"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
The world sounds quiet without the beat of the shore, but the redheaded girl is enjoying the silence. She cannot remember a time without it, and though she will long for it in time, the novelty of its absence is pleasant.
She stands in the middle of an empty field, surrounded by rolling frostbitten hills that are themselves ringed by fiery trees. It is so different a place from home. She finds it beautiful. Wax smiles, the expression faint and mostly covered by her tangle of bleached hair. Always in her face - like some uncouth ruffian her mother had said.
At the thought of her mother the smile fades again, because to think of her mother is to think of Wane, and there wherever that he might be. It is certainly not here, she knows. The chestnut mare stomps one dark foot firmly on the cold dirt and inhales a sharp, crisp breath.
One more place to cross of the list.
A shame - she thinks Wane might have liked this meadow that seems as endless as the sea.
I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound
The field is beautiful when it is like this, emptied of bodies, quiet.
It is eerie, in its way, but also beautiful, and Magnus finds himself breathing in the fragrant scent of flowers along with the scent of earth and the haunted scent of horses here and now gone. He does not mind it though, the way that the shelled out land is full of ghosts. It is calming and grounding.
It brings a strange and rare peace to him, leaving him quiet as he walks through the field, the grass tickling the underside of his belly. When he sees the mare, fiery red in the midst of all of the green and tan, it doesn’t cause any change in feeling. Instead, it causes a smile to warm the edges of his sooty lips, his gold-flecked eyes studying the lines that draw her up before altering his path in her direction.
When he is near, but far enough away to remain respectful, he stops.
For a moment he is quiet, reluctant to break this beautiful silence that swells around them, but it would be worse to simply stare and so he finally does. “Hello,” his voice is thick, husky from years of use, his throat rumbling with just the few syllables. He inclines his heavy head in greeting before bringing his gaze up again to find her own, lips curving in the one corner. “My name is Magnus.”
I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine
At the edge of the empty meadow Wane is basking in the subtle smells of autumn leaves, and the undisturbed silence that echoes all around him. In Nerine he had claimed what were essentially squatter rights and the kingdom (a land claimed by the former amazons tribe, unbeknownst to him at the time), he’d learned only recently, could get more than a little wild towards the end of the season so he is unabashedly grateful for the peace. Today, he is thinking about her, because the way the oak tree he stands beneath now is casting shadows along his back reminds him of the way he’d grown up in her wake.
He won’t say it aloud, but he’s missed her.
There are those that think twins are intuitive; that one will instinctively feel the prickle of hair on the skin of his back and know that the other is in danger. This had never been the case with his sister, as far as Wane is concerned. If it were, he wouldn’t have needed to flit from place to place in search of her wildfire skin, and hurricane legs. He longed for her, though, in strong ways that he could only ever describe as a sort of homesickness. That’s what Wax was to him; home.
So, when he cranes his great head to look across the meadow at any of its potential patrons (and not for any of the elegant reasons that Wax, gentle as she is, might assume) and sees the familiar burn of her skin something inside him is stirred. He laughs aloud at the way her hair still falls across her eyes as moves forward as though he has been set on fire himself, arriving at her flank just in accordance with a rather broody-looking stranger who says his name is Magnus.
“Did she ask?” He scowls, unable to help himself, but he doesn’t linger on the stranger long as in the next moment he moves to look his sister in her eyes.
“Wax,” he says, the curl of a familiar smile on his lips.
“What took you so long?”
10-25-2018, 10:35 PM (This post was last modified: 10-25-2018, 10:36 PM by Wax.)
The steady thud of hooves catches her attention quickly, and Wax turns her head to see a stranger moving closer. She smiles warmly, and when he stops a respectful distance away the mare close the gap between them to press her nose against his in a far warmer greeting. It is the way her family has always greeted each other, and it does not strike her as at all strange.
He does not look like she had expected, this resident of Beqanna.
Wax's mind was filled with fanciful tails of violet colored horses that trailed silver sparks, of ruby-eyes mares who could shift to badgers in the blink of an eye. This horse looks rather like any other horse, though she is delighted to see that he is not bay like her mother, father, and brother, but is something different. Not like her (all bright copper and pale flax) but something entirely new.
She does not have enough time to take in much more than his color and name when she is suddenly spinning around at a touch at her side.
"Wane!" says Wax with delight, and presses her cheek to his neck in a warm embrace. When she pulls away it is with a delighted smile. "It's only been one day, silly!" She responds with a laugh. The laugh grows still as she searches her twin's familiar face more carefully. She traces the strong lines of his face, the thick crest of his mane that is not at all as she remembers. This is her brother but this is an older brother when she should be the elder by a half hour.
