"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
His first memories had been of darkness. A darkness that had clung to him, molding him until it truly is the only thing he knows.
Is that why mum had named him Darkling?
Were he a more introspective sort, he might have lingered on this conundrum. Might have asked about it even. But alas, he is not. He is just a boy, after all. One who has too many more things to worry about in the world than lingering curiosity about his beginnings.
Those beginnings had made him into what he is though. Had crafted him into the youth that even now flits among the dark trees of the vast wood. He tests his very limits, understanding no bounds but those of his body and mind. Even that is tenuous sometimes. Doubtless his mother must worry sometimes, when he disappears for days. But he hardly pays that any mind.
There’s far too much to do, after all.
Today he lingers in the dark crevices of a forest path, eyes gleaming with an unholy mischievous gleam. Something only a youth with devilry in their heart and a wicked sense of humor could achieve. He is surprisingly patient in his wait to see his goals through. Hushed and still in the lullaby of the forest and whispering fauna. Silent and waiting.
Until an unsuspecting passerby wanders past, and he springs into action. He seems to grow almost impossibly large in the shadows, pale gold bleeding dark, eyes gleaming with a hellish light, horn spiraling and wicked as he grins at his poor victim.
All of this of course lasts no more than a moment before the youth falls away into peels of laughter, damning illusion disappearing to leave behind a young, gangly boy, fair and golden of feature. Not even as fearsome and frightening as the drooping leaves of the willow he had only moments ago appeared from.
you're burning up the sky, you're a constellation I think that I could die for this revelation
She is no stranger to illusions. As darkness is his life, illusions are hers. Reality has always been a fickle thing for her, the lines blurred between truth and the lies created by her own mind. Sometimes even she can’t tell the difference. Sometimes she isn’t sure the difference matters.
Today she is in the forest, finding herself out of Loess more and more. With the wings at her back finally more than decoration, no one place can quite hold her. Beqanna has too much to offer for her to remain fixed to one spot, content to practice her illusions and nothing more. As usual, she seeks nothing in particular, just something new.
The new that finds her is not something she expects, and for a moment she startles, stepping back hurriedly away from the looming shadow creature, wings half flared for balance (oh, how handy her wings truly are). She’s about to charge the monster, head slightly lowered already to aim her large and rather solid antlers at it, when she catches sight of it shifting into something far more normal.
An illusion, except not. The illusion is not the same as hers, made of something different, but still it was an illusion. For a moment she says nothing, just regards the boy with a quiet curiosity, wondering what he is. Shadows creep out from around her, lengthening, stretching toward the boy that seems to be made of them. Her shadows are a lie, and if he controls what she thinks, then likely he will see through the lie but she doesn’t mind. She isn’t trying to fool him, after all.
“You are not the only one with tricks,”, she says as her shadows creep along the ground, far more subtle than the monster he had created. They twine around his legs, almost loving, and yet if she were trying they would create the feeling of being trapped. Even though he can move, she can create the illusion that he cannot. In this case, she doesn’t though, simply wondering what he will think of the shadows that are not his shadows.
but they forgot that nightmares are dreams too.
@[Darkling]
Use of mild power playing is allowed; no injuries without permission
They are kindred spirits, though he hasn’t the foresight or insight to notice such a thing. Still, perhaps it is fortunate it is this girl his prank had caught unaware rather than any other poor sod who might have passed by. She meets him with intrigue rather than irritability. And that is perhaps the best thing a boy like him could’ve wished for.
As his laughter dies, his bright, decidedly devilish gaze fixes on her, an almost manic gleam still visible despite the success of his prank. Only when the shadows begin to creep towards him without his willing it does his gaze fall from her, landing curiously on the curling darkness as it stretches gaunt fingers towards him.
He meets them boldly, as any might expect of a youth like he, nose dropping to investigate the creeping illusion. He snorts when he does not meet the shadows he had expected, his own abilities fizzling flat within them. With the impetuousness of youth, he grabs greedily at anything he can find, a sudden darkness falling ominously around them as he yanks the shadows he can find violently close. For all his ability, he lacks the finesse to refine it any further in his baffled temper.
When it finally clicks that the girl must be controlling something that is not truly shadow, his gaze leaps upwards, landing with an unnerving intensity on her. He steps abruptly closer, nose reaching out to prod roughly at her shoulder as he attempts to inelegantly discern her secrets.
“Show me more,” he demands, his void lilting in a surprisingly lyrical tone, though it does little to mask the abrupt impoliteness of the command. The hallmark of a boy who is so rarely denied.
you're burning up the sky, you're a constellation I think that I could die for this revelation
Perhaps she should mind his demanding tone, but instead her lips curl, amused, at the command instead. He’s pulled at the darkness all around them, creating shadows where before there was sunshine filtering through the trees. She’d watched, quietly, as he came to the realization that she was not playing with shadows at all but with something else. It is one thing, certainly, to manipulate the world around you. A powerful thing, not to be taken lightly or ignored. And yet, it is another thing entirely to play with the mind, to remove all sense of reality or to create new realities. It was not more powerful, but it was powerful in a different way, the limits of what the natural world could create gone in the mind.
