"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
we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
Although Wishbone has endured a lot in the past few days, she isn’t quite ready to return to Tephra yet. Her nap with Mazikeen had revitalized her, giving her enough energy to journey from their safe place near the Forest to the northern realms of Beqanna. She stumbles for the first half of the trip, unbalanced by the shorter, muscled nature of her new legs. But they feel similar to her original body — though a bit more athletic — and by the time the redwoods tower in the near distance, she walks with a confident step.
Wishbone isn’t entirely sure why she travels to Taiga before heading home. Perhaps her spirit of wanderlust remains unquenched, fueled by the adventures that continue to find her (and she finds them). But on a deeper level, Wishbone realizes that she hopes to find Lilliana. The scents of pine and mist remind her of the red mare and their journey to the top of the volcano. Wishbone had learned a lot on that trip; she had discovered much about herself, about Lilliana, about Wolfbane. It had been painful, she can’t deny that, but it had also been good.
And while another story of Wishbone’s life remains unspoken, another bodily change (from mahogany to obsidian to purple) has sparked her to tell it. While she had stubbornly sat through her parents’ lectures on diplomacy as a child, those lessons have remained with her. Even more so, Wishbone is aware of the fact that Lilliana won’t recognize her right away. The only thing that remains of her long, dark body is her amber eyes. So the purple pangare mare comes to a stop at Taiga’s border, the ground soft with decaying pine-needles and spongy moss. Her eyes glance into the darkness, aware of the whisps of shadow that seem to dance and taunt like young children.
02-18-2021, 02:15 PM (This post was last modified: 02-18-2021, 02:19 PM by lilliana.)
It's like sunlight becomes a dream.
The warmth is there, hazy in the back of her mind and shining only in her memories. How the days pass no longer matter. The darkness that existed only behind her closed eyes swallows her whole from the moment they open. Leonidas no longer comes and Lilliana no longer attempts to know if it is day or night.
Her days are measured with the coming and goings of her children, of knowing when Leilan is nearby. These are the rhythms of her time; this is how she measures her hours (like the ebb and pull of tides, like the shift of the stars - if they still existed). When is she is alone, she moves. The chestnut mare wanders through her Redwood home, weaving between the trees and searching through the tangled growth for signs of life. For signs of monsters. For hope of Neverwhere or one of her wayward children (Reave reminds her most of her mother; there is so much of wandering Aletta flowing in the strides of her youngest son).
Lilliana moves through the trails of her home, guided by knowledge and the faint glow her markings still give. Even if this is an era of darkness in Beqanna, life doesn't still. Life goes on, even if the sun no longer shines. There are still patrols to be done. (Life has quieted for the Northern forest, but like Magic, Lilliana doesn't trust it.) And just when she least expects it, a strange scent comes dancing on the wind. The Taigan stops and raises her head, dimming herself so that she might become just one more shadow. It will be a few moments before her eyes adjust to the dark and when they do, she waits with a practiced stillness. A stillness borrowed from studying the deer that wander through these sentinel woods.
After a few heartbeats, her dainty ears swivel quickly. Her blue eyes keep searching through the dim outlines of trees and ferns, trying to intercept any movement. The scent came again, strange and unfamiliar, as she blew it out of her flaring nostrils. Lilliana turns her head towards a copse of trees where an outline looked out of place, a shadow that was the wrong shade. It was a horse, she knew. The stranger didn't carry the bitter tang of Magic on them. She waited a moment longer before realizing that the wanderer had stopped at the border of Taiga, a familiar hint of diplomacy despite the strange times they lived in.
She leaves her cover and approaches the other horse - a mare - carefully. "Hello," Lilliana says in a tone that she had learned while trailing after her Regent mother: welcoming yet direct. "Who comes to the Taiga?" asks the Guardian lightly with a whisper of humor warming the last words.
