"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
08-12-2021, 09:35 PM (This post was last modified: 08-12-2021, 09:36 PM by liesma.)
liesma
She steals away into the night when her mother and father are asleep.
There are nights when she is content simply to watch them, the way her father bends himself around her mother, how fiercely he loves her. And she loves them just as fiercely, both of them, and she tells them as much before she goes, a testament murmured into the still summer air before she turns and disappears into the darkness.
(But it is never fully dark, is it? It can never be dark with the way she sets the night ablaze.)
She will be back. She would never leave them without telling them goodbye in a way that they could hear her. No, this is only temporary. And it is not the first time she has slunk off into the wilds either. But she is always back by morning, blinking bleary-eyed into the rising sun.
Her heart flutters wild in her chest, a rabbit-hearted thing as she chases a shaft of moonlight across the meadow. She races across a wide open stretch of grass until her lungs burn and, finally, she comes to rest. It is there that she closes her eyes and, chest heaving, closes her eyes.
But she does not sleep. If it was sleep she was after, she would have stayed tucked close to her mother and father. She would have curled herself into whatever narrow space she could fit and slept among their warmth.
No, it is not sleep she’s after at all.
She thinks hard about the stars overhead, the stars splashed brilliantly across her body. (The first time this happened, it was by accident. She had been staring at the stars overhead for so long that she could see them still when she closed her eyes and when she’d opened them again, she had pulled them closer to earth.) She thinks so hard about them that she thinks she’s breathing them in and when she opens her eyes they have cast themselves out of the sky and come down to surround her where she stands in the meadow.
She marvels quietly in their brilliance, though she has not yet worked out exactly how the magic works and has not been able to make it work quite on purpose. She blinks at them as they shimmer and dance in the air around her and then wink out all at once when she hears a noise in the middle distance and whips her head around to seek out the source.
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
His “adoptive” mother is far from overprotective and neither is the Prince she serves. They both encourage his wild sense of exploration and a sink or swim method to parenting but what can you expect when you live amongst the Fae and their merry band of misfits? While some in the Pampas may cast him an odd look from time to time, he is mostly accepted with all his strange and destructive talents. He still worries though, despite their wary acceptance, that he was born wrong. That the things he can do and see and create are bad, that word imprinted deep into his young developing mind.
The tall purple lupines and lush red-petaled poppies strewn across the rolling hills of his new home are beautiful but he finds he has a deeply ingrained need to wander and explore. He sees the Dark Fae Prince in the distance as he makes his way through the wildflowers. His little head barely breaking above the petals as he prowls towards the invisible borders (like the jungle cat whose spots he had stolen) that had been explained to him. When does the Prince sleep? He can’t help but wonder as he catches the bright red of his eyes following him. He hesitates, expecting to be stopped but the stallion makes no move to halt him as he crosses over that line and into the beckoning night.
Sleep can wait when he has a whole world to discover.
The moon moves further into the sky and as it casts its silvery caress across his dappled back, he begins to glow golden beneath its touch. It’s the one thing about himself that he doesn’t consider bad. The one thing that seems to actually draw others in instead of driving them away. He is his own lantern in the dark, easily finding paths with his brightly lit body and soon enough finding himself in the common lands.
Lightning bugs dart in and out of the long grasses and the summer evening is warm and enticing when he joins them, pretending that he too is a glowing little bug as he loosens his lanky legs and gallops around them. They can only keep his interest for so long, he had left the Pampas for a reason. He finds that this time of night is the best to practice without too many judgmental eyes watching. He had wanted to give up his powers for good, still wishes this every now and again, despite Aela’s encouragement to dig deep and learn how to master them better. His connection to the otherworld had greatly intrigued her but in the interest of keeping Obscene happy by not burning down his beloved flowers, she had made it clear that his mastery over fire should come first.
So he practices, drawing flames around him in criss-cross patterns as he remembers Aela’s words in his head about needing to learn how to defend himself. His walls of flames are getting better, able to draw them up from the grass around him until he is encircled completely. He lets the fire die and is about to call it again when something sparkly catches a feral yellow eye.
Apparently he is not the only one who had wanted some privacy in their practice.
