"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
Autumn has colored him in a deep shade of copper. He is used to the sudden change in coloring — from pale green to pine green to deep red to light cream — depending on the season, but Targaryen finds that the tingling sensation lingers into the fall season this year. When he wakes early on a foggy morning, the colt wastes no time in rearranging his feathers from his night’s sleep and taking flight.
The sun has just begun to rise as Targaryen ascends and his muscles easily warm against the chill of the morning. The boy finds that he likes the view of the world from the sky, where the details of the landscape fade into wide brushstrokes of a creator’s paintbrush. On this morning, the Meadow and its surrounding lands are covered by a thick fog that rolled in during the night. The climb to an altitude above the treetops and the fog makes his growing wings tired, so Targaryen spends a moment drifting along an eastern current to rest them.
A familiar cry brings the boy’s brown eyes up from observing the ground below. The feathery body of a golden eagle glides on the currents beside Targaryen, a keen eye glancing over his red and white body. The eagle almost seems to be saying, You’re tired already? and Targaryen feels like he hears a chirping, thin voice in his ear. The bird has been lingering around him recently as the seasons have transitioned, perhaps a companion gifted by his mother as a protector. He isn’t exactly sure why his mother would send a creature to guard him — she seemed to only barely care for him before he was weaned — and Targaryen isn’t particularly fond of the bird following him everywhere.
The boy tucks his wings closer to his sides and dives for the Meadow once the sun has burned away the majority of the fog. When he lands, it is entirely unceremonious. He is still learning to use his wings and build the muscles that work them, but the way he returns to the ground is nothing short of messy. Grass and dirt cling to his copper-and-ivory sides as Targaryen stands up, wincing as his left foreleg protests that particular landing.
Settled gracefully in a cottonwood tree nearby, the golden eagle seems to make a noise that sounds like laughing in Targaryen’s mind.
Today Catryn is feeling a little bolder than most days. She’s still uncomfortable exploring on her own, still wary about what she might find outside of Pangea, but spending her life listening to others meet and keeping to herself, keeping safe, is only entertaining for so long.
The day is warming around her as she slowly moves and feels the tickle of fog on her skin fade away. She’s listening for something interesting, something to give her a direction in the vast emptiness of her world, hoping for… well anything really. Although her world is dark there’s been nothing to fear. Sixteen had gotten them out of Pangea when it was falling apart and that had been the first time she felt afraid.
But now the earth was not rumbling beneath her hooves so there was nothing to be concerned about, right?
Just a world she could not see.
A little bit of ruckus draws her attention - the sound of someone having a rough landing she thinks. Catryn’s head turns towards the sound and her body follows it. When she stops, she’s just a little bit too close than what would normally be considered polite. “Are you alright? That sounded… interesting.” Catryn tilts her head to the side, a cautious smile softening the dark face.
Targaryen had been hoping the golden eagle was the only creature to see his messy landing, but the sound of a stranger approaching brings his eyes away from inspecting himself for damages. With a stranger of a father and an absent mother (as absorbed in the world of nature as she was, he visits every few weeks and finds her rooted into the same soil as his last visit), the boy was forced to learn entirely on his own. A plethora of siblings lie scattered throughout Beqanna, but Targaryen knows neither names nor faces. As soon as he could stomach grass, the boy has been alone.
And although his eyes are fully functioning, Targaryen feels so isolated he might as well be wandering in the dark.
The girl has a soft, dark face but he takes a singular step away from her. Unintended social isolation has made him wary of strangers, even if they are friendly girls. “Um, yeah, I’m fine.” Targaryen’s cheeks feel warm with embarrassment, but he shuffles his bi-colored wings at his sides to settle himself. “Sorry you had to see that. I’m still learning how to use my wings,” he admits quietly.
The golden eagle, apparently uncomfortable with his perch in the tree, floats on a low-riding breeze to Targaryen’s back, where he lands at the boy’s withers. The eagle’s claws sting for a moment and Targaryen grits his teeth against the pain but makes no move to shoo the bird away. It feels rude to move the bird from a comfortable position, and he is certain he can handle the eagle’s weight despite the way the stinging has melted into a slow, tolerable burn.
She hears him step away, and though a delicate frown darkens her expression for a moment she decides not to think much about it. Perhaps she had misunderstood, or he was still getting his balance. There are plenty of explanations.
His words, however, cause her frown to deepen. Why does everyone she meet make a comment about seeing in the first handful of words they say to her? She catches the sound of a second, smaller, set of wings and this eases some of her frustration because she’s curious about what’s going on. Does he have a companion? Or was there just a nosy bird nearby?
She’s never met a companion before so she hopes it’s the first.
Finally, when he asks for her name, does the star-speckled filly reply. “Catryn. And I didn’t see anything - but you made a lot of noise, Targaryen.” Belatedly, she tries to soften this comment with a small smile. “I haven’t tried to learn yet.” She stretches her sunlight wings slightly at her sides, shifting the beams of them. “To fly. I mean. It feels… dangerous. When you can’t see.” Catryn does find a genuine smile then, though it’s a self-deprecating one. "What's it like, though?"
