"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
09-28-2021, 03:21 PM (This post was last modified: 09-28-2021, 03:28 PM by galadriel.)
GALADRIEL
In the weeks following Galadriel’s spearheading of Taiga, she has not allowed herself to linger too long on the masked stallion she left in Nerine. Occasionally she will reminisce, thinking of how he handed her a seat in his sister land without so much as a blink of an eye. Her heart doesn’t warm but it certainly thrums, leaving her body with reverberations that shudder in her legs and down her spine.
It has been mildly boring in Taiga, with the Hyalinian shapeshifters having mostly left the land alone. Rel cannot say she knows every detail of that story, but she knows enough to be aware of the tension between the North and the East. In her first days, she prickled with the anxious energy that accompanies poor kingdom relations, but rarely was her restlessness sated.
Day after day passes as Galadriel realizes that the lives most Taigains lead are quiet, shadowed, and (mostly) peaceful. A people to be proud of, yes; but did they suit her? At night, in the sleepy minutes before she fully passes into dreams, Rel sometimes wonders if this was a mistake. Perhaps she needs a more riotous community, and perhaps it would be wrong of her to stir the giant sleeping tranquilly beneath the fragrant soil.
It’s when Galadriel is deeply entrenched in her restlessness that she scents Reave on the wind. A small smile curls her lips, thinking his arrival being right when she is about to burst so very like him. Calmly, she follows that smell, trailing lazily through the evening shadows.
“Reave . . .” she sings on a piney spring breeze. There, between the lengthening shadows of the Redwoods, Rel thinks she spots him. Her pace breaks into a trot as she grins.
He had sent her to Taiga, handing her this territory without a single qualm. He cannot say if she will keep it, but for now, it brings him a great deal of satisfaction. They are so similar, the two of them, and he has no doubt she will grow restless in these quiet woods. But he too is restless - often wandering, often away. But he always returns here just as he returns to the northern moors. He had been born amongst these trees, after all. They had built him into the creature that would take Nerine at such a tender age.
He knows every massive redwood and gleaming mushroom of this forest as well as he knows every knot and hill of Nerine. He knows many of the inhabitants of this wood trespass frequently on the north, just as he does here. But he does not care. The two territories are as close as it is possible for two territories to be.
Finding her is easy enough for a creature like Reave. She had asked him to visit, but he would have visited even if she had not asked.
The wind whispers through the trees, carrying the scent of pine and earthy loam. She finds him before he crosses the distance that remains, his name whisking through the trees on a melodically pitched voice. His lips curve into a wicked grin before he can stop them, eyes brightening into a burning blue. Her brisk steps are muffled on the needle-strewn earth, but it is not her feet he stares at as she erases the space between them.
No, his gaze is fixed on hers with a bold intensity.
“Hello Laddie,” he murmurs in reply, grin widening. She prefers Rel, he knows, but he refuses to be everyone else. “Did you miss me?”
