Silver Cove Quest - Part 1

[Briella]

Briella

your eyes are lined in pain, black tears don't hide in rain

Summer is a time of love, or warmth: of peace in the world. Greenery and flowers, the fireflies and cricket-songs at night. Cloudless stars colored like dark oceans with a myriad of stars spattered across the vast expanse. Trail and rocks alike are wet from the passing rain and moss and loamy earth are heavy on the wind.

Briella stands before the Fairies: calling out and begging; but hers is not always a favor or fortune had- no, she like any is subject to the whim and will of the creatures who she pleads to. The anger and frustration: the bitterness that they possess and all the vast reaches of their knowledges.

Fae creatures are things without morality truly, without anything more than motive and purpose that only they know- and she faces them in a way she is unfamiliar with. Before her the bubbled mass of magic is formless and strange, it is at times a shape she recognizes and other so incomprehensible that her mind must force itself to try and recognize such a thing.

She grieves for the agony it causes her to look upon it: for the feeling of absence it creates in her, and for the breath of magic torn from her throat.

“No! I wanted to help them!” she screams- agonized and in pain, so entrenched in her fury and rue that she ignores the rattling and piercing shriek leaving her throat: the jealousy and confusion. “You gave me that power to help! Demanded I complete quests to keep it so I could continue helping and you take it back when I come seeking a way to continue?! Why! I don’t understand!”

She is rage and fury, hurt and shame: a thousand faces that she cannot understand, nor that she has experienced before. “I am still going to help- I am still going to try! Take away everything from me, go ahead. Take away strength and try to worsen this plague and I will still crawl on my belly if it means I can save anyone. If I die so be it.”

Her fury is forged into spite and perseverance: her pale eyes narrowing and the blonde hair of her mane and tail blow in the wind. “I don’t need powers to fix this.”

She sturned, Briella turns- her head lowered and faux-chocolate body sliding through the trails and pathways: weaving quietly down the mountain as she spits and chokes on the bitterness and venom in her own mouth. She no longer tastes the blood from her symptoms; but ultimate she know the disease still lives in her body and Briella stares hard at the ground- thinks about the events leading to the plague.

She can hear the rocks of the mountain cracking, the fall and roll- collapses that come and go; but most of all Briella hears the whisper and shriek of the wind: feels the crunch of ice in her hair and the lingering frost coating her body from the failure she endure in the Isle. As if on queue the shimmering ice begins to melt but slowly refreezes at the pulse of what magic remains lingers upon her.

Pangea is a short walk away, a place where the dirt and stone fade to sand and rock: to a brilliant rusty orange and gray. Red and yellow, limestone and shale- plateaus so tall and vast she is unsure how any could live here. But Briella notices something about Pangea immediately…

The smell.

Brine has crusted the surface of the earth and trees, and flecks of salt lay everywhere like jagged stone and glass. It crunches beneath her hooves and with it she can smell the stale air and faint traces of rancor and rot: fetid breaths that sicken her as she walks into the terrain.

Sweet and grotesque, the sickly stench of rotting fat and flesh hits her and she sees carcass after carcass of rotting fish and mollusk: of jellies and squids and sea-krait alike all decomposing across the land. The black mold and hungry scavengers consume: and in the worst moment of all she sees a vibrating whale’s corpse shudder in a bloated state. The popping sound is so loud it echoes through every crevice and cavern and she watches as offal and viscera are spilt upon the soil.

Blue and red, green and yellow- bile and blood, gore are spattered into the air.

Like a macabre balloon it deflates and Briella watches as the skin sinks onto the bones and looks little more than stretched cloth upon them. She chokes back vomit and disgust: screams as she charges away and forward- her long legs pounding the ground as she races through passages and stretches of land. Her eyes narrow, the pale blue watching as her nostrils flare and she tries to race beyond the ruinous land.

In the end she wishes the corpses were the worst part about this place.

Instead she sees creatures so horrible and twisted that she can not comprehend shape or form: manner or make, she can only see the dribbling blue slime coating their wolfish teeth and the oily-smoke on their burned and rotting bodies. They bark and yip: excitedly chase and feast upon the birds.

The trees are blackened and briney, barnacle ridden and stretched out in a way that makes them look like surrealist monoliths of impossible make and conception. She feels the shells and stoney branches scratch her once and they cut into her flesh like jagged knives. Blood drips along the faux-chocolate and smutty body, down the curves of her moves and drips onto the soil.

She is forced to stop: Briella’s eyes fixating on a horrendous form that lurches through the darkness and scuttles towards her on hoof and tentacle. She feels a barbed appendage raking her flesh and panics: screams and runs as the mad creature cackles behind her. “Tag!” it cries, running off into the places it had come from.

Ceasing only beyond the border: she stares at the world she has left behind. The grotesque mockery of a kingdom where the thick air tasted of ruin and disease; but here in the Cove she watches as a sickly shadow lurks. Young and flimsy, wobbling on bruised legs and with a body as weak as hers had been once: it walks to her. Diseased and ruined the foal chatters and prattles, shivers and pants.

A spray of blood shoots from its nose and Briella listens to the choking in its lungs: the rattle and heaviness. It looks up at her and the gray-child is barely able to break a whisper: “Help me.” it pleads.

Her mind reels and she thinks of the Fairies and their cruelties- their ways.

Briella clenches her teeth- sighs and looks away, unable to face the child at first but soon staring down at it with all the stoic might she can have. “I am helping you, but in a way you cannot comprehend right now, I could try the ease sickness but it doesn’t cure the plague. I’m sorry; but one day you’ll understand why I have to go and why I can’t do what you ask of me now.”