01-06-2021, 11:45 AM (This post was last modified: 01-06-2021, 11:45 AM by Targaryen.)
.
.
.
Targaryen doesn’t notice the way her eyes are glazed and unfocused until she mentions his clumsy landing. At first, he is confused; he wonders if she had merely been looking the other way when he fell. But the hazy look in her eyes (the way her gaze strays beyond his face and into a world he can’t quite see) leads him to believe she truly can’t see his landing or anything else that surrounds them.
How different would he be if he couldn’t see? Targaryen has never come across someone with a sense that is lost to the whims of the world, and this sudden phenomenon brings a flood of questions to his mind. Would he be as independent as he is now? He pictures himself, old as he is now, curled against his mother’s unfeeling side because he has never had the confidence to leave her and venture into the darkness. Would he use his wings at all? It would be hard to fly without the ability to see. How would he calculate when to land (something he is struggling with even while he can see the ground rushing up to meet him)? How would he avoid the other flighted creatures, or know when to ascend to avoid the treetops?
His chest feels warm and tight with a sudden appreciation for Catryn. She is bold in ways he probably wouldn’t be if he were in her place. “It’s scary at first. You feel like you’re falling and you’re not sure if your wings will carry you.” He remembers his first attempts, carefully moving his wings to gain a few feet of airspace. “It seems silly that some feathers can carry your whole body through the air.” Though her wings are billowing rays of the sun captured against her sides, Targaryen assumes they work much the same as his own.
He wants to tell her how brave she is, to explore the world while her eyes see only darkness. Targaryen opens his pale mouth to say the words but closes his mouth quickly after, worried that turning the conversation back toward her blindness and his curiosity will push her away.
Catryn knows the sensation of falling and it is one she can feel vividly now as Targaryen speaks, even though her hooves are solid on the ground. She can imagine that weightlessness, the feeling of her heart skipping a beat in that moment before she feels the solid ground again. It’s frightening and, in a funny way, because of that it’s something that intrigues her about it too. There’s a lot about the world that is unknown to her and she wonders, if it would be possible for her to know this one thing.
She knows and believes that it is dangerous for her - but maybe like the feeling of falling that doesn’t have to be all bad.
She’s fallen plenty of times before, though they’ve mostly been short distances. A few adventurous tumbles off large boulders in the canyons of Pangea. Now that she thinks of it (though she cannot say for sure) she’s not sure she’s actually fallen from high enough to test out whether her wings could actually work. “Falling doesn’t scare me,” She states with a bravado that she only partially feels, but she lets it inflate her all the same.
She squints those useless eyes of her into the direction Targaryen’s voice and movement are coming from, trying (and failing) to come up with a way to continue the conversation without it feeling like an interrogation. Catryn just has too many questions she wants answered, and he did answer the first. “How did you learn or… I guess how did you start?” Her voice is cautious and curious this time, as though she's aware these are questions she shouldn't ask - because she knows she shouldn't fly - but she wants to know all the same.
“I have an idea,” he says, and Targaryen hears his voice fill with more hope than he has felt in a while. He’s been lonely, a boy with parents too invested in their own activities to care for their son, and Catryn’s questions bring warmth into the emptiness of his life. “There’s a place not far from here. You can practice flying there! It’s where I practice sometimes.”
It’s a place he had discovered on his mission to fly, bent on finding the true capabilities of the bone and muscle and feather sprouting from his shoulders. Targaryen had been skeptical at first; the hill wasn’t terribly tall, and he wasn’t sure if he would have enough time to catch the air under his wings before he hit the river. But it had become the perfect place to learn how to fly, and the distance had felt much larger when he was falling, and he supposes it might be perfect for Catryn as well.
The tobiano rustles his feathers against his sides with excitement, and there’s a spark in his brown eyes. “I’ll tell you about the place on the way, so you can follow my voice to get there.” It’s the first time he’s mentioned her vision (aside from his accidental comment), but he states this with gentlemanly purpose. The eagle, as if he sensed Targaryen’s departure, shoots off the boy’s back and begins to circle the sky above them. As they walk, he describes the hill to her in detail — perhaps too much detail, but his excitement for her has swept him away.
He mentions how it stands at the edge of the Meadow, where the ground slopes upward before suddenly dropping out (the mechanics of how such a thing could happen are lost on him), and below the hill is the snaking body of the river. The section that winds along the hill is deep enough to protect young bodies from bruising themselves on the rocky bottom, and the Forest stretches out on the other side of the water. The trees are thinner at the edge of the river, and Targaryen reassures her that she can let herself fall into the water or push her wings to carry her above the treetops.
They are ascending the hill as he laughs and admits, “I ran into the trees a lot, and they hurt… But you forget about all of that once you fly.” Once they reach the top, Targaryen tells her to stop and hesitantly flexes his wings. “Now, the dropoff is about two strides in front of you. I’m going to jump with you if that’s okay.” He says this last sentence shyly, and Targaryen feels his cheeks warm like he has eaten something spicy.
