"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
Summer was so close Kestrell could feel it. The heat of today’s dying sun felt like scorching claws, raking warmth down the length of his back as he flew through low-hanging clouds. It was a simple joy of his to take flight whenever he felt too comfortable in one place, and for some reason today just felt like an exceptionally good day to fly far away from the place he’d bedded last night.
Flapping his wings, Kestrell huffed the clear, icy scent of the cloud’s particles and opened his mouth just to feel them melt on his tongue. He was blissful, his body stretched to its fullest length despite his forelegs, both of which stayed firmly tucked to his spotted belly. There’s nothing in the entire world quite like this feeling, he thought as he broke through the floating sky fluff, shaking his handsome jaw as the heat soaked into his muscles and dried his fur.
It was akin to godhood.
Blinking the frost from his eyes, Kestrell growled and felt a surge of beastial energy overtake him. He wanted to feel speed, and in response his wings arced and swept through the air currents at his command, pushing him faster until the wind screamed in his ears. He could feel every muscle protesting, but the sensation was too incredible to stop. Grinning madly, the pegasus stallion pressed them to his neck and kept flying, ignoring the first foggy craig that suddenly appeared in front of him.
“Fuck.” He darted to the side just before smacking into the thing, only slightly annoyed at how his heart jumped.
He didn’t even have time to level out before another one appeared, and he yanked himself violently to the other side to avoid that one. The effort was useless; more and more popped up, leaving Kestrell to zigzag frantically through a heavy fog as the threat of death loomed around every corner. He couldn’t catch his breath to think; there was only the instinct to react and try to make it out of the deadly maze, dodging each obstacle in fear of losing his life.
The damned meadow! He thought. Out there the clouds would be sparse, and the night sky would be clearing up with such nice weather. He could land there, if only he could reach it. Kestrell lifted his nose and anchored himself to a break in the clouds, thinking it was the distant gleam of a soft, bright star that he could see through the hazy dark, and then he let go -
A second later he came coasting down through the valley, cutting through the clear night sky to land in a thudding canter. His breath came in short, frantic gasps while he laughed, happy to be alive. The feeling of his misadventure coursed through his battered body like a high.
He chuckled softly, blinking his eyes against the brilliant shine of a night sky scattered with winking lights, and lifted his head to eye a strangely glowing mare nearby - no doubt the source of his anchor, as she seemed to be alone at the very edges of this very empty meadow.
“I’ve never been happier to see a gleaming horse.” Kestrell called out to her, his voice a charming bass. He slowed from a trot and paced closer, stopping to toss his head and let the steam curl off his skin in the cool dark.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
It had been spring when her prison of ice had begun to thaw and the beginning of summer when she had finally been able to free herself. She hadn’t strayed far from the meadow despite the painful and bittersweet memories it held, her condition didn’t allow for it. She was still too weak to fly back to the Isle and even if she could… She’s not sure she’s ready for it yet. Her heavily scarred figure is still quite thin despite the way she had been devouring grass steadily for days. She had grimaced at her reflection in the closest stream, taking in the frostbit fur, the way her ribs jutted from her sides when she lifted her wings, the far too many scars that now lined her chest where Gale had ripped at over and over again. With no healing powers of her own, she is forced to rely on the old healer of time. She also leans into a new appreciation for the sun and its warmth, soaking up every last ray of sunlight she can before darkness comes.
Once the sun had dipped beyond the horizon though… Then she has her old familiar friends, the stars.
Her own shine brightly along her back and hover happily around her ears, unfazed by the trauma of being locked in ice. They were still wrapped in their eerie red hue as the anger that had stormed within her these last few years continued to rage, had done nothing but fester within the ice, wild and furious around her tortured heart. He had taken everything else back except for that. It’s all she has now.
The air is warm tonight but it doesn’t stop her from wrapping her starlit wings around her, from shivering slightly thanks to loss of fat and missing fur. Her spiraling silver eyes were churning in their usual angry frenzy, blurring together so fast that they appeared almost blinding white and pupil-less. Her ravaged face is turned upwards to the sky as she had often done long before she had been locked inside the glacier. Instead of enjoying the view, beautiful with only a few clouds in sight, she barely registers what’s going on around her. So deep in thought is she, the constant desire for revenge mixed with the reluctance of being near another horse again, that she misses the pegasus hurtling through the sky until he is cantering right towards her.
In an instant, she is on guard. Her wings flare out as she takes a defensive stance, the glow from her stars casting her in their fiery red tinge and turning her into something demonic with the puckered scar across her face and those nearly white eyes. She snarls softly and it takes her a second to realize he is laughing. It’s enough to startle her, for her wings to lower half a fraction, because she had forgotten what that sounded like.
When was the last time she had laughed?
He calls out to her then in a charming baritone and all she can do is stare at him. Envy, hot and fluid, rushes through her at his carefree nature, the laughter still playing off his lips, the steam curling like smoke from his neck. “Too bad the feeling isn’t mutual.” She suddenly snaps, all that pent up wrath suddenly finding an excuse to come out.
