[open] Castaways! We are castaways! -- Any

[Lillia]

.

What a wonder, to wake up in this world.

Of course, the wonder takes place at a time that Lillia cannot quite place -- before the end? After? She feels the softness of grass beneath her hooves and understands that much at least, that she stands here and not there. Materialized applies in every sense of the word in her case, she believes, as she considers the unbodied nature of the place from whence she came. Even now that sense of utter vulnerability with the transparency of the universe's energy flits from her finger tips, racing away back into the void, to later be welcomed as the one and only true friend available to the dead.

And the living, Lillia figures to herself, smiling as the final shreds of eternity shed themselves from her porcelain skin. For now, to live.

Rustling. A turn of her head reveals downy wings at her sides, just brushing her equine form. The newness of the body she landed this time around lends itself to a myriad of wobbling steps on pinstick legs and Lillia laughs to herself, breathless; a new, old body. Familiar in its undiscovered possibility. Eyes yet trained to herself, the little horse (she who stands at but eleven hands tall) gives a hop and a spread of her wings and finds that, despite remaining grounded on this attempt, she will know how to fly on her "first" try.

God knows she has soared since the dawn of creation.

Still, reinvigorated by her baptism into this life, Lillia tosses her behaloed head and gallops across the meadow, the pink of her nostrils flaring wide to capture every breath she can.

At a rock half her size near the edge of the meadow she stops, watches the hours pass by in an unworried blink, and closes her eyes in gratitude.

Lillia

pls come meet <3

[Selaphiel]

selaphiel

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes

He only makes it as far as the meadow.
(He, with the strong heart, who should had made it so much further. But he is so tired, this angel carved from ice. Tired of the suffering, tired of the stench of death trapped in his sinuses, and he had tried so desperately to warn Mazikeen that death would come for her a second time. 

But she had not listened.

She had marched headlong into it, the warrior he had always known her to be.

This death was different.
It sank its teeth into the meat of that strong heart.)

The heat of summer melts his halo’s ice in his eyes, dims the glow of the crevasses cut into his skin. He is much too young to feel this old. (Even here in the meadow he cannot escape the horrible smell of so much death, no, not with the way the dark things had ravaged the poor souls who had tried to find refuge here. There is no place he is safe from it. He is a damned thing.)

His own wings droop against his sides as he walks. (Stumbles? Ambles? Trudges? He is so tired, you see. So dreadfully tired.) 

He catches sight of her by accident and he wonders if she is similarly damned. He approaches, the heart heavy in the cage of his heaving chest. 

“Can you smell it, too?” he asks. All the death, all that suffering.

I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@Lillia

[Lillia]

.

The despair descends upon her far before the boy, an omen preceding the act itself. To find herself greeted at once by the hopelessness of this reality further defamiliarizes that feeling from whence she came, just: of everythingness, of oneness, of unique and sublime belongingness. Lillia quivers, once. In the wake of eternity's serenity, the pain of reality feels at once like an old, loveless friend and a new, agonizing enemy.

Her glow weakens and her grasp on time flickers; Lillia releases it entirely when she sets eyes on him, figuring to preserve herself instead of prostrate herself before his angst. Clutching her wings to her ribs, she reminds herself to breathe (that strange, conscious and unconscious mechanism which this life demands of all its creatures) and feels uncertain of what comes next.

Longs to fast-forward through it.
Wills not to.

Can you smell it, too? The boy asks. Beneath his aura of misery Lillia notices his features, icey, cracked, and yet as angelic as she; alike, yet opposite in regards more felt than seen or understood.

Seconds pass before she registers his question at all.

Inhale.

But the warmth of the only breeze she's ever known greets her. This gust so like the last, indistinguishable, almost, yet tantalizing in its newness to her summoned consciousness. She wonders, what is there to smell? and figures that she must answer with the truth.

"I cannot," she speaks to the boy across from her in a pleasant, blank tone, one not absent of curiosity but not bustling with it, either. Searching the stranger's eyes, Lillia thinks, but then -- yes, she must. She must, for him.

In a blink the afternoon sky flashes to night, hours passed in a breath. Her body punishes her for this act of temporal manipulation and, as she retreats from the mental place where she stores her time magic, she nurses the aches in her body like newborns: feels for the first time the exquisite sensation of exhaustion after exerting herself in the presence of such hopelessness. For though he, this angel of despair, weakens her, for all that she has become in materializing here, an angel of hope, Lillia must do for him all that she can.

"Is it gone now?" She asks him, peering through the dim light of their semi-matching halos with a keen, soft-spoken interest.

Lillia

@Selaphiel