"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
The child that went into The Darkness is not the young stallion that emerges, too gangly, too soft-shelled, still trying to learn the pattern of his own hoofbeats one-two-three-four-five-six, one-two-three-four-five-six, each moving in strange, quick succession, each tangling together sometimes and sending him sprawling in sand and surf in a celtic knot of chagrin.
No, he is not that anymore, though of course he is still young, still growing into his body, and its lines are soft with youth except for the crisp edges of his scales which bend around that supple flesh like armor.
Somewhere, deep in his breast, he knows he is a strange sight, even in a land full of horses twisted into dragons, into kelpies, and any other number of beasts. Even in a land full of shapeshifters and fae, he does not know of anyone that looks like him (not even his parents, though Mother is delicate and strange in her way and the father-gone-feral who he has not met also wears oddness like second skin.) Perhaps it should trouble him, this feeling of singularity, but he rises to its challenge greedily, as he rises from the ocean’s briny depths to gleam bright in the tropical sunlight drenching the island’s white and shining shore. Ischia is glorious in the beaming sun and Enoch grins back at it a wild smile.
He leaves the water, flicking droplets from his tail and the swimmerets hidden beneath, those long antennae sweeping the air as if to make room in an imagined crowd. Ischia has never been crowded, and it has never been a kingdom, but he pretends himself its beloved prince just the same, handsome, fashionable, humble.
A stranger is waiting there on the beach and he approaches them with all the ease of young nobility, practiced and smooth, the ocean-wild smile turned charming instead.
06-01-2021, 08:02 PM (This post was last modified: 06-01-2021, 08:02 PM by Maurtia.)
MAURTIA
The whispers of ghosts here are no different than what they had been in Pangea, though some of the familiar voices that Maurtia has come to know have been filtered out and replaced. She is attempting to learn the new ones - waiting for bits and scraps of their lives to come through. Maurtia is enjoying their stay here, it’s much more pleasant to wander the beach - even though the sand gets all caught in her long, dragging tail - than it was the canyons of Pangea. She pauses now and then, tilting her maneless head and neck as she listens to the voices. They sometimes grow stronger in certain spots, and she is paused on top of one of those areas when her ears catch the noise of life - of someone else on the beach.
All other thoughts are whisked right out of her head when she turns her head and spots him. Can you blame her? Immediately he reminds her of the armoured creatures in Pangea, but only vaguely. The ridges down his back, at least, speak of them though… okay that is where the resemblance stops. Perhaps he is a distant relation to them, the tropical version like how the birds here are so much more lively and colourful than the ones in that desolate and rocky home that they had left.
Certainly, none of those creatures had greeted her with a charming smile.
The glow of her white eyes is less obtrusive in the day but there’s a light in them anyways in the form of a smile as they track everything from those super cool antennae to the tip of his unique tail.
“I was looking for the ghosts I can hear.” She answers in an honest and casual voice, showing just how unremarkable this endeavour was for her. “But I think maybe they were leading me to you.” She says this part with an amused grin and in response to it, she gets a few protests from the voices she can hear but she is no longer focused on them and they fade into background noise. Maurtia can talk to the ghosts anytime she wishes, but the older boy standing before her is significantly more interesting than them right now. “Do you live here too? My family and I just moved in.”
In the wake of her answer, he's quiet for a moment, that smile still resting warmly on his lips, and the antennae that catch her eyes carefully testing the air as if they might taste the ghosts she speaks to. It has never occurred to Enoch to speak to ghosts, not even to try, and he considers that maybe this is rude. He is, after all, a prince of Ischia (never mind that Ischia is only a herd-land and no political actor, nobody who knows his grandmother could think of her as anything but a queen,) and he should know all the island's residents. In that brief silence, the young dun tips his head to the side as though to consider the girl from another angle.
"Were they indeed?" He likes this answer, even if he can feel the lie of it, and is happy to accept the compliment. "Yes, I was born here, not very long before the Kelpie King swallowed the sun."
(A local legend, one he's only just made up, and one very much known to be untrue.)
