11-07-2019, 09:46 PM
Pteron often dreams of violets.
Sometimes he is back in the Brilliant Pampas, where the spring-fresh earth was covered with them. In other dreams, they’ve washed up on a white sand shore; in others still they grow amid craggy peaks. He dreams of them, and yet each time he moves toward them out they are just out of reach, and his lips find nothing but bitter grass or rough sand or cold stone. He dreams of amethysts too, embedded into stone that he cannot pry them from, and of lavender fish that dart too quickly to catch. He wakes frustrated each time, grasping for something that remains ever out of reach.
A gust of bitter air forces him abruptly from sleep, and he blinks away the snow that has built up on his pale eyelashes.
The dream slips away before he has time to remember it, but it was something good, and a sleepy smile remains despite the fierce cold. Tucked inside the warmth of his feather-and-leaf nest, only the pegasus’ face is exposed to the winter weather. Winds always pick up at dawn, pushing away the heavy snowfall like they push away fog in the warmer months. Cold winds, but good winds for flying, and Pteron doesn’t mean to waste them.
After shaking off the clinging debris from his coat, the tobiano stallion walks the few feet to the opening in the tree where he has made his home. Then he steps over the edge, plummeting down toward the earth a hundred feet below, only to snap his wings open at the last moment and soars. His blue hooves scrape the soft snowfall from the night before, leaving shallow furrows in the untouched whiteness. He lets the wind carry him ahead and rises between the trees, forced to dodge and duck and turn sharply in the maze of ancient trunks. He’s carried east toward the sea, and once there the winds gentle and he is left circling the iron grey waves that make up the waterway that further southeast will become the Silver Cove.
Directly south are the high white mountains of Hyaline, sure to be bitterly cold. Pteron smiles, and then the smile abruptly disappears. The rest of him is gone too, nothing at all remains visible in the air where he still hovers. The sensation is still a little strange, even after all these years: being carried by invisible wings, unable to see even the nose on his own face. He pushes past it though, intent on his southern goal. The mountains are easy enough to dart around after his time in the Taigan woods, and he keeps as low as he can, not eager to freeze. When the frozen glitter of the lake catches his eye, he rises again, and circles a good half-mile above the lake. His quarry is somewhere below, difficult to see against the powdery snow, but Pteron is patient.
There. The pegasus bends a wing, floating lower and lower until he settles in the snow a few yards ahead of Aegean, with only his wings visible .
“Tis I,” he says in a voice far deeper than his own, one that tries and fails to hold back the laughter, “the Ghost of Winters Past.” And then he reappears entirely, unable to hold his partial invisibility and laughter at the same time.
@[Aegean]
Sometimes he is back in the Brilliant Pampas, where the spring-fresh earth was covered with them. In other dreams, they’ve washed up on a white sand shore; in others still they grow amid craggy peaks. He dreams of them, and yet each time he moves toward them out they are just out of reach, and his lips find nothing but bitter grass or rough sand or cold stone. He dreams of amethysts too, embedded into stone that he cannot pry them from, and of lavender fish that dart too quickly to catch. He wakes frustrated each time, grasping for something that remains ever out of reach.
A gust of bitter air forces him abruptly from sleep, and he blinks away the snow that has built up on his pale eyelashes.
The dream slips away before he has time to remember it, but it was something good, and a sleepy smile remains despite the fierce cold. Tucked inside the warmth of his feather-and-leaf nest, only the pegasus’ face is exposed to the winter weather. Winds always pick up at dawn, pushing away the heavy snowfall like they push away fog in the warmer months. Cold winds, but good winds for flying, and Pteron doesn’t mean to waste them.
After shaking off the clinging debris from his coat, the tobiano stallion walks the few feet to the opening in the tree where he has made his home. Then he steps over the edge, plummeting down toward the earth a hundred feet below, only to snap his wings open at the last moment and soars. His blue hooves scrape the soft snowfall from the night before, leaving shallow furrows in the untouched whiteness. He lets the wind carry him ahead and rises between the trees, forced to dodge and duck and turn sharply in the maze of ancient trunks. He’s carried east toward the sea, and once there the winds gentle and he is left circling the iron grey waves that make up the waterway that further southeast will become the Silver Cove.
Directly south are the high white mountains of Hyaline, sure to be bitterly cold. Pteron smiles, and then the smile abruptly disappears. The rest of him is gone too, nothing at all remains visible in the air where he still hovers. The sensation is still a little strange, even after all these years: being carried by invisible wings, unable to see even the nose on his own face. He pushes past it though, intent on his southern goal. The mountains are easy enough to dart around after his time in the Taigan woods, and he keeps as low as he can, not eager to freeze. When the frozen glitter of the lake catches his eye, he rises again, and circles a good half-mile above the lake. His quarry is somewhere below, difficult to see against the powdery snow, but Pteron is patient.
There. The pegasus bends a wing, floating lower and lower until he settles in the snow a few yards ahead of Aegean, with only his wings visible .
“Tis I,” he says in a voice far deeper than his own, one that tries and fails to hold back the laughter, “the Ghost of Winters Past.” And then he reappears entirely, unable to hold his partial invisibility and laughter at the same time.
@[Aegean]
-- pteron --