"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
06-27-2021, 08:08 PM (This post was last modified: 06-30-2021, 03:39 PM by Popinjay.)
Her loyalties have always been fickle. When the sun drove the darkness away with it's mystery and its monsters, Popinjay went with them, abandoning Nerine without a second thought, her wild bonfire still blazing. It's surely burned itself to death by now unless someone else has stepped in, but the little bay mare doesn't spare a moment to worry about it. She's moved on to other things, the North forgotten almost before her nimble feet carry her across its border.
Hyaline has a familiar flavor. It's not like Taiga or Nerine, and it's nearly as far removed the Pampas as she can get without turning around and heading back to the frozen Isle. No, it's more like the Mountain that she climbed years ago, searching for Fairies but finding the bird that was inside her instead. That bird, so like the eagles and the bone-eating bearded vultures that live here, thrills at the feel of cold air currents running against her skin like a thousand frozen fingers scraping and scratching. The chill sets her to running faster than she ought in a scatter of sparks and gravel along narrow, dangerous pathways that open suddenly onto the hidden lake that gives the kingdom its name.
She has never had a great deal of caution. Her hooves hit the water with an ecstatic splash carrying her chest-deep at first, then with a kick, beyond the reach of the bottom entirely. Enormous black wings bloom at her back, spreading across the glassy surface to keep her afloat as she drifts towards the lake's center like a dark swan.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
An intruder.
The entity that he had taken from the Silver Cove hums in some part of his mind he has no name for. It’s been louder since he’d accepted Mazikeen’s offer, more insistent in his not-ears when someone unknown crosses the border.
Gale thinks he could easily come to hate it and the responsibility it signifies, but tonight he is hungry and it clangs within his head like a dinner bell.
She runs along the mountain path, reckless in this land of shifters, and Gale watches her from the sky before diving beneath the water with no more than a kingfisher’s splash.
He surfaces not far from where she floats, blue lightning dancing across his nereid face and illuminating the space between them with more than starlight. He looks not at all like the brindle creature that had asked about her fire, and Curse had not kept the each useless memory of its host to recognize that they have met before.
The brown mare is not Hyalinian and she is unrelated to his host, but there is a chance she might be a friend of Mazikeen. His recent promise to the white Alpha should ensure her safety, but there is a nearly equal chance he might leave Popinjay’s corpse beside the water to remind his lover that his promises are worthless.
He’d have her heart first, and he is hungry enough that he would use his teeth to rip it out and not the magic he’s practiced on Aela and Ciri.
“Have you come alone?” Gale asks. Or will there be others? Best to not glut himself early on a single dish, he decides, especially not if there might be a larger variety on the way. Perhaps she’s on a diplomatic trip, perhaps they’ll bring a trainee with tender young flesh.
Or perhaps it is just this small brown mare, who he drifts beside with a smile.
current appearance: glowing perlino nereid with blue lightning and blue fins
She should be wary, but it's never been her way. It isn't that there's no voice in her head telling her when things aren't right, it's just that she's ignored it to her benefit too many times, so even now, when he surfaces near her and that piece of her that sounds not a little like Lethy's soft voice is crying so loudly, the dark mare only grins. She doesn't need that voice to tell her that he is a monster. The predator in her recognizes it immediately. It's something in the way he moves, in the way he smiles.
It's the way he looks like Celina.
He could be her brother, Poppy thinks, blue lightning instead of a cloud of fireflies. The thought comes with an unexpected heaviness that her merry heart veers sharply away from; Popinjay has not forgiven Loess for killing her friend. His question, asked as if this is a secret tryst they've planned, is a welcome distraction from that. It makes her grin grow brighter while they drift side-by-side in the azure lake. She considers telling him that she is not alone, not to hedge her bets against him, but because she suspects it is the truth. It is not at all what he means, though.
"Does it matter?" She asks instead, words tripping light as laughter across her tongue when she turns her head to him. They are so close in the water, who can she have brought with her that could intervene?