It's easy, in the bright sun and with a companion who is so nonchalant about it, to find his usual stride with the topic of ghosts and death, even for as much as the subject doesn't quite suit Enoch's island home. This is a place of peace, of family, of rest-- Well, he shouldn't get too carried away with his family's fiction. There are bones and skulls that still wash ashore, that are still hidden beneath the shining waters, tucked away too purposefully, tucked away from the prying eyes of anyone who can't swim deep enough to see. Ivar still lives - somewhere (probably,) either in the dungeon Aquaria made for him or some other forgotten corner of the world - but he's nothing more than a bogeyman to Enoch, a mythical creature used to frighten him into behaving when he was a child. Before the darkness came and he no longer needed lies to teach him caution.
"Do our ghosts have much to say? I don't think we've had anyone here that could speak to them before, so I'm afraid we may have ignored them a bit," his tone turns apologetic, long (noble, he thinks,) ears twisting like a second set of antennae, but if any spirits are whispering around them, he does not notice. For him, there is nothing flavoring the tropical air but the usual things, and the bright spice of her curiosity burgeoning in his chest.
"And have they led you anywhere else interesting?"
Maurtia’s eyes widen at the oh-so-cool mentioning of the Kelpie King and swallowing the sun - though the effect of them widening is lost because they are all white. The difference is minimal, as she knows from interacting with her family, but she stores that little topic in her mind to ask about in the future. It sounds like a very good story, one she would like to hear from a voice not in her head.
“So far you’re the most interesting thing they’ve led me to, but everything on this island is still new to me. It’s not boring, not like Pangea.” Maybe boring was the wrong word for Pangea, but Maurtia’s eyes were never short on colour to see here - not even at night - and she cannot help but feel like Ischia is a little more alive than the place she had been born into.
She answers his first question about the ghosts with an attempt at being serious - though the faint and amused smile that softens her dark face may just make her efforts in vain. “They think you’re pretty rude for ignoring them,” Maurtia says - though the ghosts have said no such thing. Another small lie it pleases her to say, as are her next words. “But they’ll feel better if you sing to them now and then. That’s what I do.” The effect this has on the voices differs, sometimes it stirs them into a frenzy and sometimes it quiets them - both a result of them hating it enough to either rage or just shut down.
But the creature before her had sounded apologetic about ignoring the ghosts, even accidentally, so her attempts to tease him about it don't last very long and she replies more honestly - “I think they are happy to have someone to listen, though. They can get pretty loud, just trying to be heard.” Too loud, though she was steadily getting better at controlling it.
Forgetting that she had meant to ask about the Kelpie King, she instead asks something else - wondering what it would be like to be shown around by someone who wasn't dead. "Do you know of any interesting places on these islands?"
The word demands to be said, though he tries to swallow it, making it a strangled, bedraggled thing that falls ungracefully from his lips before he can regain his composure. She wants him to sing to the ghosts? No, no, that's unfair, it's not what she said, only that they like it, and hasn't he been unforgivably rude to them already? Enoch clears his throat and pretends he has not screeched that bedamned word into existence at all.
"I am not certain they will like my singing," he says, all cool charm once again. He isn't quite certain that this is a convincing argument, though he isn't quite certain that she is being serious, either. There's a sense like laughter but he can't grasp the feeling that bubbles between them. Is she joking, or just amused by the ghosts' real request? He hides his puzzlement in jest, instead.
"Imagine having already had the misfortune to die, and then being forced to listen to me caterwauling at them like an elephant seal? No, no, I'm sure they'll like your singing much better than mine." He curls his neck, drawing his muzzle back to his chest so the look that he gives her is full of the same good-natured false modesty that fills his throat, but she turns the subject to something he knows better and his manner brightens again.
"Interesting places? Oh, well, I guess that depends on what you'd like to see. Everywhere you go is beautiful, here, and if you prefer spooky stuff, your friends are probably better guides than me." Most of the Boneyards are deep underwater and she doesn't have the look of someone who could tolerate being long beneath the surface. He hesitates and wonders if he should warn her - are all the ghosts her friends? Ivar dragged many to their deaths in Ischia's waters and surely some are angry, bitter souls.
"There is a place I could show you... we aren't really supposed to go there," but that's the fun of it, his grins finishes silently.
