"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
He had never left the Valley before. Never except that one day... his eyes slit with hate. Jsut the thought of the creature brought about a anger that had his muscles coiling. Not like he is a child anymore. No now he is a full grown male, his mother's son. She had always been somewhat ackward around him. Her Amazonian nature still engrained into her. But he loved all the more for trying to be there for him.
Their family a picture perfect mass of black with glints of green when one turned a head or opened their eyes. Their fathers enormous wings covering them sheilding them from the world. So the world wants war. His thoughts turn from the painful warmth of family to the brokeness that he has come to understand.
His world altered, completely turned inside out. Because of one crazy man, and its lack of control. He would find it. Would find all that it held dear. He would crush it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he would devote his life to this. He did not understand the concept of love that his parents had experienced. Not in that way at least. He was still a naive little boy in that sense. Still the black coat shimmers. Regulating his breathing, clearing his head, snaring his wild rage. He was slowly learning to ball it up in his chest. To let it sit and fester. His jaw is set, he looks from one horse to another.
The males stench was everywhere here. He wanted to find out everything about this horse. What is it that he holds so dear. What would bring him the same pain that he himself was experiencing. Fuck he growls out the word in frustration.
He had nothing to go off of, not even a name. Gallows had failed to show up. His stability was gone. There seemed no reason to stay in the Valley for the moment. Sure he would return there. After all it is his home... well uncertainty clouds his mind. Would Eona want him there now? How would she feel about his new sharpness. The bitter edge of indifference he now carried.
If its war they want then war they shall get. This is his new resolve. He would join that war, he would be there when the world crumbles for everyone else. He would take pleasure in finding others in the same pain that he is in. Those in the feild merry and completely oblivious the horses laugh and enjoy themselves. He looks from one to the other hissing under his breath. Seething, they shouldn't be laughing. Did they even know what was happening? Well they would eventually.
it's strange what desire will make foolish people do.
It is almost like he is allowing her to leave him. She still fears him, fears what he will do to her if she upsets him, but she can control that fear better than she can control her power (though that is coming, since she met those three terrible beasts, since she tried to stop Beqanna from falling to them).
And recently, she feels as though he is letting her go - the noises no longer haunt her as they once did, she no longer quivers at the sight of every palomino stallion.
She hasn’t seen him in weeks but his hold is only just starting to loosen.
The filly frequents the Meadow, and she is beginning to recognise some of the other Meadow dwellers: her mother, for one, who always keeps the girl in sight (even if the girl can’t see her); a few other mares, many with children; a couple of roaming stallions who always nod to the green-and-red as it blinks past. But no names, no stories. Nothing to trace her here.
But something is different today. Something draws her - someone draws her - away from her usual pastime of trying to be invisible only when she wishes to be so (and it’s taking more time than she would have liked). He is young, like her, though seems much older; not as she does (she has aged from what he has done to her, the fear he has instilled in her young heart) but with darkness and sadness and anger. She tries to keep herself hidden - though she is hardly inconspicuous, with her green-and-red coat that appears and disappears at random.
But curiosity gets the better of her (she is the cat, surely).
“Hello” she says softly as she approaches, dark eyes wide and full of something like hunger (though it is not food she craves, but freedom). She is a yearling now, but some part of her will forever be a day old, trapped in the awfulness of her first few hours of life.
(Funny, really, that this pair have had their lives so entirely changed by the same horse, in such different ways.)
She doesn’t say anything else, not yet, not until this one reveals to her if he is to be trusted (but trust is a fickle thing, so hard to grasp yet so willing to be chased).
His boyish voice was slowly cracking and twisting into what would be his life long vocals of power and manipulation later in life. But it was slow going. His black body flickers every now and again with a image that is not his. Sometimes its at random other times it corilates with something he is touching. He would not fully have control over this gift for a while.
But he can remember the feeling of complete power over it. Complete and total single mindedness that followed with it. He was finding that his rage was a great source for the replication process to take hold. Today he trods through the grasses looking to the dirt for answers. Pacing where he had left his mother to rot. The marks of cloven hooves send a flash of red and black, a dull crunch of death, a reminder that she was not here anymore.