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Does it matter, she asks?
Gale smiles, and the finned tail that keeps him afloat becomes something else, something barbed and sharp and good for gutting. And then it becomes a tail again, because he does not want to lose her blood to the water.
The indecisiveness is new.
Mazikeen’s fault, he knows, and the fury - at her and himself - expresses itself in the lighting that dances more rapidly across his skin.
“Will anyone miss you if you do not come home?” He asks, as casually as if inquiring her name.
The shifting of his tail makes the water move beneath her, but it could be anything. She ignores it.
"Oh, yes, tons of folks would miss me!"
The little mare answers thoughtlessly, which is just as well since there's no telling which answer is the right one anyway. The reality though is that aside from Nashua, Popinjay's friends and family have all melted into obscurity. They've all disappeared into the Taigan fog, beneath Pangea's sandy soil, in Loess's flames. She has not made many new friends since childhood, and the children she's borne mean so little to her as to not count at all. She's a selfish thing, thoughtless of others and always hungry for whatever is new, always pushing past boundaries that won't bear just it so see what will happen. It's no wonder that the dull adult world she has been navigating does not appreciate her. It's disappointing, though. She tosses her head lightly, the curls of her mane, made heavy by lake water, falling reluctantly away from her bright eyes.
"But they're all very boring, so who cares?"
Her wings fold so that she can swim closer to him, appreciating the way the water beads off scales and fins. It only soaks into her coat, making it darker except at the soft places - her muzzle, beneath her jaw, her elbow, and at her flanks - where the hair is brighter. Ghaul was scaled, but not like this. Dragon scales are thick like armor, but the Hyalinian's are more like beads and she reaches out to press her muzzle against them and feel how the water makes them slick.
"So, I decided to move here," she says as if she can smell what's brewing in Hyaline, a moth to the flame of chaos. But then her smile becomes a frown, nearly pouting, and she changes the subject abruptly, "You're lightning's very pretty, but is that flickering all it does?"
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
She comes close, and Gale hardly notices. She’s decided to move here. The answer is met with a low and disappointed growl. So she is Hyalinian then, and so protected by the promise that he had made to the Queen.
The growl grows louder, until Gale suddenly dives down, disappearing into the darkness beneath them. A writhing mass of oily blackness, it is visible in the well lit water for some distance below her, and fades into blackness at a great depth, where it feeds on things far less satisfying than horseflesh.
Some time later, it rises again and she is still there.
Perhaps it can charm this brightly winged thing, take its magic the way that he’d taken Aela’s, without much of a mess or fuss.
“This is all the lightning does, yes.” A brief pause, and a curious tilt of its head. There is no longer any need to play Gale, and yet some bits of his host remain, small peculiarities of movement that linger even when the first consciousness that inhabited this body is long gone.
“And yours? Does it do anything but flutter inside your chest?”
Not much about Poppy is relegated to a mere flutter. The strange nereid disappears, and she watches him as long as she can, watches him change to the black, twisting arm, watches him disappear into the deepest place in the lake, and then she stops watching because there is more to see above than staring into depths for something dark hunting dark things in the dark. She has moved closer to shore by the time he returns, with her dark legs stirring the soft, silty lake bottom into streaming clouds that drift along the gentle current.
"It's not in my chest at all," she replies, copying the tilt of his head. For just the briefest moment, the smell of ozone fills the air between them then a bolt of lightning arcs out blinding white and curling around her like a fond pet. With a gesture of her muzzle, she spreads it flat, sparking and sizzling just above the crystalline water, creating a bridge that she leaps up onto with a wave of water that makes the electric platform whine and pop and makes the water boil. The gestures are not strictly necessary but Popinjay is a theatrical creature. She shakes the water away, shakes the great black and red wings away to the nothing they are. Threads of electricity cling to her hooves, make her feet feel heavy and her hair lift slightly away from her skin.