Maurtia is always pleased to get a reaction out of someone, and the strangled way the armoured youth says sing is certainly one of the best she’s gotten. Her sisters are becoming remarkably harder to trick, now that they know her well. The cool charm that follows only solidifies the opalescent filly’s interest in one day getting him to sing. It obviously needed to happen now - no matter what he says about caterwauling.
If he did sound like an elephant seal she wanted to hear it.
Her white eyes glitter when he tucks his muzzle back to his chest and she doesn’t bring up singing again… yet.
That’ll be the next time they meet.
Everywhere was interesting to Maurtia, especially here, so that makes deciding where to go both very easy and very hard. Decisions are just the worst. Maybe the ghosts would show her where some cool places to go were but they usually didn’t answer those kinds of questions - or she just hadn’t figured out the right way to ask. If her new friend really did caterwaul when he sang, that might be a good way to torture some information out of the ghosts.
But his grin and the words ‘we aren’t really supposed to go there’ absolutely captivate her. She straightens up, absolutely and completely focused on him now as she exclaims in an excited whisper (just in case anyone overhears these secret plans) “Where?!”
Enthusiasm breaks through his cool charm, enthusiasm both to break away from the subject of his singing and for showing off the hidden places of Ischia. It is a large island with a great deal to explore, and a history littered with ghosts, if those are the kind of things that Maurtia likes. He does not know for sure where the ghosts congregate, but he can guess, and he pauses to glance at the nearest islet, just visible from the eastern beach where they are standing. The waters between Kelpie and the shores of mainland Ischia are a graveyard, but he is not taking her there today. The tides are too strong now if she cannot swim, too dangerous for anyone unable to survive beneath the breakers.
"Come on! I'll show you!" He grins, washing away the concern that fills him when he thinks too much about the kelpies and turns towards the ridges that mark the start of Ischia's low and lush mountains.
"There are no mountains like ours anywhere else in Beqanna," he adds, matter-of-factly. The continent has many wonders, but all her mountains are bare things, naked, cold, and high. Ischia's are green nearly to their tops, thick with trees and vegetation and colorful birds, and he ducks through two cashew trees, their boughs so heavy with fruit that he is forced to slouch and press his long ears flat to his poll. The branches rap audibly at his slick armor as he squeezes beneath them and, straightening slightly (for the canopy is still a bit low for him,) steps aside to show Maurtia a cavern entrance at the mountain's foot.
"There." His whiskers gesture for him in the cramped space. The mouth of the cave is black and the distant light of its other end is far enough to lend no helpful light. It is full of the sounds of the spaces between, of the soft flutter of bats' wings, the plinking of water dripping through rock, and occasionally, the unexplained groans and knocks of the immense weight of the mountains above. His goal, on the other side, is invisible to them from here, and feels miles distant though he knows it is only minutes away.
There is no hesitation in Maurtia as she moves to follow him - caught up in both the excitement of what he might share and that which comes from making a new friend. She’s explored some of the islands here with her sisters but it is different being guided by someone else. Her long tail trails behind her, picking up various leaves and one disgruntled beetle that has only just managed to dislodge itself from her hair when she stops beside Enoch, peering into the cavern that he’s paused before.
Her ears twitch at the sounds that come from it. Her explorations had been exclusively above ground and one rather tragic and extremely short attempt to swim with her head under water.
And sure, she knew her mom could turn her into something that was aquatic but that took the fun out of trying for herself.
She is momentarily distracted by the movement of his whiskers, forgetting entirely the cavern and that there may be a destination on the other side of it. Her white gaze flicks upwards to his eyes at his question and after a brief flash of a smile her face folds into a frown of concentration.
Maybe the question doesn’t require that much thought but she feels like it might be important.
“Ummmm first. No, last.” She nods to herself but in the next moment, before either of them can move, she steps forward with a shout. “NO! First.” And this feels right to her when she moves into the cavern - the glow of her white eyes becoming more apparent in the shadows. This decision continues to feel right up until the point where she is entirely in the dark and she stops dead in her tracks, turning her head as much as she can in the tight space to look at Enoch with her glowing stare. “Wait a minute, why did I go first if you’re the one showing me something?”