Rarely has she been presented with such an opportunity to show off. No, more than that, to show off in a way where she did not care to be kind or gentle or sweet. This was not a boy who needed kindness, and she finds herself drawn to the darkness of him. His coloring is anything but dark, and yet, there is something about him that screams of the shadows he wields around them.
First, she simply scatters the shadows, creating lighting that shouldn’t be able to burst through the trees as it does. It streams around them in brilliant rays, impossible or maybe simply improbable, illuminating the path along the forest floor. After a moment, she wipes away the forest all together. Now they stand on the top of the mountain, an icy wind whipping at their faces. Snow crunches beneath their hooves. Creating the mountain is easy, creating the cold is much harder and she lets the illusion go after a moment.
They are back in the forest in the blink of an eye. The light has returned to normal, and the shadows will have returned if he’d kept their grip on them. She can’t determine that part, and she doesn’t try to bring them back. “I can show you anything. What do you want to see?” That grin is back, the hint of something dark and alive creeping at its corners. Perhaps she ought to have denied him just to teach him some manners, but she would have denied herself too much pleasure in the process. What did she care about manners anyway?
but they forgot that nightmares are dreams too.
@[Darkling]
Use of mild power playing is allowed; no injuries without permission
Darkling has never cared much about power. To him, the world has always simply been. The understanding of his own power is lacking. Not because he does not know what he can do, but because he does not know it is unusual. To him, it is the most natural thing in the world. He had always assumed others must be as powerful, faulty as that assumption may be.
And this does nothing to change his mind on the matter. Though he does not find it unusual in that sense, he does find it vastly intriguing, for it is a far different kind magic than his own. His demands are fueled far more by misplaced curiosity and the wildness of youth than any true hunger for power.
Though, were he to realize such things, no doubt that hunger would rise. But, fortunately for those of his acquaintance, he had been born to decent parents. It is likely only their decency that has kept him from slipping down that dangerously ragged slope into true darkness. The kind there would be no redemption from.
When bright shafts of light begin to break abruptly through the trees, Darkling stiffens, head jerking up as he tugs the darkness even closer around him. It coalesces, bleeding across pale gold until he is encased entirely in thick, inky black. His eyes however, gleam with bright curiosity as he squints into the light. When the forest begins to melt away however, he whirls abruptly around, nostrils flaring wide, tail snapping with agitation as his eyes widen at the sight of the snow-covered mountain peaks that now meet his gaze. The wind drives a chill down his spine, the crunch of snow beneath their feet causing his ears to twitch atop his skull.
When the illusion disappears just as suddenly as it had come, he swings sharply back around, eyes pinning the young girl with wild delight. Her comment and subsequent question catch him by surprise, and he stares at her for a long moment, not having expected the opportunity to choose. Truthfully, he has seen little enough of the world that he isn’t entirely sure what there is to see.
After a short silence however, he abruptly utters, “The moon,” a trill of excitement in his voice. “I want to see the moon.”
you're burning up the sky, you're a constellation I think that I could die for this revelation
She doesn’t long for power, but she does long for something. For more, for some intangible thing that cannot be shaped into thoughts. She longs too simply to live outside the shadow of her mother. Those cravings have yet to manifest into true action, but perhaps she would seek power in her quest for more. Power was the obvious choice, whether it be political power or magical power or strength or the ability to create fear. Well…she could already create fear. Quiet literally.
It’s not something she’s been able to practice much, but the concept seems almost easier than painting worlds. If her power is over the mind, then why shouldn’t she be able to create something that belongs so securely in the mind itself, something created and shaped and nurtured there. The hardest part was finding the fear to pick on. She could make it from scratch, of course, but what she would need is the power to find it in order to be truly effective.
She has never sought that power because, as of yet, she does not know if that is who she wants to be. Empathy perhaps could give her the ability to create fear or joy, to give her the ability to swing between one thing and the next as she so often does. Ori is a changeable, malleable thing, unable to find one shape and stay within it. She is clay that fits into the mold she is given and never set into a kiln. One day she’d wear up and dry out from overuse, perhaps, but she was far too young to concern herself with that.
His request comes as something of a shock, and she laughs a bit. Not at him, but simply at the surprise of it. The truth is Ori has absolutely no idea what the moon looks like, but she figures he likely does not either and it seems safe enough to make something up. It is not hard to make an educated guess.
The forest disappears again, and instead she paints the ground beneath them dusty gray, pockmarked with craters large and small. Around them, the sky turns black and far in the distance she paints what she images the world might look like from so far away. It is light, blue and white with some obvious patches of land mixed it. Ori has no concept of gravity or air, and so these things don’t change. It is imperfect, but it is something.
