"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
10-26-2017, 05:05 PM (This post was last modified: 10-26-2017, 05:38 PM by wrena.)
Wrena
she sucks the blood of the slain,
& the wolf tears men; would you know yet more?
For a while now the fire-child has wandered farther and farther from her last point each time she takes to the skies alone, which is not very often. Most times she is accompanying her mother on some chore, or wasting time listening to her big sister – sometimes they go on adventurous, but mostly it’s just her sister (much more diplomatic than she) barking orders and hovering like a hen. Today on this rainy morning she finds herself alone, combing the gray beach for things washed on the shore. Today she finds nothing fun, but she wanders still. When she comes to some jagged pillars of beaten stone she admires them for a time and takes wing, a running start is needed first of course. She ascends from the sand and crashing waves of Nerine’s most westerly sea border to balance playfully at the tip of the towering stone, looking down and around but the drizzle and fog has covered most things in the distance. The sun is muffled on the southern horizon, but it is there. Just as the rain is beginning in Nerine, the sun beams in its retreat elsewhere. Wrena has never left Nerine without either her mother or her sister – until today.
Whoosh. Soft on the wind like an owl between evergreens. Her wings are massive in comparison to her tall, lean frame. They’re scaled in smooth onyx dragon-skin, obsidian claws adorning each bone tip, the first being the biggest for clinging. Her jack-o-latern eyes burn through the veil of mist as she soars over the swathing seas, thundering booming and threatening in the distance but she avoids it with ease. Wrena cannot resist running across a violent swell here and there, crashing through the crests of angry white sea-foam. She laughs to herself, twirling in mid-air, diving from great heights to dip her toes to the waves as she plays. Wetness sleeks her coat and glistens her wings by the time she touches down on the River’s marshy shoreline. Some slickness is from the sea and some from the rain, either way she is soaked once she arrives in the rainless place.
A few large cranes, blue and cautious, flee with a subtle splash which makes the dragon-girl startle a bit, smoke billowing from her nostrils with alarm. Even with little control over her magic, she’s always ready to fry something – especially when it makes her scared. With never leaving Nerine without a chaperone…she’s never had the chance to fry much at all (aside from a few poor critters). She creeps out of the knee deep marshes that surround the shores, much unlike her home’s sandy and rocky coves. It smells of wet forest as she ventures onto drier (not by much) land. Moss squishes beneath her and the wind howls between the bony trees, she tightens her wings to ribs and shivers. Much colder than home too…
The promise of sun was surely a cruel trick. It is only sunny a small amount and it is chilly enough to freeze an egg, it feels like. She wanders only a little more before gathering what she can of flaky moss, bark and twigs, breathing a lick of flame gently onto it until a flame is born. As she’s learned from her mother, she feeds it with dry wood broken under hoof, standing over it with her wings spread and curved to absorb it fully.
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
“That’s an interesting trick,” he says from beyond the warmth of Wrena’s tiny fire. Standing motionless in the shadow of a large oak, he’d watched the younger horse as she played above the sea. Her wings were almost familiar, and he’d known even before she’d headed inland that he wanted to speak to her. She’d seemed careless, without caution – something Ivar barely remembers.
As she’d built a fire, he’d caught the smell of salt-and-stone that he knows to be Nerine. Once again, he eyes the leathery length of her wing, and wonders if perhaps the dragon has strayed from his iron queen. No, Ivar decides, there is not a strong enough resemblance between the stranger and Isobell or Castille that might support such conjecture. The brown creature is no relation to his pseudo-family, but she is from the same kingdom. Perhaps she knows them. It is enough to staunch his hunger (that, and the knowledge that she’s barely more than a child). He’s an animal, after all; she is too small to be recognized as prey and so he has no interest.
No instinctual interest at least; his fascination with the little fire is certainly not from any sense of self-preservation.
“You’re a long way from Nerine,” he adds, never turning his brown eyes away from the source of light at her hooves. The firelight shines off his still-dripping scales with a fierce sort of intensity. Opalescent rather than reflective, he glimmers in the cloudy afternoon and the fire: the very image of perfection. “Come to get away from all that boring grey?” There’s a grin pulling at his scaled mouth, and he finally looks up to meet Wrena’s gaze, clearly amused by his own observation.
she sucks the blood of the slain,
& the wolf tears men; would you know yet more?
Her reptilian wings gleam between the wet and the lick of the orange flames, her eyes smolder while she watches the fire dance and curl. She draws dreams and memories across the blackness of her stirring mind while the sun tries to climb above the clouds, above the shroud of cinereal mists to touch the land below. His voice breaks the peace and startles the young woman alone in the woods, her wings bend and flatten against her rusty red ribs. She faces him with only quick, deer-like scrutiny, as if ready to flee. She does not flee, however, and flicks both of her ears up to listen without making a move.