The lightning is not in her chest, but the bird is and the kiss of lightning on her skin makes it grapple for control. It wants to fly among the mountain tops and drop rock sheep from the sky so see their stony fleeces burst to pieces far below. It wants to lap the marrow from their bones, but she holds it tight in that vice-grip. Later, she thinks to it. They will hunt later. Now, instead, she finds dry land again, leaping down from her stage. Her feet touch the earth and the molded lighting crackles brightly as she releases it, streaking horizontally until it strikes an aspen tree at the lake's edge in an explosion of sound and splinters and light. With a laugh, she looks back at him.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Not in her chest?
But if he eats her heart, will the magic not come to him? Gale frowns. He’ll try anyway. His promise to Mazikeen was always going to be broken, and she doesn’t even know this newcomer. Perhaps plenty of folks will miss her, but none of them will know that she was last seen in Hyaline.
As creature who Sees, the beauty in her display is remarkable. But it is her explosion of the aspen tree and the proud smile afterward that finally make him choose to spare her. That, and the awareness that something is struggling within her. Something wants to escape.
He will free it.
Perhaps he can use others the way he uses Mazikeen.
“How good is your aim with that?” He asks, and his voice is curious. “I happen to be in need of someone capable of causing distractions.”
If he is going to be King of Hyaline, he might as well make good use of it.
current appearance: glowing perlino stallion with feathered quetzalcoatl forelimbs, lightning, and iridescent navy blue scarring
She can't know how close she is to death, not really, even knowing that she flirts with disaster isn't quite the same, but her manner is excited, nearly giddy, because she loves to show off and this strange shifter is an appreciative audience. His curiousity is met with more of the same. The lightning does as she tells it to do, it goes where she directs, except when she sets it free and it goes wild.
Even then, it most often blasts itself open against her.
"I can be distracting," Popinjay remarks, light blossoming around her again. This is harder, more technical than a simple platform (and an utter waste of the magic, some might say,) but she breaks bits away until there is a small flock of flickering white birds that pulse around her, yearning to melt against her skin, to stream down and find the dark peace of an earthy grave. Her tongue is pressed hard against the roof of her mouth, the skin around her eyes furrowed as she watches them.
"And my aim is excellent," she says, dark eyes full of reflections when they flick back to the sea monster lurking in the lake and the flock surges toward him. Instead of birdsong, the flock fills the air with buzzing and hissing, swooping low over the water, barreling over him like acrobatic swallows chasing flies. Just one, she thinks, Just one shouldn't hurt him much. Sweat blooms on her neck. At his withers, an electric bird lands lightly, emitting an excited crackling from its open beak.
It's a strain to juggle so many, so she calls them to her again, all but the one she's set upon his back, forcing it to keep its shape and chase the blue lightning snaking over his skin. The others race back to her like ducklings, flaring brightly when they strike, and when she moves away, four blackened hoofmarks remain where she'd been.
"It's easier, with just bolts, but it doesn't look as cool."
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
I can be distracting, says the small brown mare.
This time Gale anticipates the display, but he does not expect the birds. When the lightning takes physical shape his eyes widen, the manipulation one that he has never Seen. His own blue lightnings reach toward the bird as it circles and lands.
Of a size not unlike Erne had once been, the shape is familiar, and Gale grins at it. She holds it still, he knows, can tell in the way the lightning remains clear of his own even as they spark together on his golden skin. She is not letting it hurt.
What would she be capable of, he wonders, if she were not so limited? If she did not have to expend some part of her focus in protecting others from her gifts?
He could take her heart and find out.
But that would take weeks, months even, and he still might never learn the finesse. He is impatient, wants to know what she can do now.
So he turns and he swallows her last lightning bird.
The sparks fizz and burn on his tongue, but there is a satisfaction to the sensation of captive lightning, of the way it dances around inside him like the emotion that he has learned is called ‘joy’.
“You may join Hyaline,” He tells her. “But only If you show me what it is that flutters in your chest if it is not your lightning.”
