"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
Where Aela had imagined the memories a weight to drag them beneath their ever-flowing tides, Reave had always worn them as a buoy. That is perhaps the greatest difference between them. He had never feared losing himself to them because he had never imagined he would. Though he is not yet quite perceptive enough to pick up on this, he does recognize in her that stubborn refusal to cede. A stubbornness that he imagines might be clouding her memories (both the ones belonging to her and the ones that do not) of the northern kingdom.
It would be so easy to lose themselves to this tumble of echoes between them. To fall down a rabbit hole to nowhere. But Reave, as he has done so many times in his young life, brushes them aside like flotsam to focus on the woman behind them. The hazard and the boon of a shared gift. But Reave had been practicing the art of discerning memory from reality since the day of his birth, and for him, the skill has grown increasingly innate.
To his surprise however, Aela does not dismiss his supposition with a scoff. And, just as it had faded, that devilish grin begins to return.
Does she know she had just awarded him a rare and coveted freedom?
He most certainly does not need a second invitation before delving into her sight, into the memories and the visions that never lie. She is young yet, so he does not expect much. But what he finds is far more than he had ever anticipated. A tether he had never before encountered that, when tugged, opens a floodgate of visions and memories. Past and present roiling through them like an endless tide of carefully curated sights and long hidden emotions.
For a moment, he finds himself staring into an identical blue gaze before he is abruptly expelled, vision cut off.
He finds himself blinking rather stupidly at Aela, surprise etched in every line of his features. His original intentions are momentarily forgotten as the surprise fades into a frown, then suspicion. Moments later, he blurts rather thoughtlessly, “Is that why you felt… suffocated?”
05-08-2021, 11:37 AM (This post was last modified: 05-08-2021, 11:40 AM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
It had been that tie - the same brilliant blue gaze (though perhaps more common in the North, now) - that allowed Reave the freedom with her sight that he currently enjoys. While there is a blood relation that is far closer than the one that the copper-and-bone colt is delving into, it is because of Heartfire that he is allowed the privilege of her sight. The gift of being able to See so much is one far more powerful than her own and yet, Aela thinks that there is an advantage to having her half-brothers check in on her.
For now, what can it hurt?
There is a flickering across her vision - a familiar feeling to her by now - as Reave dives and searches through her memories. The only visible sign of anything happening physically is that Aela tosses her pretty head once, both ears pricking forward and then back as the adolescent finds another pair of piercing blue eyes, watching them from Beyond. The palomino stills and then lifts her face to @[Reave] as he frowns.
"That?" Aela asks. The presence of her grandmother has always been felt and while it might have been suffocating for another, it never had been for the young mare. If anything, it had bolstered her confidence to know that Heartfire was always so close. Her granddam who could see and therefore know so much: what did Aela truly have to fear growing up with such a deadly (and devoted) grandparent to watch over her?
She laughs then, a chiming sound that rings truer in the presence of the tobiano than it has in a long time. Aela is enjoying this, she finds. The golden girl gives her head a shake to confirm no, that Heartfire has never made her feel stifled or suffocated. The Seer had always seemed to encourage them, so long as Aela understood what she was truly pursuing.
Freedom. That has always been what Aela has wanted.
The freedom to chase down whatever destiny she saw fit.
Aela casts a dubious eye on the colt, finding it hard to believe that, "You've never felt her before?"
In a way, it is irony at its finest. They both ultimately sought the same thing - freedom. But they did so in such vastly different ways as to be nearly shocking. The tobiano colt cannot imagine sharing his every thought with another, cannot imagine such an intrusion on the one thing he felt most private. It is surprising to him that this is not the suffocation Aela felt, but instead the freedom she sought.
It startles a laugh from him, bold and careless as he truly understands their differences for the first time.
His first response to her skeptical question is a raised brow, followed by a broadly amused grin. “Not like that, no,” he replies with the nonchalance of someone who hadn’t just uncovered well-concealed secrets. “She visited mom once when she was a statue. I think she knew I was there but she never said anything.” He pauses before adding, “And she never felt that… loud. Not even in mom’s memories.”