It's when she glances at the amber eyes - mirrors of the soul - that her expression becomes guarded. She knows those eyes but they belong to a blazing soul with a glimmering golden blaze and long, sleek legs. On the purple stranger, the image is all wrong.
we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
One shadow becomes two, and two become five, and Wishbone feels her skin prickle with apprehension. The darkness has a practiced way of playing tricks on the eyes, creating phantoms and ghosts. Where light would have scared away the illusions, the eclipse invites them to run rampant. Wishbone has seen many things in the dark, and the eclipse has married her dreams to reality. Svedka’s pale face appears beneath the glow of a Tephran bird, a large rock becomes her twin daughters, a twisting shadow becomes Wolfbane’s spinal mane walking through the jungle.
Wishbone’s amber eyes follow the wispy shapes as they wind among the redwood trunks. Her dark ears press into the knots of her mane as they loom closer. And just as they get too close and she is about to drag a bone from the soil, she hears Lilliana’s voice. As if answering a call, the shadows pull themselves together to form the red mare pushing through the darkness. Wishbone relaxes under the familiarity of Lilliana, even though the mare’s clear blue gaze is guarded.
The way the shadows had shifted reminds Wishbone of the monster (Ivar had seemed to appear from the darkness similarly as if the shadows had carried and birthed him). Yet that monster hadn’t spoken, even when it had bitten Mazikeen and engulfed Wishbone’s torso in its unhinged jaws. So the purple pangare eases under this assumption, and she relaxes her grip on the bones that lie beneath the ground.
It seems their friendship is bursting with difficult conversations. “Lilliana, it’s me, Wishbone.” She hopes the characteristic sound of her voice will help plead her case — a childhood in Tephra had gifted her a tune from the ashes while her femininity adds a dose of honey to the whisky. Her amber eyes remain on her blue-eyed friend, even while she takes a shaky breath. “There’s something about my life I didn’t tell you on the volcano. If you have the time, I’d like to share it now.”
02-26-2021, 07:51 PM (This post was last modified: 02-26-2021, 07:55 PM by lilliana.)
Climbing the Tephran volcano had ignited something in Lilliana.
It might be hard for Beqanna to believe, but the chestnut mare had once enjoyed tempting fate. Perhaps not as bold or daring as adventurous @[Wishbone] but she had done so in smaller ways. Lilli had always respected the borders of her mother's territory and her father's kingdom and never ventured outside them (save for that day with Frostbane). As a youth, she was as biddable and dutiful as a daughter of her bloodline should be.
But then Lilliana learned that while she didn't possess the airbending abilities of her ancestors, the wind talked to her in other ways. Lilli learned that her long legs gave her speed, that her chest held a large heart that gave her stamina. She learned to tempt the Fates with a chase. There were many days spent with her half-siblings and cousins and nephews where Lilliana convinced them to run with her. For her, there was no freer feeling than her hooves lifting off the ground. She could race with them for hours and even when all their sides were heaving, when they were were lathered with sweat and their manes hung limp against their damp necks, all she needed was a moment to recover, and then she could toss her slender head to the wind again. (Tarian would huff, 'Enough, Lilli.' Liam always found an excuse to leave their game first. Even Elena would smile after a while and say, 'Why don't we walk to the river? It always looks so lovely at sunset.')
She hadn't forgotten that spark - that feeling - but so much had happened since those lost days.
There had been the journey to Beqanna. There had been Wolfbane and his Curse. Lepis and her anger. Ghaul and his flames.
There had been motherhood and the sacrifices that came with it. There had been Taiga to lead and Brazen to mourn and Neverwhere to lose.
Then had come the Darkness and the monsters and there had been no time to consider anything else but survival.
That day with Wishbone, braving the steep incline of the volcano and even venturing to reflect on a past that she wanted to forget, had brought some part of herself back into the light. So when this stranger comes to the border of Taiga that peers at her with Wish's fearless gaze, Lilliana lifts her head. She recognizes those amber eyes. But the muted purple is unfamiliar. The smaller, sturdier shape of this mare is not like the long-limbed frame of her Tephran friend.
