[open] There ain't language for the things I've seen; Call pony/any

[Vlx]

I took a little journey to the unknown.
And I’ve come back changed, I can feel it in my bones.

His chest was tight while he grieved his lost paradise; he didn’t look back at the bodies and only chuffed bitterly at the rain, sneering at the stink of charred flesh over burnt timber. Sickness took some, fire took the others.  Both engineered by creatures too stupid and greedy to see the damage they were causing until it was too late. Such was the curse of the immortal, they had so much time at their disposal that they never considered the destruction they left in their wake. And so, he left Eden to the snakes.

?˖ ࣪⊹

Beqanna was under the cover of an unusual darkness when Vlx returned.

He was certain that it should have been daylight by now, but when he crested the mountaintops, the sun did not rise to meet him on the other side and he stared blankly toward The Beach. There was an enormous black creature outlined in golden light in the distance. Vlx sighed. If it wasn’t the faeries or the gods themselves causing everyone in Beqanna issues, it was the dead.

Vlx stared for a moment longer, then pressed on, following the ancient trail southward to The Meadow. It was not lost on him the implication of the old trail being so overgrown.

?˖ ࣪⊹

There were ghosts in the old Meadow.

He could hear the giggling of spectral lovers. The war cry of old, dead stallions quarreling over mares who didn’t love them and children who wouldn’t remember them. The sobbing of the betrayed. The rendering of flesh ripped from bone by horses too far gone to save. Something in them had just been wrong from the start. But they were the start of it all. The fabric of what had made Beqanna, Beqanna.

And the fabric, it seemed, had started to unravel.

He stood atop a withering knoll, the wind at his back; he was practically invisible now in that persistent darkness, the only light, it seemed, for miles around was the dim yellow-gold glow of his eyes and the glow of other creatures who slipped to and from the place. None seemed to linger. They had better places to be. Vlx cocked his head, his ears swiveling forward as he tried to scan the Meadow to no avail. They all might as well have been blind under their present condition.

“It’s always something,” he muttered, his voice deep and low.

Vlx

atrox x laiyna

[Rowe]

Rowe, it would seem, did not have losses to grieve, or if she did, she failed to mourn them. It’s difficult to be sure, but the patterns of her lineage found her all the same. Willing subject or not.

It’s not the darkness that follows her, that is for certain. Nor is the shadow her cause, because even she could not command the revenants of gloom. Pressing them into the commons and lengthening their presence until they stretched far across the loam of grass. And yet, she succumbed to them all the same, latching on to the nightshade, and curling it around her form, effectively camouflaged against the unlit portions of the meadow. Until she too, perhaps, became a small piece of that darkling setting.

Two amber eyes watched as another approached, and stood against a knoll to overlook his dimmed passageway.

Rowe shouldn’t wonder why, but her curiosity piques nonetheless, and she finds herself approaching the isolated man without worry befretting her emotion. The darkness, though unusual, found the pale mare as a welcome visitor—it brought no spirits to haunt her. Rather, it is possible that she herself was one such phantom, meandering the moors with interest in place of woe.

”Do the shadows bother you?” A voice that lacked all sense of discomfort, she turned a pallid ear to his gruff words, perceiving his observations as annoyance. Though she remained blithe in her own senses, could it be that this man with the lamp-like eyes had a distaste for the dark?

”It’s not so bad,” she assures him, bumping a shoulder against his own dark palette, and then she too looked from the knoll—though she had yet to learn why.

ROWE

Michaelis x Padma

[Vlx]

I took a little journey to the unknown.
And I’ve come back changed, I can feel it in my bones.

“Do the shadows bother you?”

Vlx chuckled, though not unkindly, and leaned into the warmth of her shoulder bumping against him rather than skittering away from her reassurance. Part of him wondered what he felt like to others now; he wondered if he felt cold to the touch, or if his inky black flesh and coat felt as warm and alive as it always had.

“No,” he said, still staring toward the horizon. The creature blocking the sun moved, its giant crowned head outlined for a moment in blinding, white light from the sun. He looked away, turning his own head inward towards her. Blinking away spots from his vision, he squinted just in time to make out her pale silhouette before the sun was eclipsed again. “There’s far worse things in and around Beqanna to be bothered by.”

Vlx leaned forward into a stretch like an oversized hound. “I just like being able to see them coming,” the black stallion snorted, giving his body a good shake after pushing his front end back up. “Who might you be?”

Vlx

atrox x laiyna

[Rowe]

The knoll had become her podium, and she watched the dozing stretch of land in hushed parallel until his words broke the silence like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples disturbing the sleepy surface; maybe she was the pebble afterall.

A small smile tugged at the corner of her lip with the realization, but she left it there where it warmed her, turning her attention back to the sable man beside her. His glowing eyes drifting out along the moors, but her own just as keen to stare alongside him, flicking an ear at his easy ‘no’ and nodding her head ever so slightly. The young mare found herself wondering what had perturbed him, but she stilled her questions before they unraveled like the night along her skin.

The sun assailed her amber eyes, drawing several rapid blinks against the sudden change, collecting a hiss between her teeth that left no room for misconception.

Someone had turned on the light, leaving her momentarily blind, though her eyes dared not shut, there was nothing to soothe them from unseeing. Precious moments pass, she can feel his breath when he turns, ears swivelling toward the tiny nuance of his head twisting and the sound that comes with adjusted movement. The faintest warmth pricked her skin, laughing as it touched her face, her neck and evaded the premise just as quickly.

‘Far worse’, now that should have held some value, and it does in its own sense, but Rowe is drawn to the distraction of seeing such things. Rather, not being able to see them, and that final inflection tugs her ears forward, leaving her lack of caution behind until a gentle, ”Oh, I’m Rowe,” draws itself past her pale mouth.

”Perhaps I can help,” she offers, carefully filling the void with something that is assuredly near to pleasantness, though I’m not convinced I’d call it even that. “I found you, didn’t I?” There’s no offer at smugness, nor would one be able to pin her as proud, but there is something delicious in her certainty, the ease at which she navigates the gloam and asserts herself where others find blank canvas. She watches, she waits, and tilts her head at his stretch.

An obsidian hound, she asides, noting the action and saving it for later. Filing the movement under interesting behavior, one that she might try when no one is looking.

“What are we looking for,” she begins, before an ear turns thoughtfully toward him. “—and what should I call you while we look?”

ROWE

Michaelis x Padma