"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
He has stood motionless in the darkness for weeks, now. The snap of a twig underfoot no longer draws his attention, nor the mournful cry of some still confused lark. His wild blue eyes stare endlessly into the void as he keeps his focus drawn entirely upon the wordless whisperings. Crowns does not know the tongue in which they speak. He has twisted and contorted his magic in every shape he can imagine, but the language is too old even for the familial serpent to know.
Even so, he listens to the chittering and gnashing teeth that loom just beyond his sight.
But today he takes a step forward and his muscles ache at the simple motion.
His lips part and his wings spread wide in full display. “Where did you come from? Where are you going?” he whispers softly, as though the soundwaves of his voice alone will shatter this moment. He does not realize, but his legs have grown and his muscles have filled him to the shape of a man now. There is a timber to his voice that was not there when the sun set for the last time. He only knows the dryness of his throat and the tired throbbing in his knees from being still for so long. He takes another step and thin roots are torn from their place, having grown over his hooves.
The whispering stops when he draws near. Crowns sucks in a worried breath, praying he has not sent them flying from him. They do not answer in words but with a small blue flame. It hovers at his eye level, lapping at nothing as it bobs up and down, as a fishing lure might. The boy hesitates before taking another step. Another flame flickers to life. His brow furrows and something in his core begs him to flee from this place before he cannot.
He takes a third step and more fire is summoned to this gathering. Slowly, they float near and begin to circle him. The foxfire orbits him and yet they give off no heat. Crowns wonders if he should continue his walking until he hears a short snickering sort of laughter from the depths of this particular void, and then something running away in bounding leaps.
02-11-2021, 02:26 AM (This post was last modified: 02-11-2021, 02:27 AM by Narya.)
i've been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night and now i see daylight
When it had first come, the darkness had crippled her. It closed around her like a fist, and while she had never been afraid of it before, she is afraid of it now.
Because here in the dark everything is quieter, but the voices in her head are louder. The birdsong has all but muted, the dull roar of conversation that rose from the common lands had turned to hushed whispers. The only sound was her heartbeat in her ears and the ghosts that tried their hardest to reach her.
There were rumors of things that lurked in the night, too, but Narya had not seen them herself. She didn't trust her ears, either. Her mind was already so full of indiscernible voices that there were times she could not differentiate from the living and the dead, from real and intangible. From a ghost in her mind and a monster in the forest.
She was going to lose her mind, she was sure of it.
She is in the depths of the forest, swallowed by the darkness. She wonders if she stood here long enough if darkness would simply become her; if she would dissolve to shadow, or to nothing. If maybe the creatures she had been warned against would come for her and maybe that was the secret to finding the sun again.
If she stares into the dark long enough, she almost thinks she can see something. Shapes forming from the shadows, strange things that seem to shift toward her. And something that looks like a light, too. She blinks, and the light is still there, and for a moment all is silent—her mind, her heart, her breath. Seemingly against her will her legs begin to move her forward, even though all of the what if's are sending pinpricks of fear up her spine. But she is so tired of the dark. She is so tired of the threat of monsters she cannot see, and thinks that maybe she is ready to see them; let them take her, for all she cares.
There is the faintest echo of what could have been a laugh, but the sound is not bright and happy like the laughter she is used to. There is something almost sinister to it, and accompanied by what sounded like something crashing off into the forest, it startles her to a stop. She almost does not notice the boy standing there, but when she does she can feel herself shrinking back. But he has seen her, or at the very least heard her. She hadn't been terribly quiet in her approach, overcome by that strange reckless streak that she was.
She stands, her heart hammering uneasily in her chest, unable to make out his face—if he seemed friendly, or if she should be just as afraid of him as the monsters. “The lights,” she says, forcing the soft tremble of fear from her voice, “is that you making them?”
He has always preferred the night - the suffocating quiet, the stillness in the air. When the shadows devoured Beqanna, he had been thrilled in a way that others, perhaps, were not. There is mystery breathing in every inch and he is driven to pick it all apart until he is one with it all.
