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    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  Pink Elephant in the room - Starlore
    #1

    a bright and dangerous spark

    It’d been … forever. Cheri meant what she said when she told Starlore that she wouldn’t forget to find him someday. She remembered meeting the haloed colt like it was yesterday, often catching herself laughing during a steam bath about him exploding a rock and blaming it on her. Then she would feel a pang of guilt and remember their conversation about leaving home, so bittersweet and personal a thing to discuss between strangers, and her determination to find him again would eat away at her for a while after that.

    Having firmly settled into Loess and at odds with herself about what, if any, direction her life was taking, Cheri took the time after Obscene’s visit to escape the confines of her Kingdom and finally put her memories of the Silver Cove stallion out of her head for good. Oceane knew of her intentions to vacation, so Cheri took flight one early gray dawn and headed east into Hyaline’s craggy peaks. She felt out of practice, stopping often to catch her breath or land for a short stint of walking through the expansive countryside. Normally, a half-day’s flight would’ve been easy soaring but for some reason Cheri just felt breathless and weighed down.

    Her day and an evening trip quickly became a night spent in a cavernous mountain, then another day’s worth of struggling before Cheri finally touched down on the metallic, silvery sands.

    On the beach she caught her breath, looking behind her at the inlet of water stretching as far as the eyes could see. Dark, choppy waters meant a likely storm somewhere far out to sea, but for now the overcast weather held tight. Cheri sighed and wondered if she could find the lake Starlore had showed her once, all on her own. Her dark, elegant head twisted back to look up at the high dunes and the small, sloping cliff covered in sparkling waves of grass, and she set out in no particular hurry at all.

    Silver Cove was so much more beautiful in the light of the sun, even if that light was obscured by a few drifting clouds. For her northern tastes it was a pleasant cape, complete with blustering northern winds and the constant cry of seabirds. It smelled as briny and earthy as Nerine, and her scenic walk up the cliffside left Cheri nostalgic for home. She resolved to visit there on her way back if she couldn’t find Starlore, knowing he might’ve left years ago, and slipped peacefully into the fields of ripened silvergrass on her way to the hills.
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    @[starlore]
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    #2
    ( this world will have the wolves outside your door
    make you leave all that you love to fight a war
    and never tell you what you're dying for )
    He’d really meant to leave, strike out on some great adventure and leave the Cove behind. He’d find great adventure someplace beyond its shores because, although he didn’t have wings himself, he’d made a friend with wings and started to believe that maybe he was built for more than staying in one place himself.

    His family was here, even still, but that wasn’t really any excuse for his staying.

    Was it fear that had kept him rooted firmly in the Cove or something else altogether? Laziness maybe. Or just an unwillingness to confront that kind of monumental change. (Maybe this was its own kind of fear.) 

    Regardless of the reason why, he is still here. Though things here have changed. The Cove is not led with the same kind of darkness and it looks different in the light. Its shores do not harbor the same dangers it once did. Maybe he has gotten too comfortable here. Complacent. He knows every inch of this place now, though he has not yet decided whether he prefers it in the light or if he’d liked it better in the dark. (It is more difficult to be a coward in the light, which is not nothing, he supposes.)

    Their paths cross purely by accident, because he doesn’t really have much purpose these days except to fill them with aimless wandering. He stops short, eyes narrowing as a knowing grin creeps across his mouth, at the sight of her. (Though there is also a creeping sensation of embarrassment at being caught here because he is supposed to be off on some grand adventure, isn’t he?)

    They are grown now. Not at all the lanky, growing children they had been the last time their paths had crossed. He doesn’t know if she’s seen him, but he turns his gaze to a nearby boulder and concentrates. Because she had been correct in her suspicions and this is the one worthwhile thing he has learned since he last saw her. The boulder explodes in a shower of rocks, though it is not large enough to cause either of them any harm. 

    And then he laughs and calls out to her. “You were right, rocks don’t just explode on their own.” 
    starlore
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    #3

    a bright and dangerous spark

    So caught up in the breeze dancing through the strands of silver grass, Cheri hadn’t necessarily heard Starlore’s approach until the last minute. She turned, head angled in a pleasing manner over her shoulder to glance behind her, eyeing the stallion approach with only a moment’s hesitation before the rock exploded nearby. If she was uncertain in the daylight about who he was, now she knew: it couldn’t have been any other horse but the same colt she’d met years ago on the shore. Surprised, she caught the spray of stone and pebbles flying up through the air to clatter down again safely away from them, then she twisted through the stalks to face the offender properly, with a mocking frown that made her all the more alluring by doing so.