"Alright," she tells the eggplant-colored traveler. She studies her, searching beneath the skin for the blazing soul of Wishbone. (And Lilliana can't help herself. Her heart is simply too open and she has never learned how to close it. She opens herself up now, for the possibility that this is Wishbone despite the warning flaring within her. Those who have shed their skins for another have not been kind to the fire-gold mare.) She nods, waiting for the purple-hued woman claiming to be Wishbone to explain.
we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
When she had first woken in that long black body, Wishbone had assumed a new life had started. She spent six years trying to decide if a new body was enough to change her entire existence. She could have lived in Beqanna with a different name, with a different personality, with a different past. Yet all of these reinventions would have been fake. Wishbone knows she would have felt like a ghost of her old self if she had chosen that path and that she wouldn’t have been happy.
The memories she carries with her from her days as a bay mare are essential pieces to who Wishbone is. And she has learned that each new body — from mahogany to obsidian to purple — paints a new layer of life on her skin. It is not that the changes are wiping her clean or forcing her to decide whether she truly wants to be Wishbone. Instead, they are pulling the vibrancy of her life closer to the surface, so she can tell her stories to those who are willing to listen.
She is grateful Lilliana will listen. Wishbone hopes the red woman will hear her with an open heart and that their conversation will knot them together even closer. It has been a long time since she has had a close friend that does not share her blood.
“It started with my daughters.” Despite the years since she has last seen Rivuline and Delphi, Wishbone’s heart twists in her chest. “I carried and delivered twin daughters during the Plague, and it nearly killed me. The girls’ father actually did kill me, though. He drowned me in the ocean.” Hadn’t she been warned about Ivar’s nature when she was growing from a child to a woman? Shouldn’t she have recognized he honestly didn’t care for her, that she was just another Leviathan queen he could mark off his list? “I experienced several strange things at the end of my time in the Afterlife, and then a portal opened between here and there, and I jumped through it.” She didn’t even have to think about whether she wanted to remain dead or not; the burning passion of a mother’s need for her children had fueled her endless pacing near that rift, and she had willingly followed it back into Beqanna.
“When I woke up, I was tall and black, like how you met me. But before I died, I was closer to this height, and I was bay.” Her knees crisscrossed with scars from trying to climb the volcano before her first birthday, her heels patchy with burn markings from lava, her mane knotted with paraphernalia from her adventures. “It took me a long time to realize that a new body wasn’t the end of my story, but a part of it. And at first, I didn’t understand why I was different. I thought maybe the experiences in the Afterlife had changed me, or maybe the fairies were trying to show me something. But I was just in the Forest with someone named Mazikeen.” Wishbone isn’t sure if the name is familiar to Lilliana, but her newfound friend is worth mentioning. “A monster attacked us, and it bit me so hard I felt like I was dying, and there was blood everywhere.” She must have been so exhausted that her dreams were peaceful, but now she wonders if they will be darker the next time she sleeps. “I felt nothing for an instant before I felt like I was in a hundred places at once. And in the next moment, I was in this purple body. And now I’m here.”
She knows it’s a lot to take in; sometimes, Wishbone leaves her head spinning thinking about her own stories. Death, life, near-death again, life again. She has always known Death has panted after her. The more truth is that Wishbone has always tempted that gaunt creature.
04-02-2021, 03:06 PM (This post was last modified: 04-02-2021, 03:14 PM by lilliana.)
Perhaps it is wrong to be so willing to trust a stranger.
She told herself she never would again.
And yet here she is, listening to the pangare woman as she tells a story that begins with her daughters. As a mother, she knows that beginning: how it starts as all twisted limbs and frantic breathes and how it ends with a heart so horribly knotted with love that there is no undoing it. Lilliana listens as this mare claiming to be Wishbone - who holds her gaze with those familiar amber eyes - speaks of the Plague and the children she carried. She speaks of her untimely death that came from their father. Her heart twists and the chestnut mare reaches tenderly for the other, a silent show of support.