Sage in some manner and cruel in another she turns away and stares into the Cove: beyond the border, her ears pressing back as Briella ignores the child. ‘Greater good, it has to be for the greater good. Sacrifice some to save the rest... ‘

[wonder]

Wonder

She arrives at the mountain with the others, finding herself in a sea of faces all utterly unfamiliar to her. It would have been easier if Brigade or Lupine could have come with her, but it was with their help that mom and dad and even dads wolves had been too busy to notice when she slipped away. They were used to her brothers being wild, finding ways to get into trouble, tests the boundaries of a world coming undone. It was probably what made it so easy for her to sneak off, nearly invisible in that she has always been the quiet, gentle one.

But the call of the fae before her had been so irresistible, the promise of an opportunity to fix this broken world. Or at least that was what they grown ups called it, the ones with longer legs and bigger bodies, the one who were already there before she ever existed. They spoke of a plague, of sickness, of things that seemed wrong and out of place, resented, but it was all she had ever known. Venturing outside the designated safelands meant that some horses got sick. It meant they would cough and bleed and stumble around, and being that it was all she had ever known, it was easy enough to accept as normal.

Except it wasn’t normal, wasn’t how things should be. It was why Lupine was living with Wonder’s family instead of his own mommy, because she was trying to keep him safe and protect him while she tried to find his brother and sister outside the safe areas.

Maybe that was part of why this was so important to her. Why from the very first time she had heard the call and been too new and fragile to answer it, it had stayed in the back of her mind as an ever-present awareness. A desire locked away somewhere safe in her chest, tucked against the echo of her heart. She wanted to help.

So when the fae sends them on their way, bids them to hurry, waste no time, she has only a beat to decide that the best course of action is to follow someone. She doesn’t know the territory to which they travel, knows only that Pangea is close and to avoid it at all cost. Can feel it in her bones even when the warning of her parents is forgotten in the activity of things.

She picks a woman and a child to follow, perhaps drawn to the instinctive safety of someone who she assumes must be a parent for the way the walk to close and comfortable, and for the kisses she presses to his brow. It scratches an ache in her chest, a wound that is shy and quiet and stinging, makes her miss her own mother. She doesn’t realize until much later that there is another girl following them too, soft and pink and as beautiful as the dawn that waits to greet them when this dark night ends. She is far to Wonder’s right, and a little ahead, her eyes glued on the pair ahead of them.

Wonder makes no attempt to join any of them though, just follows the sounds they make as they cross dirt and stone, wear smudged paths where they travel. That it is night makes it easy to hear them, for the rest of the world is silent while it sleeps. Her unwitting companions take no breaks, and though her little legs are weary, she doesn’t dare stop and lose sight of them. But then suddenly they do pause, and for an instant she is so briefly relieved, those ocean-green eyes softening. Except they haven’t stopped to rest at all, and it’s only because someone has forced them to stop, a woman begging them for help. She can hear their voices raised and clear in the night, the woman so stern and the boy so gentle, so kind. Even watches long enough for the girl to encounter the same woman asking for the same help, and to the same end.

She is glad that she is not near enough to be stopped, has never seen this plague up close. Finds that she had no concept of the suffering until now. Words do it no justice.

She only makes it a few steps into the dark after the woman and those two children when a shape she had thought to be a small mound in the earth shifts and bleats softly at her. “Ohhh.” The sound is not a word at all, just a gasp of brokeness at what her eyes have already begun to unravel in the dark. A child who should be bigger than her, all sagging, broken skin over bones that seem too sharp, seem like blades trying to break through. Gaunt and sad and with eyes too dead and hollow to belong to anything still able to breathe.

Wonder is devastated, answering a second bleat from this sick, downed stranger by stepping closer to press her nose to the girls brow, sweep aside her forelock and breathe softly against skin that shouldn’t be so hot. She has never understood this until now, never understood the pain and the suffering, but she understands now.

“Don’t go.” That voice is brittle, all the life stripped violently from it. “I’m scared.”
It takes every single ounce of Wonders strength not to immediately lay down beside her, wrap her neck over those razor sharp withers and hold her so close. Someone else could bring back the stones for the fae, so many had gone. Wonder would be of more use here, wouldn’t she? But even as her eyes fill with tears she struggles valiantly to hold back, she knows it isn’t a risk she can take. If it was just herself, just her own life for this girl, she is sure she would make that choice. But it’s more than her, more than the two of them.
“Please, help me.”

And Wonder is sure her heart must’ve died in her chest, ruptured and turned dark like a black hole, breaking all her ribs in the process because suddenly it hurts too much to breath. “I’m not a healer,” Wonder whispers, those words like glass in her mouth, making her bleed all over them, “leaving is the only way I can help you, I promise. I’ll come find you as soon as I can.”

But this no is still a no, and the girl just blinks up at Wonder and then turns her face away, those hollow eyes even duller than before. “Please, wait for me.” Then with one last nudge against that fever-burned cheek, the chestnut girl turns away and disappears back into the night.

It is only by luck, or fate, that she makes it to the border of Silver Cove. Between the raggedness of her breathing through broken ribs and broken lungs and a body that aches with the weight of a decision she still isn’t completely sure of, and the tears that wander freely down her cheeks, she has no idea where the group she had been following ended up. She emerges not too far from them awhile later, flinching at the suddenness of the three of them standing there, and immediately turning her face from them. They are close, but they are not close enough to see the way she trembles, or the dark paths her tears have made down the lines of her delicate cheeks, and she is glad for this one small gift.

i am brambles but i am tangled in your love