[private] dear wilderness, be at your best; svedka

[aureline]

Home had stopped feeling like home a long time ago, but with the appearance of the strange, brindle stallion who had taken over Tephra, she found that there was nothing that kept her heart tethered there anymore. She was certain her family would move on, certain because of the rumors, because of the whispers of nightmares haunting sleepless nights, certain because of the slow exodus that had already begun. Individuals and families alike seemed to be moving on to elsewhere - and though there were some who seemed resigned to stay, she could not help but wonder how long that would last.

She is no stranger to sleepless nights, to dreams shaped by fear and horror, memories kept alive for far too long and twisted into something more gruesome than they ever were at their origin. She knows the cracks they make, the invisible fissures that stretch across her spirit like the veins on a birch leaf, many and forever and intricate. One nightmare is exhaustion, two is a quiet kind of dread. But a month of them, a year? She knows how that can change someone, how fear is so good at carving away these little pieces until, before you’ve had a chance to notice the erosion, you are someone else entirely.

She is eroding.
She is not herself.

When she finally unfurls her wings and takes to the skies, there is only some strange kind of dissonance inside her chest. It lives beside her heart, inside her heart - or maybe it is all that is left of that timid beating thing inside her ribs. There is only one figure she looks for down on the shores below her, but when she does not spy the familiar gold and white basking in the humid warmth, she leaves the volcanic land without even a quiet goodbye.

There is a place in the forest that isn’t quite theirs, a tiny meadow made by a few trees that had fallen after a long summer of storms, and she knows that her best chance of finding him is in that quiet spot of sunshine where everything is lazy and quiet and perfectly right. She lands carefully among the grass and flowers, pausing for a moment just to absorb the peacefulness of this halfway place. Not a home but certainly an escape.

Home, or the closest thing to it, is the man who stands in a pool of sunshine while wildflowers sway against his legs. “Aha.” She says, and at once she can feel this darkness inside her soul retreating from the light of him. There is a smile on her lips now, something soft and warm and full of easy mischief as she crosses this little patch of open grass to join him. “Right where I left you.” As she reaches him, her lips find the curve of his jaw in a gentle kind of kiss, just a whisper of intimacy as she draws back to face him. “Hello Svedka.” But she needs more of his warmth, more of his light, needs him to help her chase away this seeping cold inside her chest. So she steps close again, touches his jaw and his neck, traces the curve of his shoulder with the soft of lips warmed by the sun beneath her skin. “Can you stay awhile?”

aureline

dear wilderness, be at your best 
her armor is thin as the fabric of her dress

[Svedka]

let my shadows prove the sunshine

Svedka never has been one to be tethered to anything; he has ventured into realms beyond, both physically and mentally, uprooted almost constantly (whether it be his own doing or some dark force tearing him away) and never truly finding a place that could settle the aching wandering of his soul. Despite this, the milk-and-honey stallion always found himself drifting back to Tephra, back to the lava flows that run intricicately through the inland stretch of grass, back to the cool shadow of the volcano and the black sand beach that carves itself like a charred serpent against rough, dark waters of the ocean.

There is nothing that holds him here - nothing that cannot be taken with him, at least - and though there is no hesitancy upon leaving, he cannot help but glance over his scarred shoulder one last time, his cerulean eyes sweeping the once-familiar landscape that now seems to harbor shadow and darkness. His once home is incredibly not unlike how it felt before the earth had swallowed him with a sinister groan, how it had sucked away anything good and light and true, how hopelessness ran deep and as cold as ice in his veins. He could not stay here (and perhaps Warden had already come to this conclusion too, he hopes) and with a swift inhale of the salty humid air, disappears into the jungle with only the soft shining of his blue light to guide him.

He doesn’t know where to go, but Svedka allows the pale blue of light that now pulses from his body to guide his steps. Where it touches the ground he merely follows, appreciating the softness of its glow against the darkness with quiet eyes, not realizing that during his departure from Tephra, that the sun had slowly started its march into the skies.