It is only now, after seeing her in Aela’s mind, that Reave could appreciate just how tightly controlled their grandmother had kept her own emotions. And more, how anyone who knew enough to keep their emotional state under wraps could hide their memories from those with their particular gifts.
It seems he had not been wrong in imagining vision as the only thing that didn’t lie.
In the end however, that is not what presses most insistently at his thoughts. His gaze growing abruptly more scrutinizing, he favors Aela with a piercing look as he fits the pieces together in his mind. “But if she felt like freedom to you, then you truly do owe the North far more than you give credit for.”
A small, knowing smile toys with the corners of his lips as he narrows his gaze on her. “Or would you deny that she was the epitome of what being a Northerner meant?”
05-12-2021, 05:14 PM (This post was last modified: 05-12-2021, 05:19 PM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Maybe if the bond that Aela shared with their mutual ancestor had happened when she was older, the palomino might have held some resentment. To know what it might have been like before they shared such a tether. Maybe if she thought that some freedoms were being restrained or that she was being constrained in some way, Aela would have rebelled. She would have found a way to sever that tie the moment it hindered her; but Heartfire has never done any such thing.
If she makes herself known at all (the blue roan has had a few lifetimes to learn her ability; how to weave herself in and out of the mortality of other lives), Aela has always welcomed it.
She considers her Grandmother an inspiration and if she can become even a fraction like the immortal Seer, the striped girl would consider that a compliment. Aela tilts her blazed head towards Reave as he speaks that Heartfire coming to visit his mother after she became a statue. A statue? Her lovely brow furrows slightly - distorting the pretty vision of her face - as she turns it up to her half-brother. Loud was never a word that she would have associated with their grandmother; that would be the word she would have described for the other parent they both shared. "And you never thought," Aela doesn't say her name but shares a mental image of the Taigan Guardian with a questioning expression, "that she wasn't loud?"
It had been why Aela had given the fire-marked mare such a wide berth when she had lived in Taiga. The few times that she got near enough to the chestnut woman, her mind had been full of crashing waves (Aela still doesn't like the ocean) and gull's cries and agony. After that, she had kept her distance.
Aela spends very little of her own emotions wallowing in sorrow; she certainly won't do it for another.
Reave's piercing gaze is met with an equally fierce one. When he implies that she owes the North more credit than she gives it, her ears flick back into the fine strands of her pale mane. "I owe Grandmother much," Aela confirms. That she won't deny - Heartfire had instilled confidence (and perhaps arrogance, because even deities have their flaws) and certainty of a bright future in the palomino. And then her smile turns small and slight, like her; coy. "But I think you mean Nerine," she corrects @[Reave]. There are flashes of the moorlands like lightning in the air between them, fueled by Aela's association of that place with once ruled by their ancestor.
Aela’s retort to his assertion that Heartire was so loud beneath her carefully constructed mask stirs a sort of curious and abrupt understanding within him. Their grandmother had kept that facade at least partially intact even through their mind link. Only Reave breaking through as unexpectedly as he had had allowed him to see beneath it, even if it was only for a moment. And the woman that Aela sought to emulate was a pale reflection of the truth, like the surface of the ocean on a calm day, hiding the surging riptides beneath.
For Reave, loud was so normal that Heartfire’s calmness had struck him as odd.
And so when she asks about Lilliana, Reave shrugs, saying simply, “No louder than normal.”
And perhaps too it had something to do with the circumstances of his birth. For a moment, he is awash in those memories, the grief - his and Brazen’s and Lilliana’s - as Brazen’s life had faded from her eyes before turning to stone. He had been born into a maelstrom, and everything since then had seemed positively calm in comparison. At least, until the light has seeped from the sky and everything had been overlain with a thick miasma of fear and despair.