There are flashes of a life that isn't her own and through those memories, Lilliana sees the Wishbone that she had known. The black-and-gold woman who had talked Lilliana into scaling a volcano. There glimpses of the Afterlife that Larva had spoken of: a gray and kind of monochromatic living. The rest isn't familiar to her. They have been fortunate in Taiga that none of their own had been felled by the monsters. It had attacked Cheri and scarred Nashua but that was where the damage had ended. She hasn't encountered a mare by the name of Mazikeen (but when does Lilliana ever leave the Taiga?)
Lilliana listens as Wishbone - because who else could this be? - explains that a new body was not the end of her story but the beginning. The chestnut feels the sliver of a smile emerge, glad that this story had its shining parts. This story that Wish weaves is one her mother, Aletta, would have loved. It sounds like one that the silver mare would have told while she and her siblings drifted to sleep beneath their willow tree. She has her own questions regarding Wishbone's gift but she refrains from asking for now.
The Tephran mare has given her story and Lilliana only thinks it fair that she offer one in return.
"If you'd permit me," Lilliana starts and then offers, "a story for a story." She waits a moment before telling the story of a girl born in a place called Murmuring Rivers. She speaks of growing up racing the summer breezes and the rapids because she had been the youngest of her family. She speaks of an orphaned cousin who turned into something between a sister and an integral part of her soul. She speaks of Orani with the night sky on her coat and Salem with his desire to see the world. She speaks of a father returned from war with ghosts and how they haunted her family. She speaks of that so much of his power had been given to save a place called Windskeep, there had only been so much left to protect them when he returned.
Lilliana then tells Wishbone of the years that followed. How her home and family disappeared in a flash of Magic. How she had spent the years after on the run from the enemies her father had made. How her large family had been cut in half and then quartered themselves to go seeking a better future.
"I followed my cousin, Elena." She says and got lost in the Commons of Beyond. The chestnut even brings herself to speak of the man that she had met on the Pass, with the stormy seas trapped in his gaze and the most beautiful singing voice she has ever heard. "A bard," she tells the pangare and even smiles at the memory. It had been the first time that Lilliana had heard of such a thing. He offered shelter to her quartered family and then as time passed, had offered more to Lilliana. A future, a life together and she had hesitated. "I asked for more time," she says to Wishbone. "And he- he didn't have that."
His time ran out.
Elena then left Beyond to find that fabled place her ancestors called Windskeep. Two brothers went seeking a place called Liridon. Her mother - as obstinate as ever - refused to leave their Mountains. It was the last place they had seen her father and the silver mare was adamant that was where he would return, as certain of that as she had been of anything else.
"And so I came to Beqanna, the place of my mother's ancestors, looking for the Dale."
The chestnut doesn't need to tell the rest of her story. Wishbone knows it.
"I'm glad you're here," she finally says to the mare who had gone to a thousand places and then emerged back to this one. Her voice wavers despite the steady way her dark muzzle brushes against the slender shoulder of Wishbone, "any shape or form, I'm just glad you came back."
we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
Wishbone feels a weight lift off her chest after telling the red mare her story. She had told Svedka about her first death in an ocean colored by the sunset, but the eclipse had taken him away (down to the earth’s depths, right before her eyes). It dawns on Wishbone that her brother might have been the only one to know her completely, at least until this very moment. Her heart twists, thinking about where the gap in the earth might’ve taken Svedka, yet Lilliana is offering a story of her own.
The purple mare’s eyes find her friend’s as she says quietly, “Of course.” Wishbone listens quietly, giving the red mare all the attention and respect she had just received. The trees of Taiga seem to dip closer as if their limbs are reaching to hear every word from their darling guardian. Wishbone leans in with them, caught in the whimsical web of life that Lilliana spins with her words.
The purple mare has always been enchanted by the world outside Beqanna, even going as far as exploring the Beyond by herself. As she listens to Lilliana, she begins to understand why the red mare had been so willing to climb the volcano. Perhaps their lives are intertwined beyond their comprehension; maybe they are grown from similar roots and have sprouted into similar trees. It makes Wishbone’s amber eyes twinkle, hearing the tender similarities in their stories and feeling the arms of kinship draw them closer together.