“Or so I imagine, she says, offering him the truth. There is no reason to lie, to pretend that she knows what the moon looks like. How could she? She is made only of illusions, of falsehoods, rather than reality and truths. “I’m Ori,” she offers, leaving them on the moon. She moves a hoof and dust floats up from around where she places it back down, playing a bit with the world she has created. If they walked, she would not be able to keep up those small details, but at least for a moment she can pretend.
but they forgot that nightmares are dreams too.
@[Darkling]
Use of mild power playing is allowed; no injuries without permission
To the young boy who has yet to see much of the world, truth and lie are all the same to him. Everything he believes he knows of the world lives so exclusively in his own mind that those falsehoods may as easily be as real as truth. And so, that she must fabricate a faraway world she has never truly seen before does not occur to him. Not when that world may as well be more real than the one in which they live.
There is naivete in that, of course, but also a strange kind of freedom. He is not trapped by the vagaries of reality that so seem to snare everyone else. Where others might balk beneath the uncertainty of such a lack, Darkling only languishes in the endlessness of uncontained possibilities. Doubtless he would crash, repeatedly, into the walls of reality with such a mindset. But he is either lacking in the kind of sense that should give him pause or impossibly confident enough to keep that from stopping his momentum. Or, more likely, an unfortunate combination of both.
Whatever the case may be, his delight in the illusion is both genuine and greedy, hungering for more even as he delights in all that he can already see. He doesn’t pause to question it, his hoof scraping as curiously against faux stone as if it were real moondust beneath his feet. He laughs abruptly as he whirls around, slipping as easily into the moment as he had the gruesome disguise he had worn upon their meeting. He is not hampered by fear or worry over what has been or what would be, living purely for the here and now.
Were he more self-aware, he might understand how truly rare that is. Of course, were he more self-aware, he might not escape anxiety so easily.
When he finally turns to face her once more, his eyes gleam with a merry devilishness, grin stretching his lips wide. He makes no comment on her admission of imagination, but when she offers her name, he clicks his tongue against his teeth before testing her name on a drawn-out breath. “Or-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”
Even as he says it, he draws tendrils of shadow from swirling dust to reach up and pluck impishly at her mane. He ends abruptly, syllable cutting off as shadow falls away, leaving him staring at her, lips tilted in a wide, lopsided grin, eyes dark and glinting.
“I’m Darkling,” he announces suddenly, continuing the conversation as though it were the most normal thing in the world. And to him, it is. “Someone said the sky’s the limit once,” he scoffs, though there is delight lingering on the edges of his words. “Liar.”
you're burning up the sky, you're a constellation I think that I could die for this revelation
Truth and lie simply blur for her. She does not intend to lie, but reality is what she makes it and so the lines of it are blurry for her. There’s an argument, perhaps, that what they see is real, that the illusions she creates are real. If you feel pain, does it matter if there’s truly a cut or if you only imagine the cut? The pain is still there, blinding and sharp, demanding to be heard, all the same.
As of yet, she has found the indistinct lines to be easy enough to live with. In one way, her mother’s were with her during her childhood – she gave herself memories, false though they may be. The sensible side of her knows that her mothers will have no such memories though, that their hugs were makings of Ori’s imagination and not of their own machinations. The truth lingers there, but it hurts far more than the lie. Sometimes, she simply prefers the lie. The lie got her through a lonely, quiet childhood.
The way he says her name amuses her, a small smile spreading on her face. He draws it out, like a song or a bird might do, catching on the i that sounds like a e in her self-given nickname. A sound that should be cut short with the addition of the second half of her name, not that she tends to use the full thing. She is not the sort of girl who gives a nickname to those she likes; no, she is the sort of girl who will only let those closest to her call her by her given name. Ori is her truth.
Her eyes drift to the shadows that move of their own accord, and she wonders if he’s plucking shadows from the real world or her illusion. Could another manipulate the world she creates? Perhaps. It’s not a thing she’s ever thought of and certainly not a thing she has tested. Though it seems easy enough that he could grab shadows from the trees but see them as the illusion allows. The shadows pluck at her mane and she giggles, just a girl for a moment, ducking her head as if to escape them though in reality she does not mind the attention.
Her eyes dart back up when he stops saying her name, the world suddenly bereft of sound until he speaks again, far more normally this time. It is almost disappointing. “A fitting name,” she says, guessing at this point that he controls shadows. To what extent, she doesn’t have a clue, but the basics of his ability seem obvious enough. Or at least, he favors shadow if he can manipulate more.
Her grin grows a little wicked as he call the unknown someone a liar. “The sky is only the beginning, I think.” Her wings flutter slightly at her side, as if they itch to taste the sky again. She believes her statement knowing full well that when she finally, finally flew and saw the world, it was just the beginning.
but they forgot that nightmares are dreams too.
@[Darkling]
Use of mild power playing is allowed; no injuries without permission