But even Heartfire had echoed with faint traces of grief as she stood over his mother. He had thought it odd at the time that there was not more of it. Had perhaps even resented her a little for not grieving her daughter more. Now though, he knows better. And in the moment, he picks out the threads of her remembered sorrow. Not for Brazen, who hadn’t truly died, but her eldest son. The heart shattering grief and rage. The furious vow to avenge his death. The sickening satisfaction of watching the orchestrator of his death choke on her own blood as she thrashed her life away. He lobbed it between them, a memory long forced into dormancy brought to light.
Heartfire would be furious if she knew.
Then, as flashes of Nerine recede from his vision, he smiles too. To him, the north was one and the same, Nerine as much a part of it as Taiga and the Isle. The moors could not be separated from them. Not without destroying everything Heartfire had tried to build. But he understands her resentment now. Heartfire had been her rock when she had needed one in the same way Lilli had been his in the wake of Brazen’s death.
And so, plucking from the memories Heartfire had inadvertently left him, Reave counters, “Are you sure your anger isn’t clouding your judgement?” He eyes her with a speculative blue gaze, understanding now so much more than he had earlier. “How will you ever be something more if your prejudice blinds you?” He grins then, devilishly wondering if she would pick up on the words he plucked from memory.
05-14-2021, 09:47 PM (This post was last modified: 05-14-2021, 09:51 PM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela had come into the world during a lull; the calm before the storm.
And when she had been separated from her birth mother, that was when she had started to truly learn how loud the world could be. The brief reunion with Lilliana had been a windstorm of grief and other raging emotions. Even nearly-silent Kota seemed to have her own stirring beneath her spotted skin.
Fate had changed for so many lives, all because one foal had been born dead in Taiga and another had been born alive outside it.
Funny how they remember different things but the thread of those emotions is very much the same: grief is portrayed on the faces of those they love. She's never been this close to another who remembers one thing and she another, never felt the faintest embrace of different moments in time as they brush past one another. If Aela had been in a different frame of mind - if this had happened with anyone but her half-brother - she might have wondered what recalling such powerful memories near each other might reveal? What ghosts and secrets might they stir?
It's like a humming in the back of Aela's mind as the fractured pictures come alive, tucked back away in the subconscious where things are best forgotten. The trees are tall and mighty, something that (for once) doesn't overwhelm her and the heavy fog shield them from the rest of the world: "She is to stay in Taiga," says a brittle voice, such a broken sound that even Aela knows there is no hope to repair what about is to be torn. The blue eyes of her look down and it is like the chestnut mare blames Aela for the shattering she finds glittering there (she hadn't - Lilliana never would - but what does a child know grief and loss when the world is still so new?) and the palomino had pressed all those emotions away, pressed herself into the pale side of her nurse-mother (though some part of wonders how much of that peace was thanks to Heartfire).
Before Aela can dive deeper, she pulled back. A force more powerful than her abilities and before Aela can be irritated by it, there is a sheen of blue. Blue roan, blue eyes, iridescent blue. It colors everything. There is grief and rage so raw that it even cuts her, an empath who is so often in control of her emotions and those around her.
"Of course it is," she tells Reave with a voice run ragged on the shared memories between them. "But at least I know the anger is my own," Aela says with a lift of her slender head, trying to regain some semblance of her usual austerity. Perhaps it's the blood they share or all the history that remains in the North, all the memories left behind by family; it does cloud her judgment and therefore it is better for her to stay away from it.
Whatever her future is, Aela doesn't think she will find it waiting for her there.
"And what do you want, @[Reave]?" she suddenly asks, turning an equally inquiring gaze on her half-sibling, and away from the past.
For the first time in his young life, Reave almost feels as though he finally truly understands his abilities. That he has finally clawed his way through to the top and looked down to see the patterns in the world around them. It is an odd and unique vantage point, one the bone-clad youth is certain he would not give up easily.
