"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
As the sun sets, the warm colours of Tirza’s coat begin to glow. It is still new to her, though it has been a few seasons since she and her siblings changed - since the last piece of their parents had fallen away from them and into the water they had swam in. They emerged a family of their own, tied together with the brightness of their red eyes and the fire hues that had stained their coats. Everything about them had changed and it had been an absolutely perfect way to welcome back the sun. As if Beqanna itself had somehow approved of them casting aside the stars and the viper.
Tonight, though, Tirza’s focus is here and on herself. It is difficult to focus on anything else in the darkness.
The glow makes her feel exposed, casting purple and red and orange light around her as she moves through the forest. She hasn’t yet discovered if she can control it, but she’s determined to try. As if it is possible to dominate this new part of her by sheer force of will.
There is something else new in her, something she hasn’t yet discovered but it comes out in the near-prowl she uses to walk the forest paths in the growing darkness.
Tirza looks like she's moving with purpose, though she doesn't even know where this path goes. Further into the forest, undoubtedly, where the shadows are deeper and her glow is more obvious. Somehow that seems better than standing out in the open.
05-24-2021, 06:02 AM (This post was last modified: 05-24-2021, 06:04 AM by Chemdog.)
“Oh,” his granite voice chirps from the shadows, not light and sweet, but a little devious. He doesn’t roll forward to interrupt her path, but only turns to face her with his illuminating teal eyes – the moonlight makes them shine like wet glass. “Hello there.” His voice drips from a grin and long tentacles of glowing smoke spread from the moss bed he’s standing on to reach toward the passing mare. “What a lovely glow.” he says this and his yes move over her body, taking in the glow, and whatever else adorns her pretty form.
He can never help himself.
And now, if she doesn’t flee or ignore him, he will step out to properly say hello. The silhouette of the over hanging trees moving over him like fingers until finally his piebald frame is completely in the light. “From the darkness?” his mouth quirks in a smirk, inquiring if she may have acquired that lovely illumination trick from the eclipse, as he did.
he had looked at her reflection and realized there was a hole where something important should be. Things were falling out of her hands faster than she can catch them, a sense of security, some purpose, her ability to tell the passing of days. There is abyss here in this land, opening up beneath the sun’s gaze. (Is that why Solterra was filled with sand? Did the sun yawn a grave where land once was?) She thinks that if you stare hard enough, the abyss doesn't stare back, it just swallows you whole.
What a world it would be if she could walk with her eyes closed.
Elli tastes the fading sunlight in the corner of her mouth, feels it crawl over every inch of her skin, like a blanket falling over a bed. It tucks her in and kisses her forehead, but provides no story. Her eyes should be closing now, but just like when she was small, those blue eyes are bright and wide. Like satellite dishes, too big for her face. Her father always said she would grow into them, but Elliana never did. It provides her with a strange, childish expression on her face, as if curious about the entire world and begging for answers to questions she has never asked.
Night brings with it the gentle glowing of a stranger. Strangers in the woods, it was not the first time this has happened. Will this one lead her to the empty grave that Elliana still dreams about?
“Is this a night for the lonely?” She asks the pair. Such a strange question, and not the one she wanted to ask. She hopes it leads to the answer she seeks though all the same. ‘You are like your mother, able to skirt the topic at hand with such grace no one knows you are doing so,’ Andras told her during her time in Delumine. She took it, at the time, as an insult, but she thinks now, he may have been complimenting her, a thing she thought Andras incapable of. “Thank you for your light.”
Part of Tirza considers continuing on the path. For a short moment, her red eyes do not break from that dark distance and slide to the stranger that stands off to the side. But there is some part of her that is a social creature, though she has not interacted with anyone outside of her family for a very long time. So she pauses and looks to him, to the glowing smoke that moves across the ground.
“From the light.” She replies in an indifferent voice - because that had been when it had appeared. Not during the darkness, not when she had been alight with the galaxy and stars of her father. But when she had been reborn with the sun.
But this is too much to explain to strangers.
Another joins them, with another strange question. To this one, Tirza doesn’t have an answer - she just tilts her head and regards the mare with a small, ghosting smile. She has never felt lonely - or she doesn’t think she has. Even in her childhood, even as isolated as she and Gravitas had been, she had never felt the need to seek out more. She had her brother - and now she had a sister too.
She certainly did not feel that way tonight, alive with the changes that have happened in her life recently.
But she decides to make an attempt and though she had no answer to the mare’s question, she asks one of her own after the thank you - “Not a fan of the dark?” As if they had not all lived through two years of darkness, as if that wasn't a completely valid reason to want to avoid it as much as possible.