Nerine. She squints suspiciously when the name of her home slips off of his tongue. He is bigger, probably much older, she concludes. Politics and geography is all that is, she tells herself. She is between fear, curiosity and something she cannot name… “Yeah…” Through a few strands of obsidian forelock she stares on, her voice shy but clear, tempting boldness you might say.
The world around them drips and crinkles. A cold autumn rain, turning on and off as the clouds flow overhead, leaves everything shiny and wet. Sunlight is trying to peer through, but to hardly any avail. A wind tumbles in from the west and collides with turbulence from the eastern sea-side. The clash makes for rampant gusts at random times, pushing the fog-like rain around like smoke.
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
While Loess has been uncharacteristically full of children visitors of late, most of them had been of the especially small variety. Fluffy still, with little bottlebrush tails and an eye-to-head ratio that appealed to Ivar’s very base instincts. There are only two ages of horses he is familiar with after all: those very small children and full grown adults. Of course he knows there are ages between the two ends of the spectrum (he’d been an adolescent himself not terribly long ago), but he’s not been around them, and certainly not seen one since he’d gone back to the sea.
He steps a bit closer, curious about the fire and the rusty filly that is protecting it.
Wrena does not run, but the readiness (and then reluctance) to flee is appealing to him in a way that children are usually not. It reminds him of Isobell, of the way she was a child in all his happy memories, until one day she was suddenly a woman almost too good to eat. The bay filly is almost there, walking the vulnerable precipice of adulthood.
The opportunity is too good to not take advantage of.
Ivar reaches out (slowly, as if to show his good intentions), and removes a leaf that is plastered to the leathery skin of Wrena’s wing.
Physical proximity established.
“Doesn’t look like you picked a good alternative,” Ivar says, his attention turning back to the fire at her feet. “Or do you like standing about in the rain?”
she sucks the blood of the slain,
& the wolf tears men; would you know yet more?
Never has she ever…interacted with a man. Young or old, any type, she’s never come across them personally…or ever wanted to. At her mother’s hip she’s only ever spoken to women, her aunts and sister, never the boys or men (though few in Nerine, there were some). This realization floods her senses for a second or two but her external doesn’t betray it. She leans in recoil to his brazen reach, but watches him pluck the leaf politely from her scaled wing. Her lip threatens to curl as if she’s disgusted, but it only twitches in place while her eyes roll with his movement. She nods at his poke at her escaping rain to find rain still, tilting her head back to look up to the pearly clouds rolling low above them. “Yeah…” same quiet tone as before.
“I’ll try anything once.” The embers of her burnt orange eyes catch the light of his and harden, unblinking. “So far I am not loving it.” She shivers, which makes her eyes flutter and she blinks rapidly. “Nerine…it’s much warmer.” Her voice is gaining its typical syrup notes the more she speaks, her vision steadying on his face, taking what she can from his painted cover.
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
She is still cautious, Ivar realizes.
It is interesting, and makes her all the more intriguing. They’re usually half way to the water by now, starry-eyed and compliant. She is not, and the hardness of her orange eyes heightens his curiosity. Every once in a while, he comes across one that will offer him a fight. It is not frequent, and so is all the more tantalizing. Is it her age, he wonders? Both too young to be tempted and too naïve to know exactly why they feel wary of the charming stranger? She’s a little younger than Aena had been, he thinks, though the similarities between the two otherwise are minimal.
He could tell her more about Nerine, how he had run down its shoreline as a child with his friends the prince and princess, how is mother is the queen’s mage. Those details might reassure her, might cement him as not a danger. Sharing them would be simpler and probably faster, but Ivar has an empty afternoon ahead of him and no reason to rush.
“The water’s just as cold though,” he replies with a shrug, pointedly ignoring her shiver. “I prefer the hot springs when it’s this cold out.” It’s the truth; Ivar dislikes the cold immensely.
“Do you?” He meets her gaze squarely, and the flecks of gold in his warm brown eyes catch the fire. He speaks as though he knows she has experienced the Loessan hot springs, and is simply inquiring about her thoughts on the matter. He treats her like an adult rather than a child, and for a moment he makes no effort to further his own motives. Ivar has not seen Isobell in a few days, and the idea of breaking this filly as a replacement for the iron princess is suddenly appealing.
11-04-2017, 12:08 PM (This post was last modified: 11-04-2017, 12:11 PM by wrena.)
Wrena
she sucks the blood of the slain,
& the wolf tears men; would you know yet more?