By the time Lilliana’s story comes to a close, the pangare feels as though she raced through her friend’s life. There is the ache of things lost, and there is the joy of what has been gained. Wishbone leans into the chestnut’s soft touch, a smile curving her dark lips upward. “I’m glad I did, too. I wanted to make sure you were okay in this darkness.” She had no plans of spilling her life story, yet it had happened, and she is grateful for it.
She returns Lilliana’s touch with one of her own, bending to brush her nose against a red cheek. “And I’m glad you’re here in Beqanna. You have quite a story, yet you’ve chosen to call these ancient woods home.”
04-25-2021, 06:55 PM (This post was last modified: 04-25-2021, 06:59 PM by lilliana.)
Elena had told her once - (and she hears the palomino now in her memories, as if her cousin knew that there would come a day that Lilliana would be reluctant to share her past with others): 'Those stories are seared onto our skin, Lilli. They are ours but that doesn't mean we can't share them.' It takes her some time to untangle herself but the grief isn't as sharp as it once was. She had thought when she first came to Beqanna that who she had been in Beyond - the life she had lived there - was something better left in the past.
But now she knows that the past is always intertwined with the present; who she had been before had set her on the path of who she was now. The shadowy path she walks now with @[Wishbone] could be the trail that sets her towards tomorrow. Lilliana, careful not to get ahead of herself, focuses on the present with the pangare.
"This?" she murmurs playfully into the darkness, slowing their walk to tilt her head to the dark world that has surrounded them. Lilliana gives it a small shake and then smiles. The darkness itself doesn't scare her. After Neverwhere's disappearance and losing Brazen to childbirth, very little does anymore. Her family starving might be a concern but Borderline has been their savior in that regard. The creatures that roam another but the Freyr has the benefit of a dragonskin. He patrols as often - if not more - than the Guardian herself, to keep their children protected.
"How does Tephra fare?" comes when she quiets and the chestnut thinks of Wishbone's other brother (she knows there is another but she has never met Svedka). "And Warden?"
There is much to speak of and she listens as the taller mare speaks. Her smile emerges again - hidden by this infernal night that never ends - and a dimple forms on in the cheek that Wishbone gently brushes against. "And what about you?" she says back to the Tephran. "Wishbone, former Queen of Nerine who wouldn't be contained by Beqanna's borders. Defiant even against death itself."
we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
Wishbone laughs at her friend’s playfulness. Their world is full of so many obstacles and adventures and journeys; if they do not find humor in their world, Wishbone thinks her days would seem far darker. Her mother had taught her the importance of finding the good in everything. Wishbone has taken that lesson with her into adulthood, and it is one of the most valuable she had learned as a child. Beqanna might roll beneath them, springing monsters from the shadows and stealing friends from their beds, but at least they have chosen to seek joy.
The purple mare quiets as Lilliana asks about Tephra and Warden. Her ears shift into the thick tangles of her mane as Wishbone thinks about her brother. He’d tried to warn her about the oncoming darkness, how Svedka would slip into the cracks and disappear, how she needed to find him as quickly as she could. Yet his futuristic visions couldn’t lend her enough speed to reach their brother in time, and Warden carries the weight of their brother’s disappearance.
Wishbone has never blamed him; she had been the one who’d reached Svedka too late, just as the earth swallowed him. Her amber eyes are sullen while they walk, and Wishbone turns this gaze toward her friend as she begins speaking. “We’re doing alright, all things considered. Our brother, Svedka… When the darkness came, the ground opened up under him and took him away. Warden saw it before it happened, and I tried to reach Svedka, but it was too late.” She pauses to inhale a slow breath, hoping the air will unknot the tightness in her chest. “Warden’s taken it really hard, and I haven’t seen him in a while.”
Despite her grief and guilt, Wishbone can’t help the smile that marks her dark mouth at Lilliana’s comments. “I’m doing okay. I’ve been helping Warden with Tephra, and the darkness has kept me busy.” Political affiliations have slowed since the eclipse arrived, but Wishbone has patrolled the borders religiously, watching for signs of danger looming in the shadows. “I’m thankful for your friendship, Lilliana. You have truly been a light through all of this.”