This is more of what she had expected from the fairy-tale land that is Beqanna: an inexplicable three year age difference between twins. They had celebrated their third birthday not long before deciding to leave their childhood home, and though Wax had delayed her departure by a half-day, it seems that those twelve hours had passed much more quickly in Beqanna.
She is suddenly very aware of Magnus, who she had greeted and then immediately forgotten. Making a soft noise of distress (Wax is a great many things but never has she been so rude!), she turns back to the buckskin stallion with an apologetic smile.
"I'm Wax," she tells him, her voice demure and with the faintest hint of her father's twang. "And this is my brother, Wane. It's a pleasure to meet you, Magnus. Have I made it to Beqanna then?" This last question is directed at both of them, one copper brow raised curiously.
I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound
She steps forward to close the distance between them and he doesn’t mind it, instead reaching forward to touch the velvet of his nose to the crook of her neck. The scent of her is soft and wild, speaking to something like honeysuckle and thistle and he breathes it in, committing it to memory. His dark lips curve into a roguish grin, the gold of his eyes good-natured as he studies the line of her face. Such a greeting, however, is cut short by the arrival of the other stallion. Magnus lifts his head slightly to survey him, watching as he snaps at him and then moves to his sister, the two of them coming together like gravity.
If he is surprised by the stallion’s quick annoyance, it doesn’t show on his face. Magnus has had enough experience in the field to not be thrown by a few curt words and he just grins at the other stallion, a flash of white against the shadow of his muzzle. “Not yet,” is all he says with a casual roll of his shoulder.
He falls quiet for a moment, letting the two of them sink into the reunion, and he nearly takes a step back to take his leave when the mare looks back at him. He grabs onto her name, along with her brother’s, and he tucks it away for safekeeping. “The pleasure is all mine, Wax.” His gaze shifts to her brother, something like humor in the tilt of his head. “But the pleasure is probably all yours, Wane.” One corner of his mouth quirks before he settles his gaze on the mare, contemplating her words for a minute.
“You have.” Something like excitement twists in his stomach at the prospect of the stories. He always loved to hear others talk about what it was like living outside of Beqanna. As someone who had been born and raised here, and never given the chance to travel outside of it, it was thrilling to think about.
“You’ve made it to the field. I take it you’re from elsewhere?”
I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine
And there's a lesson waiting to be learned the firestarters always get the burns and the good guys never get the girl
She has been in the field all day, and the laughter catches her entirely off guard. Her head jerks up from grazing, and the white mare’s amber eyes narrow as she follows the path the stallion makes across the field, only to get immediately annoyed by someone else who happened to talk to the lady in question, first.
She scowls. Then, eith a breath intake, follows him, only to mix into the conversation easily. ”Boys, please, give a lady some space to breathe?” She looks at the mare almost apologetically, though the girl seems happy to see the stallion who had been intervening, and they seem familiar with one another enough that she doesn’t comment further, and smiles at the gathering.
The buckskin continues with almost a stoic-sounding recruiting-routine, asking if she’s not from Beqanna. She suppresses a laugh, though she still gives a bright smile to him before looking back at the siblings. ”Welcome to the Field, both of you, I do think. You’ve found the most likely place to meet someone here, as it’s a place full of recruiters.” A quick explanation for her and the buckskin’s appearance, as it seems the younger stallion needs one. ”I’m Ilma, from Hyaline.” If she knew about Wane’s earlier comment about giving a name, she might have done it sooner, just to see if he was going to make the same snappy remark.
and shooting stars cannot fix the world
Late to the scene but laura just keeps beating me so here I am posting anyway
Any fool knows men and women think differently at times, but the biggest difference is this: men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget.
10-26-2018, 05:52 PM (This post was last modified: 10-26-2018, 05:53 PM by Wane.)
maybe you were the ocean
Magnus melts into the background like noise, like static.
Wane hasn’t come for casual small talk, or to exchange quick witticisms that veil vaguely passive aggressions. Or, he hasn’t today. The truth is that in another time or place he might have found Magnus a sort of kindred spirit, he might have laughed at the roguish grin in spite of himself, but today he has come to collect Wax, to bring her ‘home’ after years of her absence.
Only something isn’t right, and he learns it almost as soon as she spins on her heels to smile widely at him. Because she presses her cheek against his neck first, and when she pulls away she chides him easily about the lack of time they’d been apart. As though years were hours, and he were teasing her again. At first she laughs, but he watches it soften and die when she studies the lines of his face and finds those missing years there in his expression. Wax was the same as he’d left her, as though she’d been pulled straight out of a photograph; like time forgot her.
