[private] but your savage love

[Aela]

It had been a surprise to see Kota again.

While not an unpleasant one, it had left Aela with lingering questions. There was no denying the swelling of her sides that proclaimed there would be another sibling come spring. Perhaps it's because she is used to being the youngest, she muses. Perhaps it because she has never met Let and has always assumed the role of an only child.

And while there are many more things for Aela to worry about at present, she can't help but come back to the gnawing question of why. (As far as Aela can tell, she is perfection and can't quite understand why her mother would want to face the risk of a lesser creation. But the near-palomino tells herself that she will help with this younger sibling, that she will help it find a purpose even if it will never eclipse Aela. As Heartfire had once reminded her, even ants had their purpose.)

She had sent Skandar out some time ago. They had gone to the flaming tree (that was no longer burning) and when they had parted ways, it only seemed to make sense that the creator would go out seeking the new creatures that stalked and prowled across Beqanna. So many were already terrified of them and the pair looked to take advantage of that. Terror was a platform for chaos and that was an element that both Aela and Skandar thrived.

There is little light. Aela makes her way from Pangea the best she can but the lack of sun is as much of a hindrance as it is a boon. She was curious about the monsters that so many were murmuring about but only in a controlled setting, only if she had some kind of support to go along with her overwhelming memories (and that posed the question if those things could even feel?)

Aela had meant to travel to Hyaline out of curiosity. Had the group of shifters noticed the creatures? Were they attempting to replicate them and feast on the chaos? Did they run from them? The striped filly meant to linger at the border and hopefully stumble across a Hyalean or two that might reveal something of what the skinwalkers made of these exciting times. But she gets lost and as she gazes across the shadows of the Meadow, she knows this is not Hyaline. She hasn't traveled far at all, she realizes with an annoyed huff and an inquiring lift of her blazed head.

Something comes creeping by and Aela instinctively responds by broadcasting a memory: the clicks of the armored aliens in Pangea as they sang to each other during a hunt. The magical blasts coming in varying shades of gray and vibrant orange as parts of Nerine imploded into small, granite bits. The dark oil-slick of the creatures as they lingered in the woods, the eerie yellow-glow of their waiting eyes.

Aela flicks an ear back and angles her head behind her, waiting to see if the lurker had fled.

image credit to footybandit

@[Gale]

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you The eclipse means trouble, Gale is sure, but the darkness that has come with it has not been entirely without benefits. Gale has dedicated a good amount of time to testing the limits of his vision manipulation, enough so that even as he walks through the darkness, he can see more clearly than he ever had in the light. The same is not true for the osprey, who shuffles his dark feathers and clings more firmly to the thick white hair along his companion’s topline as Gale moves through the Field. The osprey can see very little, but Gale can see everything. Forced to travel by hoof with the disappearance of his wings, Gale had briefly weighed the possibility of a canter. It might draw too much attention, he’d decided, and has instead kept to a trot as he makes his way east. A creeping trot apparently, and one that comes to a sudden end at the onslaught of echoes. The brindle stallion freezes, but Erne (catching only the faintest edges of the attack through his connection with Gale) immediately takes to the sky in a rapid beating of wings. He’d been prepared for another monster, but he’d not been ready for…whatever that was. Monsters, yes, but of a different sort. The images of them though, and the feel of them inside his head. Were he someone else, someone who had not been raised alongside a bevy of siblings who could not keep their eyes or emotions to themselves, he might have fled with Erne. Instead, he remains statuesque but for the turning of his eyes, until he’s found the nearby filly who is doing her best to remain equally still. She’d done it, he’s sure, though with his heart still racing he is not quite able to process what exactly it was. “I should take your sight for that,” he says into the darkness between them, his tone nearly polite. It's clipped enough to show she'd struck her target, and short enough to make his displeasure about it clear. “You can’t go around casting things at people you don’t know,” he continues, “The next stranger might not be so disinclined to return the favor.” @[aela]

[Aela]

She hears the sound of beating wings first and there is a brief flare of triumph in her slender chest as the creature flies away. Aela has gotten quite good at even unsettling the wildlife, if she wished it. The adolescent hadn't intended to scare a paltry bird but with so many creatures lurking across Beqanna during these dark times, she couldn't be too careful.

Her blue eyes are still searching through the dark, unconvinced that the offender had fled.