Oh the many things she does not know would amaze her, they would beguile her. These things she does not know are just that though, a mystery to her, so she has no allowance to fret over them and let them conjure doubt within her mind. She watches him carefully, her jaw clenching and her muscles wound tight to ripple under her dapply bay pelt. When the scaled stallion mentions the water she turns to look toward it. It is hidden in shrubby, mist and marsh-weeds but you can hear the sea-birds calling from I and the hum it’s waves whispering on a gentle wind. She keeps her white ear bent to him as she looks out into the nothingness, toward the sea sounds. I bet it is. Her voice sizzles in her own mind but she turns back to his chocolate eyes with silence.
Hot springs? She shifts, a visible fidget as she lets the term familiarize itself within her arsenal of words, phrases and other things. She looks at the ground in a moment of frayed confidence and quickly recovers it with her glassy eyes of magma find him again. The glint of orange dances in ribbons across his opalescent face, catching his hungry eyes they stare at one another. She is a tall girl but she pales in comparison, her bones are finer, her frame thinner and her height dwarfs in his shadow.
“I wouldn’t know.” A smirk wants to crease the edges of her black lips, it presses to and leaves only a hint but she never lets it happen. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” If he is observant enough he will be able to see the amusement building behind her eyes, perhaps even able to read the change in her voice. She speaks clearly, but it flirts with being a mumble, something you have to want to hear otherwise it falls into the background like shuffling leaves in the wind.
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
“Never?” Ivar repeats, his brown eyes widening as she admits to never having heard of a hot spring. “What are they even teaching you women in Nerine if you don’t even know what a hot spring is?” Calling her a woman rather than a child, he casually admits the way he sees her without resorting to the typical lascivious perusal of her figure. He is testing the waters with enjoyment, curious as to which approach might be the most successful.
Ivar has never hunted quite like this before, but he finds in enthralling.
Perhaps there is a grain of truth to the legend of kelpies preferring to seduce young virgins.
“Would you like to see one?” He asks, attempting to tease the shadow of a smile that he suspects he is witnessing into a more tangible thing. “At least you’d get more from your trip away from Nerine than standing in the rain at the River.” There seems to be nothing unscrupulous about his offer; he has been the perfect gentleman thus far.
she sucks the blood of the slain,
& the wolf tears men; would you know yet more?
In years to come Wrena will be able to say, at least, that she’s known what it feels like to be prey. To feel the aching scrutiny of someone’s primal, vicious desire even when it is hidden beneath a few layers of scaly charm. For now though, she’s unaware of why his brown eyes twinkle just so or why her skin prickles beneath her rusty red coat. She doesn’t acknowledge his first jab, responding only in silence and the erect attention of both ears.
She involuntarily tilts her head to the side with a skeptical squint in her ember colored eyes. This does nothing to coax even a shadow of a grin to play on her charcoal lips, in fact, they tighten. Wrena’s thoughtful eyes soften to look toward where she’d first descended, then to the sporadic flecks of lit ash that rise with the last dying hisses of her fire and they sharpen again when they come to rest on the piebald stallion. She’s oblivious to his status, his capability, his intentions… Something in her screams to leave, to take wing and find her mother, but another part of her growls, snaps and slithers at the chance to go somewhere, to keep herself in the company of this stranger.
She nods finally. “How far, then?” She says this slow and with a creamy smoothness, the broken glass rigidity almost gone.
I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take
If he has to stay on land, at least he can do his best to make it tolerable.
The sea dulls his hunger, but there is no sea in Loess. Kylin had pointed it out during her last visit, and the scaled stallion has been unable to forget it. The hills of the kingdom are thick with springs, but none are deep enough. The land lands prey too; the piebald had ranged far on his hunts in years passed. Now though, he is more tethered to the land; the title came with a chain, it seems.
The odds of being discovered will be higher, he knows, but there is no harm in bringing someone new to the kingdom. She could just be a recruit, he reasons, and the idea of a façade seems all the more invigorating if just for the layer of difficult it adds.
“That way,” he says, turning the dark point of her muzzle with a nudge of his own, directing her to look south. The desire to subdue her is strong, but the touch is too brief. The timing has to be right, he knows, and they have plenty of time.
The piebald stallion moves forward, but he does glance down at the dying fire for a moment. The fire probably keeps her warm, he reasons, and so he changes the path they will take in that moment. The first was well protected by a break of trees, blocking the worst of the winter wind. The one Ivar moves toward now is out in the open. It offers glorious views on a summer afternoon but the windchill is bitter and the breathtaking come winter. She’ll come closer for warmth, he reasons, perhaps that will be the right time to make his move.
kelpie mimicry | dragon scales | tactile hypnosis minimal grullo tobiano king of loess