Then steps aproach, flickering his green orbs to the present. His brow glowers with distian towards the intruder. But its only a filly, a filly with long gangly legs, a filly with green and red. A filly just as he is a colt. Though draftly in his build, well muscled even at his young age. But the fluff of straw fur along his neck give away his real age. Crowning his neck he grunts Hi. But before he continues his image flickers in and then out disapearing for a moment as a butterfly floats where he had stood just a moment before.
Then the black colt is back. Just as he was completely unaware of what had happened. She to flickers in and out of his vision for a few brief moments. Then she seems solid. Whats up? He doesn't want to give away his name... not yet anyways. Maybe some other moment would lead to that, but if she wasn't offering anything why the hell would he? His rage boils, and green eyes grow toxic.
Then he decides to step forward. A sure foot infront of another, and his nostrils widen extending his neck so that he can sniff at her. The stench of fear overloading her glands. Once again he recoils his eyes slitting to look into hers. His minds gear working and clicking through, what had happened? Why was she so scared? And yet, at the same time he was not going to ask. Not yet.
it's strange what desire will make foolish people do.
She is thin and delicate where he is thick and draft-built; she is smoke where he is solid. But they share something, the mark of something, someone. And they share something else, she can see; she doesn’t flinch when his body changes, disappears, leaving a butterfly behind. And then it reverses, and the black colt is back.
She does the same thing, after all, but in a different way; without the butterfly, for one. She disappears though, and she is slowly learning how to control when she disappears, when she reappears.
He seems short, blunt. The girl doesn’t mind - those who speak a lot seem to always want something from her, need something; as if she has anything to offer. She is just a child, a small shivering shaking girl who doesn’t know how she has ended up here, like this.
She had such high hopes for her life.
“I don’t know,” she says, simply, because it’s too complicated to answer with anything else - anything truthful. The truth is she is afraid, she is scared of being alone because she fears she isn’t alone. Every low crunch, every flash of gold, she is aware. He is here, always here - even if his body isn’t, what he has done to her will always be present.
This colt seems suspicious, always watching her through narrowed eyes. She does not know why he is so suspicious (so strange, that one horse has had such widely different effects on these two young horses), but she does not press it. She does not press anything, and so the pair of them stand, silently, watching each other.
She doesn’t know how to have a conversation yet and she doesn’t know how to learn.
He is everything and nothing. He can be anything he wants, but for all he is, he nothing that he desires to be. Shame, hate, bitterness, and pain. It balls up, coiling around itself. Folding around him like a warm blanket, as much as he hates it, he feels comfortable with it. It coos to him poisonious words. It kills the happy memories with mocking laughter.
Creating a dark smokey world that is stiffling. Sufficating, that is what he is, each breath shame, each look pain. He knows what they see. The black family of the Valley had brought darkness to the land. He had shamed his mother, his father had shamed him. Its a standstill. A deafening silence that clouds his mind. Pride in his heritage was all but gone. He couldn't know just how much like his mother he was. How much she felt the same. But something, something secret inside is soul told him that she knew exactly what he was feeling.
A failure, thats all, he would have to right the wrongs of his father a failure to the Valley and his family. Instead of staying and supporting his children the man had run off. As much as he the pain, he couldn't help but blame his father just as much as he blamed the asshole that commited the crime.
Maybe he could start over in the Tundra, maybe there would still be hope for him somewhere. Maybe there was a place that wouldn't look at him and whisper of the run away king. Neither do I He states quietly. Taking a step, then another he scrutinizes her. There was something piculiarly familiar about her. Something nagging at the back of his brain. And just as she is bright and vividly colored, he is simple, simple and plain. He begins to make a wide arching circle around her.
Testing her, trying to see what kind of reaction he could get from her. What was she like? What attracted him to her with such magnitism. Part of him had to know. In the dark recesses of his mind he could feel a calm in her presence, almost a silencer to the boiling anger that laid just beneath the surface.
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