Aela had heard what sounded like hoofsteps - the two-beat gait of a trait - and unless her follower was a pegasi (which they could be flighty things), she wasn't ready to believe that it had just vanished. She remains as still as she can, imagining that Nerinian granite that she had just sent glimpses of. She isn't a shapeshifter and her shape will always be this one - golden and striped with a blue sheen that barely reflects in the dim world they currently live in - but Aela has found that focusing her thoughts during moments like these (when she isn't sure what) is out there allow her to remain calm and her thoughts collected.

But then a voice cuts across the dark from where a silhouetted mass forms. Aela narrows her gaze (though she doubts that the lurker can see it) towards the direction of the voice. That he is upset about the intrusion of his mind is not something that is unusual to Aela; it's that makes the ridiculous claim that he could strip her vision. There is only one mare she is aware of with that kind of ability and Aela doesn't think that is a kind of power that nearby shadow possesses.

He gets points for bluffing, though. Aela can definitely understand that there are some who wished to appear more powerful than they actually were. It's a valiant effort and she decides she won't immediately bombard him with more terrifying memories.

"Oh?" she asks him, a singular word that shows no trace of how she can struggle with them. The question is a direct one, a challenge. Could he really take her sight? Aela might have told him that she doesn't do favors, that she will never indebt herself to anyone but refrains. It's too many words and poses the problem of too many problems. There had been nothing direct in her visions - nothing of herself in them - and so she carefully adds towards the stranger with a practiced simper, "Who said it was me?"

image credit to footybandit

@[Gale]

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you Gale moves closer to the other horse, his brilliantly blue eyes narrowed in concentration. He can see her, can see the wide blaze of her face and the way the hairs catch the fragments of light her skinemits and reflects it back with a blue that seems almost iridescent. Since the brindle stallion does not recognize her face (having given her no thought at all since her mother tumbled down the river in Pangea and he presumed them both dead), he wonders if perhaps she is some relation to Breach. That might make her a shifter, he realizes, but an assessing flick of his pale eyes show nothing but a horse in front of him. One younger than him, at least, who if she is an immortal has not yet reached that age at which time stills. She is pretty, with enough bits of something familiar in her face to make him certain he knows a relative. These past few years he has met a great many horses though, and the amount of things he has seen often make it difficult to recall details. He comes to a halt just as she questions his earlier assertion. Gale looks across the distance that separates them, and soon a bemused laugh accompanies a shake of his long-maned head. She is rather brave, and he supposes the power of her gift might make that an easy characteristic to maintain. So confident in her own abilities, but simultaneously doubtful of his. So she’s not learned caution yet, and he adds a mental check of confirmation beside his earlier guess at her age. The lack of a second empathic attack had confirmed that she was the guilty party. (Her, or someone else immune to Gale’s power, and that’s not something he cares to consider.) “You didn’t ask what I meant by ‘casting things’,” he answers, the implication that if she hadn’t been the one who’d struck him she’d have no idea what Gale had meant. The ingratiating smile she wears is effective on a creature as trusting as Gale, but he is still on edge after the impact of the explosions, and so rather than leave immediately, he instead reaches out with his magic and replaces what she sees from her left eye with the vision of a red sun obscured by clouds, reflected a thousand times in pools of water below. It’s a vision he has sent several times, and he knows it well enough to be sure she’ll see it. And then, just as quickly, he pulls it back, leaving her with her own eyes.  “Why’re you out here, anyway? Target practice?” He asks soon after, shifting his weight just as Erne returns from the sky overhead. The bird grips at the thick white mane with his talons, settling into his customary place riding atop Gale’s hindquarters. He peers at Alea with yellow eyes for a long time, and then turns back to the shadows that surround them. His companion is also watching Aela, his sharp eyes meeting hers unblinkingly, as he waits for an answer. @[aela]

[Aela]

The unfamiliar stallion laughs at her question and Aela can feel her brow lift quietly while studies him from beneath her flaxen lashes. She is the very image of a demure thing; it only the smile that curves the edges of her pale lips that gives the picture away. Aela appears far too impish to be someone mistaken as naive. He is looking at her and she assumes that he sees what so many do - a slender mare who passes for more than passably fair (and Aela certainly has her own opinion on the more).

She isn't exactly keen on coming closer but the distance has always impacted her ability to pass along her projections and if there is a need for a second attack, she'd prefer to have a stronger position. One that gave her more of an advantage than where she stood now. And so the golden girl takes one deft step after another, walking lightly over the frozen ground.

When her blue eyes take a sweeping glance at him, she decides that he might be more than passably fair as well.