He cannot possibly see what lay in the future, but he has finally begun to pick out the patterns of the past. It’s fascinating to watch how those patterns replay even now in Aela, torn by memory and emotion both hers and not. To see just how closely she walks in the footsteps of his grandmother, both deliberately and not. To recognize that they had both been blinded by their emotions. And to understand how much wild emotion drove the acts of greatness they had seen in their world.
To know that he did not need to fear his own emotions, or the wildness that burns even now in his chest. It’s a relief, in so many ways, when he finally understands this.
He sobers as he stares at his sister, vibrant blue gaze growing curiously perceptive. Her ragged ‘of course it is’ resonates as his lips lose the devilish grin. Reave had never been a great believer in fate, but in this moment, he fully believes they had met for a reason. He would never be foolish enough to believe her future lay in the North, but if she wanted to become everything she dreamed, she would still need the North.
“Does it matter if the anger is yours or not if you’re still consumed by it?” She had railed against everyone else’s emotions because she feared losing herself to them only to lose herself to her own emotions. Did she even realize it?
If not, he would make her see. Because during the course of this conversation, Reave’s own course had begun to grow clear. He wanted to be something as much as she did. Perhaps their motivation is not the same, but in the end, they both looked towards the same versions of the future and saw possibilities. So her question when it comes, despite it’s clear design to turn the sharp points of the conversation to him, only brings a rather devious smile to his lips.
05-18-2021, 09:07 PM (This post was last modified: 05-18-2021, 09:11 PM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
There is a battle boiling in Aela's blood that not even she can be fully aware of.
Parts of her longs for power and chaos because between the lines of the two, the palomino thinks she senses destiny. Another part of her longs to feel, begs for it in a way that only her mother's blood can. She is light and dark encapsulated in a golden body and though Aela can't realize the war within, she does recognize that she burns for something.
And there is a flicker of it here, with @[Reave], a spark waiting to ignite.
"It is mine," Aela states, possessive of the emotion and reluctant to let it go. This half-brother might have a point, though. What good is her anger if it solely fixed on the North? If she narrows on that, it could narrow her whole view on what she eventually wants. And what good was it to want only one thing?
Her jaw clenches tightly as she studies the bone-armored colt, traces his blue eyes and the fire-red of his pelt. His is not a face that she will soon forget. There are similarities between them - obviously glaring ones like the blue eyes they share, the pale manes and tails - but the smile is, perhaps, the most telling. As it blooms on her face, it becomes obvious that this is something else they share when she lets the tension go.
"Perhaps," she says slowly, as if toying with the idea. "I might come pay you a visit?" Aela tilts her head and in case that there is any doubt, she shares an image of their grandmother's favorite spot in the moorlands - a cave in Nerine she seemed fond of. The glint in her eyes is mischievous and the way she holds herself makes her look positively impish, "You could show me... everything."
Aela may not be aware of the battle, but it writes itself in the air around her, in the colliding memories she unwittingly exudes. They tell Reave a story he can easily understand. One that burns inside him too, coursing in the blood they share. Building that spark she had already sensed.
One he cannot wait to ignite.
He doesn’t press further, instead letting the insights he had shared fall into memory. He suspects she had understood though, even if she would never admit it. In the end, he doesn’t need her to admit it. Instead he simply grins, blue eyes burning as they remain fixed on her features - ones made even more beautiful in the light of her anger. Reave would never be that lovely, but of that he is very glad. He would much rather be fearsome than lovely.
Her offer to visit brings a similar glint to his eye, and as Reave lifts his head in an acknowledging tilt, his grin turns a bit wicked. A grin that matches hers corner to corner. In that moment, their similarities are unmistakable. As memories of a shallow cave dance through the ether, Reave nods. There is no question that he would welcome her visit.
Shifting restlessly, Reave replies evocatively, “Don’t wait too long.” He turns to go, taking a few steps before pausing to glance pointedly back, smirk toying with his lips. “You wouldn’t want me to start without you.”
