"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
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
She has spent too much time wrapped in the embrace of rediscovery.
The transition from Death to Life had been dramatic enough. She had adored the painful strength of the desert sun’s rays, but it did not compare to the fullness she felt when her senses were fully restored after she stepped through that mysterious portal. The crystalline blue of water had never looked so beautiful, the tingling scent of pine trees had never smelled so wonderful, the taste of summertime grass had never been so delicious.
Indeed that transition from gray to color had been striking, but her reflection in that patch of slick ice had been the true reason for her long absence from society. The only two things that remained from the Wishbone of the past were a pair of fiery amber eyes and that drawl of honey and whiskey. Her mahogany face had been swept away by the hands of magic and Death, replaced by a chiseled dark face carved with a gold badger marking. The crisscrossed pattern of scars on her knees had melted into long legs built for speed and athleticism.
While the grayness of Death had easily faded into a hazy memory lying just outside the corners of her consciousness, it took Wishbone longer to adapt to an entirely new body. Her purpose became lost, a blurred concept she felt herself reaching toward. No matter how hard she stretched into the darkness, she could not achieve that bright spark. Wishbone spent days, weeks, months staring into any surface that would shine her unfamiliar face back in her direction.
She wondered if she would ever feel comfortable with herself.
The legs too tall, the head too clearly-defined, the onyx too dark.
And finally, as winter gave into spring and spring began to succumb to summer, Wishbone felt herself relax into the legs and the head and the onyx.
So she gathered the fearlessness and fire that had fed her all those years ago. She pushed her way through the forest and into the Meadow just as the sun stretched into its highest point in the cloudless sky.
With the fading of winter and the return of warmth to the common lands, Quell has spent less and less time in Sylva. He still visits often, catching up and roughhousing with Larrikin and Herrin, but he has come to consider the Field and Meadow more of a home than the ever-red woods. The transience of the places are a comfort to him, and he is fond of the little waterfalls that reminds him of Ischia.
He stands deep in that water now, feeling its wash away the dust that has gathered on the thick scales that protect his legs, underbelly, and the lower part of his neck. With it gone, his gold and white markings are more visible, matching those on his leathery dragon wings, which are spread out just above the surface of the water. He gathers the most warmth he can on his day, and then ducks below the water for a brief second, and clamors out. The chill of it has shaken off the last weariness left by his noon-time nap, leaving him bright-eyed and alert as he looks over the meadow.
A black mare has arrived in the time he spent bathing, her face brilliantly gold in the sun. Like many dragonborn, Quell is inexorably fond of gold, and he finds himself moving toward her without really deciding to. He shakes some of the water from his mane as he does, allowing it to fall across the pale tobiano shoulder mantle that he’d been given by his parents. Though he has always favored his mother in appearance, there is a razor-sharp curiosity in his gold-and-silver gaze, one that often borders on manic if he forgets to disguise it.
He does not forget to disguise it today, and instead offers her an easy smile.
“I’m Quell,” he says, pausing a comfortable distance away. “What brings you to the Meadow today?”
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
The high grass brushes against the lean curve of Wishbone’s belly as she steps into the sunlight. In her past life, the grass would have reached her shoulders, perhaps even higher. Her long, dark legs make it easy to carve her own path through the wild grasses. While she walks, field mice scurry from their hiding places and a few sparrows take flight. She pauses midstep to watch as one of the birds catches a warm western breeze to glide upon. The movement of the wings reminds her of Warrick, how he would glide on salty winds as he patrolled the borders. Wishbone can remember dodging low-lying vines and leaping over streams of lava to race her father from the ground.
A young voice startles her from the memory. Wishbone blinks her distinctive amber eyes and realizes she had been staring at an empty blue sky, the sparrow having disappeared. Her chiseled head turns toward the boy, an expression of indifference marking her black-and-gold face. “Quell,” she repeats the name, testing how it sounds on her mouth. There is something about the boy that seems familiar to her and she wonders if he is the son of someone she used to know. Wishbone knows many horses in Beqanna, though she isn’t exactly sure if any of them will remember her now. She shakes her neck slightly as if to brush the fleeting thought from her mind and the tangled threads of her mane roll across her crest as she does so.
“My name is Wishbone.” In the time she had spent in the quiet corners of Beqanna, tripping over her new legs and searching for her lost purpose, she had contemplated crafting an entirely new identity. It would be easy to imagine a new alias, pursue a new personality, and forget the true Wishbone. She found there were no names that fit. Deeper than that, the conversations she had with the trees in a new identity felt wrong. The true, authentic Wishbone could never pretend to be anyone she isn’t.
Her look of indifference shifts into something more natural for the amber-eyed woman. A witty smile reaches her lips while her eyes shine with a look that might be the cousin to mischief. “I suppose I’m looking for an adventure.”
Wishbone, she says, and Quell imagines the bleached bone with its three points. He’s seen an intact one only once (a leopard seal is not delicate in its consumption), but the fragile white bone is little like the black mare in front of him. He knows her name, and follows it with: “Sixth Queen of Nerine”, and a smile of fond reminiscence. His mother had not been lax with their education regardless of the freedom allowed by his father, and Quell and his siblings know much of the northern land’s history. He has never been to the iron grey shores of his mother’s tales, never walked on the rocky beaches his dam and granddams had ruled.