"Perhaps," she says carefully, as if she is considering her next words. "I simply did not understand what you meant." (This is the most she has ever said; Aela has always tried to count her words to keep them steady and she can only hope the rhythm of them comes as naturally as the waves that she caught glimpses of from his mind.) But the smile she wears implies anything but. It implies that there is nothing merely simple about her.

It's at that moment she pauses. She stills because the vision that comes into her left eye is not her own and while Aela has never minded intruding upon strangers, she minds greatly that another would dare to do it to her. It's a sunset - a blazing red sky - in a place that she has never seen before. Even as he pulls the vision away, Aela is already summoning memories of the sights of Pangea, of the many terrors that so many Beqanna natives claim to live there.

They remain below the surface of her near-palomino skin, just waiting for the memory-giver to unleash them.

Aela eyes the bird that settles atop his withers before giving a small shrug of her slender shoulders. She would never admit why she was out here; that she and Skandar had parted ways some time ago - when they attempted to light Straia's tree - and she had hoped for some news of him. The smile emerges again while Aela glances back at the brindled stallion, "You seem like a good shot." She plays along with a soft voice, "Are you offering?"

image credit to footybandit

@[Gale]

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you If Gale had been at all inclined to believe her, the smile would have quashed that hope. She smiles as if she knows something he does not, and when she comes closer it is with a dancer’s grace that he appreciates without conscious thought. When he realizes that, he returns his blue gaze to hers, and he raises a single – disbelieving – brow. Paired with a tolerant smile, the doubt is softened and even made humorous a moment before he shares the sunset.  His breath grows still as he waits for a reaction – another attack most likely – but Erne readjusts his grasping yellow talons for a second time and the young mare in front of him only shrugs her shoulders. There’s amusement in her voice when she asks, but as Gale’s eyes travel across her face he feels as though this time he is not entirely unaware of the joke. “Certainly not.” He replies quickly. “I don’t know what it was you did”(because he just knows it was her, even if she prefers to play innocent) “But it’s not something I want to feel again.” He's not encountered her type of magic before, and he finds himself rather grateful. Would it be difficult to grow wings, he wonders, wings strong enough to carry him far from here? He looks up as he thinks it, at the ever-dark and ever-empty sky. This is not the world he had grown up in, but Gale has found that there is less to fear in the dark than he had originally assumed. What is it that the Pangeans used to say, something about survival of the fittest? The golden girl seems like a survivor, for all her youth and lack of caution. He wonders where she has come from, and curiously looks her over in attentive detail, forgetting the earlier consequences of the inattentive wandering of his eyes. @[aela]

[Aela]

"A shame," she murmurs, tempering his hasty reply.

Aela stops a few paces away, pausing those fluid steps to better make out his shape against the shadows. His coat color had been hard to discern at first; with what little light there is, the navy hardly stood against the half-pitch shades that now always lingered. But she can catch varying shades of it as they gleam from the little light that she can provide, glowing from legs in gilded stripes.

The stallion says whatever she has done, it is not something he wishes to experience again (does he know that she would consider that a compliment?)

It's enough that it stills her consideration of a second attack. Aela tilts her pale face in the direction towards him and holds that smile, even as he appraises her. "You'd certainly make a pretty target," she says and the laughter doesn't come from her mouth. It catches the intense blue of her gaze and it flickers there, briefly, before she rolls her shoulders again in a nonchalant way. She has always been confident in her abilities (Aela considers herself an arsenal of Magic - if there is something she can't achieve with her gifts, then there is always the talent of her wit and her cunning). There hasn't been a situation (yet) that Aela has managed to sort out herself.

For now, Gale seems to understand this and there is no need to remind him.

He glances up at the sky and for a moment, her gaze follows. She has never understood the desire to fly. Aela has always been more than happy to remain on the ground, secure in the knowledge that the soil she treads on is hers to walk. She can't quite understand the appeal for a wide-open sky but perhaps this brindled stallion without wings dreams about them. The palomino glances to her side again, noting the absence of them on the brute.

"So you're not out here searching for a thrill, then?" Aela continues to play along, tilting her head charmingly to one way while a dimple (a trademark of her birth mother) forms on the opposite side of her coy smile.

