"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
03-10-2022, 04:10 PM (This post was last modified: 03-10-2022, 04:10 PM by lannister.)
you used to tell me we'd turn into something oh, you said life was much better than this
Having lingered in the North, Lannister makes a slow trip out of Taiga via the banks of the River. His trip was bitterly cold—vicious—and he finds that even the pleasant memories of Taiga are not enough to warm him. He seeks that heat now: traveling south, wondering if he might be able to stomach a stay in Tephra.
Lan wraps his wings tighter around his body as he bursts into a rapid trot in an attempt to loosen and warm his muscles. Next to him, the River only babbles quietly. Mostly frozen on the top with rushing water running beneath, it hardly makes a noise. Lannister almost misses the white noise in the background, both his ears flicking erratically at every snap of ice or twig.
Eventually, the riverbank grows rockier and harder to traverse, forcing the dream-weaver to slow his pace and climb over row after row of flat, slate-gray rock. The iced-over river had broken into running water a half-mile ago, and Lannister has been hearing the rumble of a waterfall for some time. The sound of his hooves upon rock soon dies beneath the gentle roar of the tumbling water. Lan pauses at the edge, ears turned sharply toward his nape.
To his left is densely-packed forest, to his right uncrossable water, and above him is the rolling gray of a pre-snow sky. Even if Lannister didn’t mind the cold wind above, the weather will keep him bound to the earth.
So he stands before the crashing water, frustrated, flicking his tail angrily as the first flurries fall.
She does not feel the cold against her skin. Like everything else that tries to touch her it is no match for the relentless heat that rises in the shape of flames across her body, the sparks in her mane and tail creating an invisible barrier that wards winter—and everyone else—away. She had once thought that time would wear away at the bitterness, that eventually she would grow tired of the anger that festers like an infected wound. Instead the bitterness had carved itself into her like a river might through a mountain: so slowly she might not have noticed, until all at once she is nothing but a canyon sculpted from her own resentment.
Made of nothing but spark and flame, she stands out against the somewhat bleak winter landscape. The sky is a cold gray, and the treeline that she keeps to is dark and barren, though it does her little good. She is too bright in comparison to the dullness around her, the vibrant orange and red sure to draw every eye when she longed for the anonymity that had come with being an unremarkable bay.
The only good that come of turning into a living wildfire is that only a fool would be stupid enough to reach out and touch her, and if that is the choice they make she no longer feels pity for scalding their skin.
She follows the distant roar of a waterfall because she finds that she prefers the crashing sound of water to her own thoughts.
As if the water might drown the images of the faces that haunt her, to fool her into thinking that she might for once find some kind of respite if only for a moment.
She is hardly surprised when she rounds a thick grove of trees and comes nearly face to face with a man that must have been planning on doing the same, but that does not stop the shadow that falls across her face when their eyes meet. Her dark eyes flash, though whether that is with irritance or simply the flames along her face reflecting, it is difficult to say. But the way her lips nearly twist into a sneer, the way her ears fall flat into the embers of her mane and the single word that she speaks seems to burn from the inside out, she is sure there will be little question to how she feels at stumbling across unexpected company: “Leave.”