“My mother’s side of the family has lived in Nerine since the great Reckoning,” he explains as his bi-colored gaze looks back at the open field for a moment before returning to the black mare. “She, likes to pretend Nerine is still the great empire it was, my mother does.” They’d ceded leadership to the frozen island, Quell knows, and whomever their Kahleesi was this days now rules only the little heartland of the once great Nerenian empire. He had thought of asking his mother what she thought of this news that he’d gotten from a sapphire-scaled sibling, but the dragoness was nowhere to be found. He had not looked long; this would not be the first time the piebald vanished into the air.
He notices the shift in her tone, from indifference to mischief, and he watches the way it changes her golden face – makes it even brighter.
“An adventure?” He turns the word over as slowly as he does in his mind, examining the idea from a myriad of angles. “And have you found them often, when you seek them out?”
be the one, be the one to take me home and show me the sun. i know, i know you can bring the fire, i can bring the bones. i know, i know you'll make the fire, my bones will make it grow.
The memory of her death had scared her awake every night in the Afterlife but since her resurrection, she has slept peacefully. Would those nightmares have been more traumatizing if she had known what happened after her consciousness faded into the western ocean? She doesn’t know about how viciously Ivar had torn her jugular from her damp neck or about the years her skull has spent nestled among the fronds of his hiding place.
Nor does she know that the bone that flashes in Quell’s mind is her own bone, washed white by the forces of sun, weather, and time.
She mirrors Quell’s soft smile when he mentions Nerine. Wishbone wasn’t expecting him to know her name, nor her connection with the northern kingdom. It has been many years since she called Nerine home, even longer since she ruled there. Her amber eyes are curious as Quell explains his knowledge. An ache blossoms in her chest for a brief moment when she hears that Nerine is a shadow of what it used to be. Wishbone is certain Breckin is no longer Khaleesi… So who has reduced the thriving northern kingdom to a second-thought? She considers making a trip to the granite cliffs, to see who is ruling now and what their plans are.
Quell’s voice draws her attention from these musings and she focuses on the mystery of his knowledge. His mother must be someone she knows and Wishbone peers closer at his multicolored face as if the secrets of his parentage may speak to her from within the lines of his features. Yet he has moved onto another topic and Wishbone follows along, pushing her curiosity away for another day.
The question sends a laugh out of her throat, a sound that is equally mysterious and captivating. Wishbone’s voice is characteristically rough from her childhood in Tephra, yet the burn melts smoothly into honey-sweet femininity. The unique combination threads itself into her laugh as well, drawing a nearby stallion’s eyes away from his lunch. “Most of the time.” Delight blossoms on Wishbone’s face while her voice drops to a low hum. “Sometimes the adventures find me.” A thin wisp of dark hair brushes against the fading vulture scar that cuts against her left cheekbone. The nerves surrounding the scar remain tender and she flicks her head upwards to remove the nuisance.
“I haven’t had excitement in some time, Quell. What should we do?” She is curious about what he might say, with the idea of bold crusades seemingly new to him. Her gaze is friendly yet intense, though it lingers on his black-white-gold face for a moment before scanning the landscape behind his shoulder.
Though Quell had been conceived in the cenote where his father remains, the boy had also been raised on the Ischian islet that bore the name of their kind. Without Ivar, those treasures had gone unguarded, and had been a delightful trove of wonders for the young pegasus. They were the skulls of vanquished enemies, his mother had said. ‘Oh they were vanquished all right,’ Lothbrok had laughed when Quell has asked for the stories behind them, but try as he might Quell could never get his eldest sibling to elaborate. ‘When you’re older’, the kelpie had said, and that was that. Quell thinks, sometimes, of returning for those things that glitter (a silver antler, some golden pegasus pinfeathers, carefully collected amber pearls and bleached bone coral), that draconic desire to hoard treasure ever present in his mind.
It is what had brought him toward Wishbone after all, the glittering of her golden face.
He’s no desire to take it from her, finding the prospect more than a little nauseating, and instead is content to admire if from a conversational distance. Wishbone appears to be doing the same, though she seems, somehow, to be looking for something rather than at it, but he allows her this oddness as he would any stranger. The black mare does not comment on the fall of the north, but Quell supposes that is not unexpected. Her time as ruler had been long ago; perhaps she is no longer attached to the place the way she once was. That happens, Quell knows, had happened with his own mother.
Having not made a purposeful attempt at humor, Quell is somewhat startled by the laugh that comes in reply. Startled, but pleased, for the sound is soft in his ears and there is more to be admired in her features than simply the bright aureolin color. She has probably had a great many adventurers come in search of her, Quell thinks. He would not mind scaling the fabled granite cliffs to seek her out again.
He is smiling when she asks what they should do, and his bi-colored eyes widen in some surprise. “I’ve never had an adventure,” the winged stallion admits, “But if you do not mind a tagalong I think I would like to help you find one.”
