she has told since she had been a tiny girl and it comes from her mouth so consistently, she often believes it is true.
“Is that what you were looking for, Crowns? Scary things?” Her too-thin face tilts at him at her question, those deep navy eyes sparkling with curiosity. She laughs a bit, the sound tinkling and gentle before she has to stop so that her lungs would not protest against her. She clears her throat, stretching her golden neck towards him as if to bump her muzzle against his dark cheek. “I’m glad that I didn’t disappoint you, even though I am certainly not terrifying.” She realizes she wouldn’t like to see him disappointed, especially because of her.
His face falls downcast and Olena’s deepens with the same concern he had shown just moments before. “Crowns? What’s - ” but she is unable to finish her sentence, for the waters that pool beneath her begin to feel alive, pulsing with energy in each place that her skin rests against it. She lowers her head, her eyes searching for anything magical (besides the feeling, of course), but when the tightness in her chest begins to release suddenly, she looks back to him with surprise. “Are you a healer?” Her voice is breathless and nearly in awe, finding it captivating that such a stranger would offer her something so precious.
His magic is enough to make her feel confident in her attempt to stand. Her thin, onyx legs pull beneath her delicately, then she lifts herself slowly. At one moment she thought she might fall or slip, but she found that whenever she felt weak, those healing waters gave her the energy to steady herself. “You are very nice for a scary thing,” she tells Crowns playfully once she is standing, the sound of the water dripping off of her white splashed belly onto the ground below her. “It leads me to wonder if not all scary things are bad like I’ve been told.”
He wonders if she’s just trying to flatter him with all this talk of him being terrifying, acting as though it should come as no surprise that she feels this way. But her smile is soft and genuine enough that he doesn’t suggest any such thing. Her mannerisms make it easy to trust her, he finds. And besides, she has a different kind of smile when she says she’s fine and he can easily tell that she is not by how long she waits before trying to rise. He did the same thing when he got himself tangled in vines and didn’t want to ask for help. Despite his hesitance, though, he still wanted someone to lend a hand.
Crowns gives a small nod at her question and he can’t help but laugh at the confession. Only Eight really knew of his love of the dark. It feels strange to actually voice such things to someone who may understand just what he means.
Truthfully, he’s grateful for the change of subject when she asks if he is a healer. He has never considered himself anything of the sort, of course, but he is glad to help others. Sometimes that means just spending time with them or, in Olena’s case, lightening the load for a while.
“I can be, I guess. I can do lots of stuff,” he explains with a shrug as though it isn’t at all interesting. He grows bashful beneath her gaze and he finds his cheeks grow warm if he looks into her eyes too long. The boy averts his eyes and focuses on the way the water flows between his legs when it becomes too much like staring into the sun when he looks at her. One of his hooves idly nudges a smooth river stone as she compliments him once more, speaking all the words he’d like to hear.
“Most scary things are nice, I think. They’ve never hurt me,” he explains as he lifts his sapphire eyes to hers once more. “Everyone’s just afraid because they don’t understand. They don’t see what I see.”
If he minds any of this, he doesn’t show it. He just smiles and continues letting the current flow his healing to her.
Olena, for all the caution and frailty that she is, finds that trust comes easy. Her shyness and timidness quickly fades oftentimes - brushed aside with tender strokes of curiosity and the painful ache of longing for friendships. She is starved of them (besides of the ones she has with her mothers and siblings) and seems to be drawn to those beyond her inner circle, a little flame of adventure sparking in her chest each time she has met someone new. So far, Olena has not come across anyone who would wish her harm and perhaps that will be her undoing; too trusting and too weak is a terrible mixture.
“Lots of stuff?” she inquires with a breathless smile (a blend of fatigue and awe making it so). She somehow feels lighter, as if she had just bathed in the waters of the falls further near the coast, though they are nowhere near its healing properties. This feeling would not last long, she thinks, just like the waterfall’s powers, but as she tilts her thin head towards the other, she wonders if perhaps there is something different in the magic he wields. “I think you’ve already seen all I can do,” Olena adds a bit sheepishly, referring to the moment her phasing had made her quiver in and out of invisibility. The buckskin filly snorts thoughtfully, flexing the lithe bones of her iridescent black wings reflexively. She doesn’t even mention her wings as they sit almost limply at her withers - she is too frail to fly and has never had a hoof leave the ground.
“I don’t want to be like that, I think.” Olena pauses, turning her dark blue eyes to Crowns. “Afraid, I mean. I want to understand.” She thinks of the darkness that pulls in close when the sun sets, especially on the nights when the moon is nowhere to be found. She imagines all sorts of things in the shadows, but she is not sure if they are real or only from her mind. Crowns, however, seems to know more about the things that wander in the darkness, and perhaps he could share his stories; ones that she would think of before drifting off to sleep that night. “What is it you see?”
12-21-2020, 10:12 PM (This post was last modified: 12-21-2020, 10:14 PM by crowns.)
CrownS
Crowns has only ever known how to trust others, to assume they only mean well in their interactions with him. The boy even finds faith in Rosebay after she escorted him to the brink of death and left him stranded there. After all, hadn’t she warned him that it would be her turn to lead their games? No one had ever lied or attempted to deceive him and so he believes the same will hold true for Olena. She will be his friend and they will be entirely honest with one another.
He gently nods when she repeats his words, his bright blue eyes meeting hers. There is a moment where he studies her face when she explains that she can only do what she’s displayed so far. Does she think he will mind? His brow furrows and he steps close enough to nudge his nose to her cheek in an attempt at encouragement. “You’re more than enough as you are,” he assures her. She has antlers and spots, and anything else is just an added bonus to him.
Crowns slowly extends his wing and turns himself until he can carefully blanket her with the dripping limb. He keeps little threads of his healing woven between the two of them to help keep her standing near him. His sapphire ears twitch at her questions. What does he see? That feels like such a loaded question to him that he finds himself humming in thought.
“The dark and all the things in it are shy, I think. They run if you get close or if you shine a light,” he says with his gaze focused elsewhere. “But it’s always quiet and peaceful. Th night feels… softer, somehow.”
Perhaps Olena and Crowns will forever hold their innocence, especially if their blossoming friendship is able to stand the test of time as they grow older. So alike (so ready for relationships, for adventures, for stargazing and explorations) in so many ways, Olena knows it will be hard to ever part with him already, even though they have only just met. Especially the way that he soothes the aches in her slender chest and her normally wheezing lungs - he makes her feel alive, no longer bound by the sickness that still ravages her from the moment she took her first breath.
The golden girl blinks at the bay and blue boy as he encouragingly touches her cheek, her raven wings shimmering iridescent blue at her sides. The words he says are familiar, though never been said to her by a stranger. Her mothers ensured that she understood that she has a lionheart and a stronger pulse than she feels, but hearing it from someone besides her family - well, it sends a large and breathless smile across her dark mouth. Touching her muzzle to his, Olena silently thanks him for it.
She watches as his wing unfolds to cover her, turning her head so that she can watch with a gentle and thoughtful awe. Without much thought, she shifts a little closer to him - partly so that she can view the translucence of his wing (it was beautiful to look at the jungle canopy through it!) as well as enjoy the heat that radiates from his side. “Maybe it is,” she muses softly, turning her slender face towards him with those wide and expressive eyes, framed by the brilliant blue of leopard print. “Safer, I mean. And that’s why so many shy things hide in it - to feel safe.”
She feels safe with him, she thinks, but finds herself too nervous to say it out loud - though she had an inkling it would be something he would like to hear. Olena smiles, glancing her dark eyes towards the wing made of water that breaches over her.