He is drawn closer and closer as the stars start to fall from the sky and encircle a winged pastel filly. He is hesitant at first, unsure if he should approach her. The cruelty he had suffered in the Adoption Den had not been forgotten but ultimately that desire to find and connect to others his own age runs deep. As he carefully creeps closer, he notices how her entire body seems to sparkle like the little balls of light that float all around her and the darkness that runs up her wings. Usually he is better in his prowling but he is distracted (dazzled) and his small hoof snaps a small twig, bringing the stars around her to wink out as her head whips around and her midnight eyes land on him. “Sorry.” He breathes, glowing brighter in his embarrassment of being caught. The twig he had broken suddenly erupts into flame and quickly sizzles out beneath his hoof and he simply stands there, unsure of what to say. “I didn’t mean to do that.” Is what comes out, rushed, and it’s unclear if he is referencing the fire, startling her, or both.
He is not difficult to spot in the darkness with the way he glows such a deep gold.
Not like the moon but like the sun. (Has he trapped the sunlight in his skin, she wonders.)
And even if she had failed to notice him somehow, certainly her attention would have been drawn to the branch beneath his foot that spontaneously catches fire. She watches it burn, her heart beating steady in her throat. (As if she had been caught doing something wrong. As if asking the stars to bend down and embrace her was inherently bad.)
His apology echoes in her ears and she shifts her focus back up to his face but her expression does not change or soften. It is not that she is an unkind thing, it is simply that the daughter of two serious parents has no choice but to be serious herself. (The father is especially serious. She has never seen him smile. To her knowledge, nobody has, not even her mother.) She tilts her fine head, her blaze glowing softly as she thinks about the fire and the sunlight trapped in his skin.
“You’re like the sun,” she says and ventures closer. She doesn’t smile, flirtatious. She is not coy as she studies him, merely observant. She does not speak poetry like her father. She does not speak herself fearsome like her mother. She is only a studious girl.
She does not touch him. She stops herself before she can get close enough. She just looks him in the face, searches the eyes. She is not unkind. She is not cold simply because she does not smile or soften. There is a warmth in her, radiating outward from the center of her chest even if she does not show it in her face.
“Did you set the fire?” she asks. “Did you burn it because it gave you away?”
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
The look she gives him makes him nervous. She does not shout nor does she smile. What is she thinking behind the glow of her blaze and her sequined stars? His yellow eyes seem to fall into the endless black holes of her midnight ones, caught in her stare and frozen by his own ineptitude. They remind him of the shadows that follow the souls that he (at times unwillingly) calls from the void. Scary to some, beautiful to him. She speaks and he flinches but continues to stay where he is as she glides towards him, as he’s able to see her more clearly. She looks at him in a familiar solemn way and he relaxes, if only slightly.
“I am?” He loosens his tongue and releases a breath that he wasn’t even aware he had been holding. He thinks of telling her that she is like the moon but that’s not quite right. She is more than just the full brightness that hangs heavy in the sky above them. She is the night sky itself, he thinks, as they search each other’s faces and he finds himself drawn into those endless starless eyes again. She is so different from those in the Pampas and he wonders if he’s stumbled across one of the gods that he’s heard so much about.
Glancing down at the ashes beneath his hoof he hesitates briefly before raising his glowing head back to her. “Yes.” He admits in another sharp breath, unsure of why he had tried to get rid of the evidence of his clumsiness. Aela had been nothing but encouraging of his abilities, had insisted that he embrace them and be proud of them. It wasn’t always easy, the shame and insecurities of being bad and wrong had burrowed deep enough in his young mind to spring roots from those scattered seeds of doubt. However, she doesn’t seem to be upset with him. In fact, there is something about her that he can’t quite put a finger on. Something that keeps him here instead of fleeing shame-faced back into the woods.
“What were you doing?” He tries to avert the attention from himself before she can figure out that he is wrong, before she realizes that he wasn’t terrible in the "good" way. He had not forgotten the smell of singed hair and burnt flesh when he had set that filly in the adoption den on fire. He was still trying to be good but he wasn't convinced he was yet. Not yet.
Can’t he feel it?
Can’t he feel the way the gold glows like the sun and hadn’t her father told her that the sun was made of fire?
And he is standing here in the darkness, ablaze, and there is evidence of a fire beneath his feet and he’s asking her to tell him in no uncertain terms that she’d meant what she’d said. As if she were prone to lying. As if it were in her nature to say things that weren’t true.
But she does not chastise him for implying that she might be dishonest. She just nods and says, “you are.” Because, to her, it really is that simple.