(There is an otherness to this night, naturally, but he has learned to trust it as he did the others.)
He turns his brilliant sapphire head and his dimly glowing eyes settle on her long before she speaks. Her every step is like thunder up against the hush of the dark. But she has become frozen with some sort of trepidation he cannot understand, and so he takes the few long, tender strides required to meet her halfway. Her face is dark with a few red locks spilling over her face and down her young neck. Crowns assumes she is similar in age to him, but he has been wrong about these kinds of things before.
“The lights?” he parrots back dumbly, already forgetting the foxfire still bouncing around him. A little blue orb bounces lazily into his field of vision shortly after he speaks, summoning an embarrassed laugh from him. “Oh. I didn’t make them but.. I think they’re mine now?”
He extends his wing to let the dripping silhouette brush against a passing flame. It neither sizzles or spits but rather passes through, unhindered by the appendage. Crowns takes a moment longer to consider the gift before bringing his oceanic gaze back to the girl.
“My name is Crowns, by the way. What’s yours?” he asks with a smile that manages to breathe life into the night.
i've been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night and now i see daylight
He does not seem at all bothered by the strange blue flames that orbit around him as if he is their sun, and she stares at him with a mix of caution and wonder. He is a brilliant shade of blue, she notices, even when shrouded in darkness. From his side wings crafted of water ripple, and while she is still unsure of him — as she is with most — she finds herself wanting to stay. Mostly she is fascinated at the way he simply accepted the foxfire; that he was not afraid of something new and strange.
She wonders what he would have done if he had woken up one day to the voices of the dead whispering in his head.
She wonders how he would react to all the dead things that haunt her, awake or asleep.
She assumes he would take it as easily as he had the discovery of foxfire.
It is only weak, brittle-boned things like her that cannot handle such things.
“They’re pretty,” she tells him softly, with a faint but genuine smile just hardly pulling at her lips. She still eyes them a little bit warily, as she doesn’t quite trust the magic of Beqanna. She has seen it do more harm than good, and most things just seemed like darkness disguised a gift. Especially now, with a never-ending eclipse, and creatures lurking in the shadows. She did not fully understand what they were, only that they are not something she can communicate with. She can never decide if that is a good thing or not.
Her heart stumbles in her chest at the smile that he offers her, always surprised when someone seems even mildly interested in her. “Crowns,” she echoes his name, trying it out on her tongue, before adding with another small smile, “keeper of fire. I’m Narya.”
Having just witnessed him discover this new gift, and knowing how she herself has awoken before to find herself changed (the rubies and the gold, the way her coat changed from simple bay to black and a deep red, and of course, the ghosts), she cannot keep herself from asking, “Does this happen to you a lot? Finding new...gifts?”
04-03-2021, 09:10 PM (This post was last modified: 04-03-2021, 09:11 PM by crowns.)
CrownS
There is a part of him that believes he cannot fear death. He is eternal, and its claws can never find their way around his throat, so he dismisses thoughts of the great beyond as quickly as they come. But there is another part of him that knows there are secrets he does not grasp. When Rosebay had poisoned him, he could hear the wailing and the gnashing teeth. He was inches from the twisting nether and it haunts him in his sleep.
But he has not slept in months and the memory is thin now. There is only peace when his eyes meet hers and that soft voice comes to curl around his ears. He likes the way she pronounces his name in her soft tones, giving him a title and offering her name in return. His smile only widens then. Crowns takes another step closer and considers her questions for a moment.
“More often than some, I suppose,” he answers with a shrug. “I used to just have wings and scales and teeth. Now I can do all kinds of tricks.”
A gentle laugh tumbles up from his lungs and down his chin. He only ever calls them tricks because they are never sinister or dark by nature, only mischievous at best. But maybe she wouldn’t see them that way? His laughter goes quiet and his smile loses a few watts of that dazzling charm. Maybe she doesn’t love the night and the unusual as dearly as he does. Maybe she misses the sun and the summer.