    “Careful,” She warned him, “You’re only confirming that I’m always right.” Cheri trotted down the short slope of the prairie to where he was, observant of how distinctly remarkable he looked in the daytime.

    Time had really gotten hold of them both, though in the present Cheri would argue that Starlore was noticeably the most captivating stallion she’d ever seen.

    Her memory of him couldn’t serve the adult version justice. How such a creature had come to be was incomprehensible to her, taller in maturity and almost androgenous in his beauty - complete with the angelic halo she so distinctly remembered from their first encounter. Could she blush, Cheri would’ve; it was only lucky for her that she now maintained an air of companionable friendliness despite the way her mind lingered over hormonal things like attraction. Besides, one thought of Targaryen and the persistent memory of her interaction with Obscene had taught her a thing or two about erring on the side of caution rather than succumbing to the desires of her heart.

    Starlore was breathtaking, truly.
    But he was also just Starlore, and she was simply Cheri.

    “It’s good to see you.” She extended the slope of her feminine nose towards his, catching sparks of light in the cluster of her forehead crystals as she did. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you. Call it fate - I came back hoping you’d still be here.” Cheri spoke after pulling away again, her mind fresh with the silence of the night before and Chem’s warning about ghosts.

    “You look incredible!” The spotted appaloosa mare took an appreciative step backwards, her voice pleasantly high and not at all facetious in its praise of him. “Is your family well?” She wanted to know, giving him a moment of air between the compliment and question.
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    @[starlore]
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    #4
    ( this world will have the wolves outside your door
    make you leave all that you love to fight a war
    and never tell you what you're dying for )
    She turns to face him and she is no longer the girl she’d been who’d peered at him through the darkness, promising that she had come in peace. And then she opens her mouth and it’s obvious that, in terms of personality, not much has changed. 

    You wouldn’t possibly let it go to your head, would you?” he asks, the question falling out of his mouth on the back of his laugh as he continues up the slope, meeting her halfway, still grinning. 

    Starlore is oblivious to her appraisal, both because there are precious few young mares in the Cove to admire him and in turn inflate his ego (leaving him largely oblivious to whatever good looks he might possess) and because he has not quite worked out how to operate his ability to rifle through other’s thoughts. That said, it is not lost on him that she is a completely different shape than she’d been the last time he’d seen her, having grown into her wings and the jewels clustered on her forehead. But they’re friends and he doesn’t allow himself to dwell on these things either.

    Until she goes and touches him, which goes and gets a few wires crossed because he doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with girls his age that he’s not related to touching him. But he hides whatever surge of hormones spirals through him with another hearty laugh and reaches out to bump her shoulder with his nose in turn. He chooses not to address the fact that she couldn’t stop thinking about him, because that probably meant something but he’s not sure he’s ready to unpack that. “Well, you have impeccable timing because I actually just got back from a really big trip,” he says with an air of feigned importance and a cheeky grin, both meant to give away the fact that he hadn’t left at all. 

    He glances down at himself with her compliment, grimacing at the way the splash of labradorite on his chest catches the sunlight. “I look the same,” he says and rolls his shoulders in a shrug, “you’re the one who’s changed!” But he doesn’t let himself say any more than this before answering her question. “Yeah, they’re fine, they’re fine. Tell me about you, what have you been up to?” 
      
    starlore



    @[Cheri]
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    #5

    a bright and dangerous spark

    With everything that seems so sharp and sudden in her life, Cheri finds the more they talk the easier it gets to slip into a comfortable sort of repertoire with the molten blue stallion. Her initial surprise and shock over seeing him again fades gradually, as does her initial attraction, and thoughts of a less ladylike quality simmer into more manageable queries like what he’s been up to all this time.

    Lucky for her, she doesn’t have to wait long. Had she been the more literal type, Cheri might’ve believed Starlore’s story about having just returned from an extended trip even with the exaggerated air of importance, but his grin and her ability to laugh (as well as learn) means he won’t have to fear explaining further. She understood; in fact, with a place so alluring and serene as Silver Cove to call home it would’ve been hard to imagine leaving. Taiga made a horse feel so small and sometimes forgotten. Cheri had needed to see the expanse of the world and had always felt a longing to soar through its skies on her own in order to find her place within it.