But her curiosity peaked; what he has done is something that she has only known Heartfire to do.

image credit to footybandit

@[Gale]

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you Gale is accustomed to confidence in others, and that the golden girl has the self-assurance tied to striking good looks like hers comes as no surprise. Living so near to Ischia, the nereids and their shore-bound relatives have accustomed him to the ethereal, but he is more than capable of appreciating Aela's dimpled beauty. A few month ago, he would have acknowledged it as well, but he has grown wiser since then. The darkness around them has had less of an effect than the knowledge that he is Cursed. He's learned much in that that time, can even do things like grow a pair of white wings (the right marked with a crimson V). He quickly does just that, flaring them wider as she calls him a pretty target, and afterwards folds them neatly at his sides. He shrugs in acknowledgment of her compliment. They’re not quite like his old wings, but Gale has the most practice with an osprey shape. The darkness around them is empty, but Gale does not place much trust in the Common Lands. They are the perfect place to search for a thrill though, and as the girl suggests it Gale wonders if perhaps that is what has drawn her here. Her confidence seems well-earned, and Gale’s curiosity is piqued. Could he disarm her, he thinks, taking a step closer? She’d not fought off the sunset, and he’d seen no sign of protective armor as he’d so painstakingly scrutinized her earlier. The thought brings an invisible blush across his navy face, which he ignores in favor of answering as if she were genuinely interested in his answer. “I’m on my way to the Field. It’s taken a while to find the best routes on land. I’m used to flying.” Learning new lands in the dark is not the most ideal, but Gale has adapted. Gale has still not quite met her gaze, and when he does she’s smiling in a way that makes his stomach flip. She looks like she knows it too, and the wariness that hadn’t left him grows heavier still. She might not be using her magic, but there are other powers and Gale is far from immune. So he smiles despite his still-present caution, and with that barrier gone asks: “What’s your name? I’m Gale.” @[Aela]

[Aela]

Aela's beauty is a matter of pride for her. There is no magic tied to the lovely smile she gives. There is no supernatural ability associated with her supple curves or the gleaming luster of her gold coat. She has grown up learning to look this way or to smile that way, to know when to tilt her head at an attractive angle. (In a land full of beautiful creatures, it is probably not the most original but Aela will always cultivate every chance she is given.)

This has nothing to do with the skills that sing underneath her sunburst skill and the fact that she has this, it is just another tool in her arsenal.

It is just one more thing that Aela, who rarely leaves anything to chance and who is always looking for opportunity, uses to her advantage. She doesn't come closer but when the brindled stallion grows himself a pair of white wings, the dark does little to hide her expression (subtle as it is). Her brow raises as she studies them - her mind replaying the memory of Gale creating them - before she glances up to the stallion again. It would seem the pretty target had plenty of bows for his string.

"The Field?" she asks. "Don't tell me you're recruiting through all of this mess." Aela teases him again because there is a particular enjoyment from it. Were horses still gathering there, she wonders? She had assumed that most would have herded together and disappeared into the quiet corners of territories in hopes of being avoided by the monsters that roamed Beqanna. After another assessing glance of @[Gale], she imagines he might be the type to think himself some kind of knight from the old stories or perhaps he imagines himself the savior of some lost soul.

(But then the thought crosses her mind though that the Field might be a good place to go searching for Skandar.)

She smiles at the mention of his name. "Are you a force of nature then?" Aela asks the shifter. Perhaps he can do more than just change his shape. It's a delightful thought and it makes the palomino avoid giving the brindled pegasus her name, for now. Her mind instead concentrates on the way that she has seen other skinwalkers change and Aela (very kindly) shares this with Gale in a flurry of borrowed memories: a mighty Taigan tree snapped in half by a brutal wind, the coppery scales she had once glimpsed on the Ice Dragon, the bubbling lava from Tephra's volcano.

It doesn't occur to her that he can't be anything that she hasn't seen.

image credit to footybandit

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you “Only because those in need of homes continue to arrive,” Gale answers. He can tell she is teasing, though he isn’t sure why. Is she so secure in herself and in her home (for surely she cannot be always alone, so young and fair) that she truly need not worry about safety? There is safety in numbers, and that has never been more true than in this continuing darkness. Gale cannot quite place his hoof on what it is about the golden filly that so unsettles him. It is something more than her beauty, more than the coy way she smiles, and when she does not give her name, the softly intrigued expression on his navy face morphs instead into a frown. That frown deepens as he feels the echoes, mostly in concentration. He shakes them away at the image of Tephra’s lava, but based on her expression that must have been near the end of them anyway. He is quiet for a while, considering. Something about that had felt like the empathic-type abilities of his family, but it was also something entirely new. If he were to see with eyes not physically linked to the heart that feels the emotion, would he still experience the visual impression? Gale becomes lost in thought for a while following her question, long enough to strain politeness. This isn’t uncommon for Gale, though he does usually remember not to do so in the common lands without Erne to watch his back. “What is that thing you do?” The question is abrupt, but he can theorize no further without additional information. @[Aela]