“Okay.” She replies a little breathlessly, the idea of practicing filling her up with warmth. Although Catryn would like to fly, she’d always shied away from the Catryn is frightened but exhilaration overrides her fear and makes her determined not to show it to Targaryen. It seems like a poor way to repay his kindness at even offering to help or his thoughtfulness in leading her to where he wanted to go.
His excitement is infectious and it helps to ease away some of that fear - and she follows him as though there’s a tether binding them. She moves with careful grace, ground-travel always being relatively safe but occasionally involving pitfalls and tripping hazards. She tends to prefer the meadow over places like the forest.
Catryn lets his voice ground her as the actual ground begins to rise into a slope. Her ears twitch with the combination of his voice and the nearby river. Its presence is almost comforting - at least if she crashes it won’t be particularly painful. The mention of the treetops worries her, though, and she’s frowning slightly when she stops.
“Okay.” She says again, when he says he’s going to jump with her, trepidation making the word wobble a little bit. But she steels herself soon after and repeats it once more, stronger this time. “Okay.” It's funny to think how immediately she's come to trust him. But she does. If Targaryen thinks this is safe - she has no reason to think otherwise.
And then before she can think she unfurls her sunlight wings and takes those two strides with feigned confidence. She feels her heart drop with her body before her wings catch her. She tries to flap her wings, wondering when she will collide with the trees, but the sensation of being aloft is so new, so strange, so wonderful, she panics and falls right into the river.
The panic gets worse when she disappears into the water but after some undignified flailing, she manages to get her head back into the air and her hooves on solid, but slippery, ground so that she can stand. The sunlight from her wings sparkling on the waves she's created. Her ears flick for signs of her new friend but she doesn’t waste time in calling out as well - a smile growing despite her spectacular failure. “Targaryen? Which way to the hill? I want to try again.”
He knows some of the feeling she has, the way her heart flutters up into her throat. Targaryen cannot picture what it would be like to try flying without sight, but neither can he imagine walking without sight. Yet she has been able to do this — to travel from one place to the other, to survive this long — and he knows she will be able to fly as well. It might take time, but he hopes this hill will give her the space to learn how to soar beyond her graceful, tender walking.
And with all the loyalty he has, Targaryen doesn’t fail to fall with her.
He had plummeted into the water the first time too. It isn’t easy to catch the air under wings you have never used, to ignore the fear that drops you closer to the ground, to press closer to the sun while you feel gravity pulling you down. Targaryen has learned how to fly since that first drop (though his landings seem to be clumsy enough that even a blind girl notices them), but he lets himself fall willingly into the water after Catryn.
He avoids her pink-and-black body, landing in the water beside her, and brings his face to the surface with an exhilarated smile. Targaryen lets out a victorious whoop of excitement as he finds Catryn’s side. “That was awesome!” He touches his nose to her shoulder, a signal of his presence. The combination of sunlight and water at her sides sparkles in his brown eyes, catching Targaryen off-guard for a moment.
“It’s this way,” he says with a happy laugh, pleased that Catyrn feels confident enough to try again, even if she has failed the first time. The ground is slippery under his feet, and it takes Targaryen a moment to climb out of the water. He is confident his frantic splashing will guide Catyrn out of the water as well (and his definitely ungraceful scramble might be because of the slick footing or because he is just plain clumsy…).
This time he chatters extra tips while they climb the hill. As they reach the top, Targaryen flicks his dripping tail in his friend’s direction with a laugh to spray her with the remaining river water. “We’re at the top again,” he admits as he stops. “It’s about four strides in front of you now.” And his chest swells with excitement and hope that this will be the time she catches the air under her sunlight wings.
She feels exhilaration, pure and sweet, and it’s fostered by the encouragement from Targaryen - no laughter over her splashes - and she does not miss that he kept with her, right into the water. Her trust in him deepens, solidifies even further. Perhaps it shouldn’t, perhaps she should feel at least a little wary, but her smile shines bright as her wings as they emerge from the river.
She follows the sound of his movement like a tether, and then his voice afterwards as she carefully navigates the slippery bank and onto more solid ground. There is a smile blazing on Catryn’s face the entire time and it blossoms into bright laughter when he flicks his wet tail at her - she does not hesitate to do the same with her own pink-tipped tail.
Her smile falters for a moment, but out of concentration this time - she runs through his tips and the distance to the edge in her mind. A few deep breaths and then she moves before she can hesitate, her sunshine wings unfurling at her sides again. After a small lurching drop, this time they catch her and she beats at the air to rise, water dripping from her soaked body into the river below. “I did it!!” The feeling is absolutely terrifying but thrilling as well. Her sunshine wings blaze at her dark sides as she flaps awkwardly but effectively enough to (almost) clear the tops of the nearby trees - her legs just earning a few scratches as they brush through them. Once she’s past them - once she’s in the air and has absolutely no idea what’s around her in any direction she has to hold onto the thrill so that the fear will not take over.
A nervous laugh escapes her and she calls out for her friend and her guide - “Targaryen! What about landing??”