And then she shifts her attention to the embers there in the dirt and he confesses that he’d done it on purpose, because the thing had told her where to find him, that he was there at all. She wonders what it means that he had been so quick to destroy it. She studies it, how sad it looks there in his soft glow, and she nods but she does not ask him why. She does not ask him if he’d do the same to her if she were to betray him. What a way to die, she thinks.
She glances up at his question. Up at him and then up at the sky. And she thinks about all she’d had to do to call the stars out of the sky was think about how much she loved them, how much she missed them, and they’d leaned down to embrace her. How brilliant they had glowed there in the air around her, a thousand fireflies there in the meadow.
“I was visiting with my friends,” she tells him and it is not that she is lying or even that she is being purposefully vague. She does not fully understand the magic of it yet. The stars are her friends, or at least that is how she sees them. It has not occurred to her that someday she might actually be able to bend them to her will.
“What were you doing?” she asks, shifting her focus back to his face.
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
He doesn’t mean to be so doubtful, doesn’t mean to imply that she was telling him falsehoods as if she needed to impress someone like him when she can call down the sky around her. The jaguar colt had only ever been compared to (in his developing mind) shadows and ghosts and destruction. He looks at the sun as the exact opposite of whatever lurks beneath his dappled skin, those questionable sensations that allow him to do what he does. To be told he was comparable to such a brilliant star, such a blinding light, only makes him smile at her with a confusing sense of relief.
Perhaps he was becoming the good kind of terrible after all.
For how could the sun be anything but good?
Her attention shifts back to the embers beneath his hoof and his smile quickly fades back into embarrassment, unable to become a paler version of gold thanks to the glow he had no control of. Should he smother that small smolder that’s left? His quick admittance is followed only by a simple nod and he is insatiably curious to what she must be thinking. Did his fire bother her or was she someone, like Aela, who appreciated all sorts of terrible things?
Her attention finally rises back to him when he asks her what she had been doing. When she speaks of visiting friends, his curiosity is obvious and reflected in those haunting yellow eyes. “Can I be friends with them too?” He asks her after a moment, wondering how she had managed such a feat. Did she simply think of them like he did his flames? Or did they simply come unbidden when they felt like it, like the ghosts that constantly visit him? He means to ask her but she is already asking a question herself.
There is still that small moment of hesitance but the girl had yet to scold him or show any type of fear and so he swallows down any apprehension and sticks to being vaguely honest. “Practicing. They don’t mind back home but I like practicing here.” What he doesn’t mention is that it wasn’t the dying coals beneath his hoof that he had come here to play with. It was his other skill that he had wanted to work on and hadn’t wanted anyone in the Pampas to disturb him. He pauses, tilting his head at her. “I have strange friends too.”
He smiles and it’s not nothing but she does not smile back, just watches it until it falters at the corners and fades away altogether.
Could she call it back at will? If she compared him to other brilliant things, would he smile again? It is nice to think that she is capable of it but she does not test her ability now.
They are nearly the same age, she is sure of it, both still burdened by their youth. But their gravities are different. She is a sober, serious thing because her father has never smiled and her mother is the most spectacularly beautiful thing either of them have ever seen. And this boy’s gravity is… what? There is an uncertainty to him. A kind of grief she has never known and cannot translate exactly.
But when he asks if the stars can be his friends, too, she nods. There is no reason she should keep them from him. “Yes,” she says and, to her, it really is that simple. She turns to press her mouth to her own shoulder, gently touching a smoldering star on her skin before she shifts her deep, black gaze back to his face and tells him, “you have to make friends with these ones first, though, because I don’t know how to call the others down when I’m not alone yet.”
He was practicing, too. She glances at the embers and back up again. It seems he has made more progress with his ability than she has. She takes a step closer, like she might move to press her nose into the heat of the ashes, but she doesn’t. She stops short and studies his face, asking instead, “where is home?”
And when he mentions his strange friends, she shakes her head and says, “my friends aren’t strange.” It is not defensive, but soft, sincere. The stars are not strange, they are wonderful, sometimes she imagines that they kiss her cheek softly and sing her to sleep. “Why are your friends strange?”