The warmth of spring touches his back with caressing golden light, the chill of winter (and the nightmares that plagued him) seemingly gone from his bones in a single breath. Flowers bloom where winter had once choked their roots, the pine trees of the forest bursting with viridian green needles that he cannot help but brush his pale lips against, the scent of their sap lingering on his skin. He sighs, content despite his current loneliness. There are no nightmares here, no disrupting shadows that did not belong - it is pure in the quiet of the forest and the armor he fashioned himself with soaks into his skin, hiding beneath his ease. His light and his heart have brought him to a place he knows well, where sunlight pools unbidden into the bright green of downy grasses and the wildflowers bloom with freedom beneath the golden rays. He smiles, handsome and thoughtful, as the brilliance of the springtime sun warms him like another he has become fond of.

“Aureline,” he muses, her voice bringing that lazy quirk of his lips into a full smile, one that makes the blue of his eyes turn crystalline with happiness when they fall upon her approaching him with that mischievous look that he loves so much. Her mouth finds his jaw and his neck, tracing it as his own grazes across the darkness of her cheek, inhaling the comforting scent of sky and sun that lingers on her skin. His golden shoulder rolls beneath her touch, stretching beneath the warm comfort of her lips on his skin. “Of course,” Svedka replies, “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

The stallion’s casual posture pauses for a moment, turning his head slightly to look into her eyes as his handsome expression sharpens with concern. “You made it out okay?” It’s a question because there is no telling what nightmares may have plagued her the moment Gale had taken the throne and though physically she appears perfectly flawless, Svedka is far gone from the naive boy he once was. The eclipse had made sure of that.

svedka

@aureline

[aureline]

It is an unceasing wonder that even the warmth of this man with eyes the color of every summer sky and a smile bright enough to rival the light of the sun cannot reach to thaw the ice that lives inside her chest. She thinks there might be more of it every day, that there are new layers inside her like rings of growth within the trunk of a tree. He is the closest thing to solace that she has yet discovered, and though it eases something inside her to be near him, the secrets she keeps hold them apart. She knows she should let him in entirely, let him know these broken parts of her heart, the ragged weariness of her soul, she even knows he would accept it all. That he would care for her no differently than he does now. But admitting it to him feels like it would be setting those truths in stone, making them permanent in a way she still pretends they are not.

So she lives behind a mask of light and sunshine, lies past smiles that don’t reach all the way to those beautiful molten eyes. It is easy to do so when almost everyone would like to pretend that the dark didn’t happen, as though if they do not acknowledge it then it will never exist, never find them again.

She thinks he is different, that he does not build a life around pretending, but she is not sure.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” She asks in a way that is so delicately evasive, smiling at him with a practiced kind of levity that bleeds out of the fractures of brokenness inside her eyes. “It seems as though almost everyone has gone already. All the families that have been there since the beginning, raised there as children and then raised their own children there.” There is a furrow in her brow when she pauses, her eyes wandering from his face to track the path of her shadowed thoughts as they draw a frown to her dark mouth. “I thought I would raise my own children there someday.” She admits, blinking once and returning her gaze to him. “But I suppose so much of that will not be true.”

She turns from him to hide the way pain etches itself like fractures of dark throughout the delicate glow of her golden face, pretending instead to stretch and sigh and reach out to brush her lips over the velvet soft petals of the flowers beside them. Aureline is so unlike her mother, so unsuited for a family. But she only knows who Isle has come to be and not the wary, wildling creature her mother had been at this age. Neither does she understand the ways in which Isle had been broken, both her trust and her heart, before she became this culmination of love and kindness that Aureline is so familiar with.

“Where will you go now?” She wonders aloud, abandoning the flowers to look back up into Svedka’s snow-pale face. “I doubt Tephra will be safe for a long while. And even once it is, I imagine it will no longer feel like home to many of us.” She does not mention how the humid volcanic forests had stopped feeling safe a long time ago. That when she smells the smolder and the sulphur, the volcanic ash, she is reminded of the way her father had been reduced daily by the same dark that had wrapped strangling fists around her throat. Tephra has not felt safe for a very long time, and Gale had nothing to do with it. If anything, he was the perfect mask for her to hide behind, the perfect reason to leave and not be questioned.

aureline

dear wilderness, be at your best 
her armor is thin as the fabric of her dress

@Svedka