"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
when all of hell is full, the dead shall walk the earth
For the first time in a long time, he found himself idle. Even in death he had found ways to occupy his time, but now there was only a vast stretch of nothingness that threatened to swallow him whole. The world continued turning on its axis, and yet there he stood, a silent sentinel surrounded by chaos. He had been given a brief taste of some semblance of action, when Straia had led him through the gates of death and asked for his help. But that had been short lived; Beqanna had a particular habit of bringing hell onto magicians who thought themselves more powerful than she. When Straia had been pulled into the chasms of the earth, he had turned and left, though the weight of doing nothing lay heavy on his scarred shoulders. It had never been in his nature to do nothing. He was a man of action firstly, and a loyal one secondly. To stand and watch the seasons bleed into one another...permanent death would have been kinder than mindlessly withering away.
The leaves falling from the tree drew little more than a glance from him. Downwards they went, some spiraling, others falling straight to the cold ground. He sighed, and it was a half disgusted thing. Disgusted that he had noticed something so trivial as the flight of the falling leaf. At this rate, he would have been better off wasting away in the fog of the afterlife. Dead men told very few tales, but the few tales were better than the shit tales told by the living. A dying sunlight shimmered through the broken canopy of leaves, and the cheerfulness of the oranges and golds seemed to mock him. Not that he was ever a cheerful creature; to the contrary, he made granite seem tender and mountains seem talkative. But even he needed a certain bit of social interaction to feel whole. A part of his stubborn equine psyche, perhaps, or a part of his actual heart; he wasn’t quite sure. Whatever the case was, the doldrums did not suit him. With another disgusted sigh he bled into the outskirts of the meadow, watching the world go by and regretting that he was not along for the ride.
TORRID
tarnished x kerowyn, skeleton shifting, wanderer
Let the dead bury the dead, they will come out in droves
But take the spade from my hands and fill in the holes you've made
The skeleton boy had only known stasis all his young life – living as if he were but a moment frozen in time.
He didn’t know who had birthed him; he hadn’t been raised by anybody. No kingdom or territory had claimed his fealty, no family history or legacy (he knew nothing of Tarnished or the chaos and terror that had followed after his infamous sire) had been passed down to him. His trust could only be placed in his self and in the knowledge and hard-won lessons of the wilds that had raised him.
Torrid ventured to the meadow often. He had found that although he did not have much interest in socializing with the many individuals who came to do so, he could observe and mimic those of interest instead. It was how he learned where the best places to find shade from the overbearing sun during the hot summers or how he learned to find food during the scarce winter months when the grasses might be buried beneath several feet of snow.
Although one could describe his life as lonely, it was certainly quite unremarkable. He felt no great bitterness or anger towards unknown parental faces. He’s never experienced deep sorrow or regrets, nor great joy, nor even that first spark of love. He was inexperienced and young – merely surviving one day at a time. The skeleton boy didn’t consider himself to be emotionless, but found that he had trouble expressing himself outwardly or perhaps not feeling as greatly as others when they are put in the same situations. He even lacked dreams and ambitions. He was just like the falling autumn leaves, drifting aimlessly downwards onto the hard ground just to lay piled beneath others and waste away into nothing.
He was a ghost, drifting through this world armed with only a name and a will.
Torrid didn’t know how long he had been watching the leaves drop down from the overhead branches, but clearly, he had done enough introspection for the day and it was time to move on. He shook his head in slight consternation before a crackling of leaves behind him distracted him even more from his previous wandering thoughts. He stood silent and still, making eye contact with the black stallion that strode along the outer portion of the meadow and advanced towards the skeleton boy’s current location.