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
The fact that she never smiles is curious to him. Why? He is not insulted by the lack of it, can understand that solemness that he often finds himself in. But could he get her to smile, just once, or were her smiles only secrets meant for stars and night time magic? She finds him with those endless eyes and he finds his own lips can’t seem to not smile in their uncertain way back at her, as if she pulls it from him with the same way she can lasso heaven. She brushes her mouth against her smoldering shoulder and instinctively he reaches out his bright one as if to follow the pattern against her sparkling skin. He stops inches from her, pulling back quickly as fire ripples down his spine with embarrassment.
“Tell me how.” He requests softly, taking a step closer to her to better eye the twinkling patterns sparkling across her body. He catches the way she glances down at his shame (shame because one never apologized for being who they are, he had forgotten) and he freezes when she seems to move closer, breathing more freely when she hesitates to question him again. “The Pampas. You?” He asks quietly, wondering if she lived somewhere dark that would always appreciate her sparkle.
He likes her, he realizes. She disagrees with him matter of factly and he finds he likes that too. “Strange can be beautiful. Just like your friends.” He says in his whispery way, hoping she understood his meaning. As for his friends… He closes his eyes and glows a little brighter. Searching for the threads to the afterlife and finding one that felt familiar. The filly from the wildflowers faintly joins his side and he looks at her fondly, remembering his promise to show her the world she hadn’t gotten the chance to see. “My friends are strange because most can’t see them.” He says quietly, watching the soul approach the living with curiosity, looking at her stars with wonder. “But they’re there.” He finishes matter of factly as the soul sweeps over the remaining ashes and stirs them to life.
“Your name.” He suddenly says, looking back to her and searching for those endless midnight eyes. “I don’t even know your name yet.”
He does not touch her.
Just as her father had not dared touch her mother.
(Her father had told her as much. He told her secrets like poetry when it was just the two of them. He had never dared allow himself to sully something so perfect, he’d said, but Liesma does not think this is the reason the boy does not touch her.)
He comes closer, enough that he could touch her if he wanted. And the flames that had flared along his spine are gone by the time she says. “Be friends with me,” she says and, if she had smiled, it might have seemed as if she were teasing. But she just looks at him with those deep black eyes and this is said as honestly as everything else she has told him.
She does not have friends that are like her, though she does not tell him this. Not that it would embarrass her, but because she does not want him to feel as if he is under any amount of pressure to be any kind of friend in particular.
She knows nothing of his home. Only of Tephra, where her father had wandered from and then found her mother and vowed never to leave her. He had not returned and they had instead found their home in the common lands, roaming, nomadic. Because there was no place powerful enough to hold them, she thought. Because they were too big and too beautiful to stay in one place for long.
“I’m from no place at all,” she tells him. Her parents are her home and she almost says as much, but recognizes that this might sound silly so she swallows it instead.
She tilts her head, her wings stirring just barely, when he confesses that his friends cannot be seen by anyone but him. Her brow darkens with confusion and her breath hitches when the embers are disturbed by something unseen. It is not fear, no, but something she does not have a name for. A kind of morbid curiosity, perhaps, as she reaches her nose into the space where she thinks the thing might be but feels nothing at all.
“Are they nice?” she asks and then shifts her attention back to the boy. “My name is Liesma,” she tells him, still without smiling. “What’s yours?”
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
He swallows hard, that same uncertainty still flickering in those moonlit eyes. Did she mean it? Or was this another trick like those played on him in the Den? They had learned quickly how far their jokes would go once he sent them squealing with a flick of his flames. He doesn’t want to do that to her though, can’t think of ever having a reason good enough to lay a single one of his flames against her glittering neck. “Ok.” He breathes and smiles at her again, a brilliant one, as some tension eases from his chest. “I’ll be your friend.” He counts himself lucky that she would offer such a worthy thing to him as her friendship, assuming she had many playmates already.
She belongs nowhere and that makes sense to him as star-kissed as she is. The sky belongs to no-one and everyone, how can something as brilliant as her ever stay in one place? He thinks she might say something else but seems to think better of it and he gives her an encouraging smile in response, wishing she wouldn’t hold back from him. Knowing he wouldn’t with her.
The spirit moves around the living, unseen except for a soft stirring of her feathers or a cold touch to her side, as she takes in the stars and smiles. He watches, approval registering in his feral gaze, as she expresses only interest in the unknown instead of fear. “Mostly.” He says quietly, considering the soul that has moved on to kick pebbles into the nearby stream. “Some aren’t so nice but I’m getting better at keeping them out.” He shares, glancing back at her and her solemn expression. Liesma. A name he would never forget. “I’m Fyr.”