Wane’s brows furrow in concern, but Wax doesn’t seem to linger on the obvious abnormality for long. He watches her spin gracefully back to face Magnus, and obviously distressed, Wane has little left in him to be snarky about it. Instead, he loses himself in the twang of her voice when she speaks, draws it out and plays it over and over because it reminds him of home. He’d worked diligently after he’d left home to erase that little bit of music from him, but Wax had embraced it. It suited her.
Most things did.
As he looks up from his thoughts, Wane notes Magnus grinning at him, head aslant, and determines he’s said something sarcastic that Wane is meant to be unnerved about but he hasn’t been listening. He cocks a heel, lamely, and lets his ears fall flat against his forelock but says nothing. He isn’t in the mood today.
Not that it matters, because they come like flies to a carcass.
“Boys, please give a lady some space to breathe?”
A second stranger finds them then, and instinctively Wane reels his head backwards with his irritation however is quickly settled when his eyes scope out first the lengths of her legs, and then the smooth arc of her hips. He decides, generously, that he will be less hostile with this one, and as she smiles brightly Wane’s head bobs upwards and his ears pivot ahead, suddenly attentive. He only had Texas to blame, and who was he to attempt to outrun genetics? So, instead of a flash of his teeth and a snarky rebuttal, Wane only casts his sister a sideways glance and snorts delightedly at the phrasing.
“Lady?” He questions, while his lips curl up at their ends in a clever, sardonic smile.
He is only mildly disappointed to find his joke glossed over, as Ilma introduces herself and goes on to explain about the recruiters here. Wane finds himself flinching inwardly at the reminder of monarchs and boundaries. It wasn’t suiting him, he didn’t care for it, and he certainly didn’t care to have his reunion with his twin sister interrupted again and again.
“Well, you’re obviously coming with me to Nerine. There’s a coastline, and the ocean.” He says then, biting his tongue to keep from explaining the logistics of his accidentally chosen loyalties. If she knew more about its politics she might be swayed elsewhere.
“You’re going to be an aunt. There’s…” He pauses a moment, thinking about the giant egg in the cave that Khuma had littered with assorted collectibles (bones, pearls, and shells) and looking for an easy way to word their explanation. No stranger to the throes of passion, Khuma had not been Wane’s first encounter. In all likeliness, Wax had become an aunt many times over. Wane, however, had never been around for long enough to know the children before this time. Coming up with nothing, he finishes weakly with:
The golden stallion confirms that she has arrived in Beqanna, and Wax’s face grows – if possible – a bit brighter. The excitement she feels is nearly tangible, and she cannot help but glance back at Wane as if for a final conformation. For all this stranger’s kindly smile and handsome face, he is still a stranger. Wane is still her brother, even if he is not the brother she had been expecting to find. He does’nt deny this, and so the green-eyed girl looks back toward Magnus.
The buckskin stallion asks if she is from elsewhere and she begins to nod, only to be surprised by the sound of laughter from beside her. The winged mare also welcomes Wax to the Field, and she is distracted from answering the stallion by the flood of words from the pale mare. Wax, ever easily enchanted, enjoys the opportunity to look at the pegasus and her lovely bright wings. She wants to touch them, she decides, and probably also the soft curve of Ilma from Hyaline’s shoulder as well.
Wax grins, a disarmingly easy smile, and keeps her eyes affixed on Ilma. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ilma.” Replies the chestnut mare who – despite her flirtation with the Hyalinian is still equally appreciative of the buckskin Magnus who she turns back to as her brother speaks. (Her brother, of course, is as about as appealing to Wax as a dead tree, because unlike the Covelings these twins have perfectly normal psyches). This is just in time to see that Wane is staring appreciatively at the other mare, and Wax does not attempt hide her rolling eyes.
The announcement that she is to be an aunt is startling, and it drives all other thoughts from her head. Wax blinks her emerald eyes once, then again, and finally repeats: “An…egg?”
They had known Beqanna to be a strange place when they had set out their plans to come here. There were all sorts of magics and oddities. That was to be expected. An egg, though. That was not at all what she had been expecting.
“This I have to see.” Says the flaxen haired mare. “Forgive me Magnus, Ilma from Hyaline, but I’m sure you understand.” They might not, of course, but who is she to presume? Perhaps all children born in Beqanna are hatched from eggs, and that is why Mother and Father had left it shores in favor of a more mammalian life. “I’d like to see you both again, but I have to go with Wane now.”
She nods decisively, and then meets her twin’s gaze, ready to follow him to wherever this egg might be.
ooc: basically wrapping up but she will come visit hyaline and tephra in the future before deciding where to settle down
![[Image: gqYjsHr.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/KjqNDKxc/gqYjsHr.png)