    Out here? The world was as open and free as a horse could ever hope for.

    And still she rolled her eyes. “Changed? Me?” She thought. Maybe - if they were comparing shades of green. Or the number of unnatural crystals she was still freakishly growing out of her skin. She was happy to hear that his family was doing well though, even happier to know just how well by the way Starlore skipped over them lackadaisically. It would’ve been exactly how she answered, had he asked her the same thing.

    “Oh, you know … not much.” Cheri sighed, her soft voice nearly carried away by the wind. From her expression it would seem as if she’d spent her passing hours languishing by the side of a reflection pool, admiring herself or something just as useless in the years since the Eclipse has passed. Her head swung low and she swiped a mouthful of the silvergrass up to casually eat, drawing out the silence for an agonizing moment or two. “I just moved into the court of Loess, started studying under Queen Oceane there. Nothing serious.” She flicked an ear and swallowed around her speech, her eyes half-closing with a mock air of superiority.

    Then her face twisted and a pretty laugh broke the facade.

    “Not that you care or anything, world traveler that you are.” She accused him gently, her markings and wings taking a shine to them.
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    @[starlore]
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    #6
    ( this world will have the wolves outside your door
    make you leave all that you love to fight a war
    and never tell you what you're dying for )
    For the space of a breath, he swears he hears it.
    “Changed? Me?” Her voice, plain as day, as if she’d said it out loud. But her mouth does not move. As far as he can tell, her only obvious response is an exaggerated rolling of her eyes. Maybe he’d just read too deeply into this, pulled a verbal reaction out of thin air where there had been none. Anticipated what she might have said when she had said nothing at all. 

    Confusion casts a shadow across his brow for half an instant before he shakes his head, effectively shaking it out of his mind. He is happy to move on from it, keen to shift the focus of the conversation from him and onto her. He has no doubt that whatever she has been up to has been much more exciting than what he’s gotten up to in the interim. (She, who had accidentally crashed onto the shores of the Cove when they were just kids, compared to him, who had never made it beyond the Cove’s borders.)

    His eyes widen at the mention of moving to Loess and grow even wider still when she adds, with all the nonchalance in the world, that she’s been studying under the queen there. Not that he knows what any of that means, seeing as he has absolutely no ambition to speak of. But being a student of the queen sounds like big news.

    Wow,” he says, the corners of his mouth turned down in an appreciative frown, “I always knew you’d grow up to be a big deal.” And, with that, the corners up his mouth flip up in a grin.

    Then she laughs with her teasing remark and he cannot help but laugh along with her, rolling his shoulders. He knows that she knows, but he feels some need to explain himself regardless. “Truth is, I never left the Cove,” he says and glances toward the horizon. “I had a friend who said she’d come back for me and I guess I thought I’d be easier to find here.” 

      
    starlore



    @[Cheri]
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    #7

    a bright and dangerous spark

    Was that confusion etched into Starlore’s brow that she saw, or had it just been a play on the eyes? Cheri thought she might’ve seen something twisted on the stallion’s face for a moment, but it vanished before she could be certain. Not one to assume, the visiting horse from Loess let the matter slip away altogether - as nonchalant as her companion was on the subject, unless it came up again.

    Besides, her attention had been twisted to focus on how ridiculous she was being. Starlore hadn’t missed a beat since she’d last seen him, and he played into her fancy of being self-important with as much alacrity as Cheri could’ve hoped for. “At least some things never change.” She sighed, the ache in her belly from laughing slowly fading away as her thoughts quieted and she listened to Starlore’s story.

    The silvergrass tickled her dark knees, tempting a bite that Cheri resisted. Balmy and pleasant in the moment, the weather of the bayline territory whipped at her until her locks were just as disheveled as the fields of swaying, iridescent stalks. She watched as he turned away to look out toward the edge of the horizon, and everything that lay between it and them seemed oblivious to their existence. A quiet, beautiful thing.

    “Is that really why you stayed, though?” Cheri studied the angled face that was preoccupied elsewhere, waiting for the same flicker of emotion she might (or might not) have seen earlier.
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