“Ouch!” Kestrell responded instantly, a more devious grin replacing the friendly one lingering before. He huffed, “Right for the heart.”
He wasn’t angry. There was a level tone to his voice that brushed off her comment as easily as one swiped away a fly, though if Kestrell had known his landing would put her such a fowl mood, he might’ve chosen to crash into one of the rock spires by the Mountain instead. As it was, the gray-and-white mottled stallion attributed her nastiness to his childish behavior. He would’ve never guessed how she really felt, and at the moment they were perfect strangers. There was no reason why the smaller, sooty black mare should trust him.
Kestrell was in a mood to try and change that.
He took a buoyant stride toward her, faltered, and buckled at the knee with a grimace.
“Landed harder than I thought.” He cursed himself, quick to shuffle the mistake away like it was nothing to him.
“Rocky out here.” Kestrell lied through a half-grin.
“You know I should be thanking you.” He tried to carefully make his way through the chest-high waves of summer grass, slowly zig-zagging closer to Ciri as if she hadn’t just been ready to lay him flat on his ass.
“I got lost up there, in the foggy peaks.” He swung his head in the general direction of the mountain. “If it weren’t for your … light? … I would’ve probably bashed my brains in.”
That, too, made him chuckle.
“Anyways,” the large, flying horse stopped in his tracks, “I’m Kestrell. What’s a lovely … beam like yourself doing out in a place like this, all alone?” He leaned to the side, dipping his nose and tilting an eyebrow suggestively.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
If she had known that this was another relation to the thing called “The Curse”… If she had suspected that he was related to the creature who had broken her open, blackened her stars, and left her encased in a glacier just because he could… His skull would have been cracked open before he could so much as twitch his mouth into that devious grin. She would have enjoyed watching the vultures feast on pieces of exposed bone and brain. She wouldn’t have felt bad at all.
Yet there is nothing about him that sparks any sort of recognition in her. There is nothing about him that screams of death and destruction. If anything, he is rather corny. He takes her snapping words with mock affront and she bristles visibly before him. Her eyes roll in disgust but it is hard to tell since her pupils refuse to show through the brightness of her spiraling iris’s. She is ready to tell him to fuck off entirely when he takes a step towards her and falters. Her expression tightens, dark lips pressed together as she studies him warily, furrowing the slash across her cheek. He plays off his pain but she is too sharp, too observant, and her gaze lingers on the leg that had nearly put him face first into the grass.
There is a war raging inside of her. On one side is the destruction of her temper, the part of her that is done giving a shit about anyone else because it only leads to physical and mental pain. And then there is the other side. The one that she had been born with that still lurks somewhere beneath her blinding hot rage. That part of her that had always wanted to help, to fix, to protect. What a far cry she is from that now, how pathetic that she is now the one constantly in need of saving.
She doesn’t trust this stranger with his nonchalance and trite conversation. She doesn’t like the ease in which he speaks to her, as if she hadn’t been through hell and back again, even if her stars had saved him from smashing into the mountain. Maybe she would have preferred that. Maybe she will still bash his brains for him after all. Yet, she allows him to come closer all the same although her muscles tense painfully beneath her ravaged skin and her defensive posture remains. Instantly regretting her decision when he introduces himself and calls her a lovely.. beam was it? It’s mostly the suggestive raise of his brow that sets her off all over again.
”Minding my business.” She snarls at him, the stars hovering menacingly above her. “You would be wise to do the same. So thank me and leave.” She takes a threatening step towards him and stops in mid step, exhaling sharply as pain rackets through her body. Instinctively, her wings drop to fall back along her skeletal sides as if the softness of her starlit feathers might ease the bruising, the frostbite, the pain that floods her system every time she moves. Quickly she looks away from him so he will not see her wincing expression, allowing moonlight to flood across her chest and illuminate the multitudes of silvery scars there. The criss cross patterns that wind up her front legs.
It is hard to admit that as much as she might want to beat the everlasting shit out of this guy… She can’t. She would probably break apart before she could even get close enough to him. Nostrils flare with frustration as she stays where she is, barely holding herself together and trying to not feel so exposed to this stranger. Not a stranger, Kestrell. There is something close to resignation in her frosted voice when she finally speaks to him again. “Did you land wrong?” She finally asks, blatantly refusing to give him her name even as she glances back at him and side eyes the leg he had stumbled on. What was the point when she probably would never see him again… If she was lucky. Then again luck hadn’t been on her side for a very long time.
Nothing about Kestrell should spark recognition in anyone. He was a member of the underbelly society in Beqanna - a rank he lovingly enjoyed because it was obscure and at the utmost fringes of society. The underbelly horses of Beqanna weren’t known like the royals or greater beings. Those were powerful horses who controlled great areas of territory where they practiced their larger acts of magic.
Kestrell was nothing like the whispered names of his ancestors. He didn’t even look like them, and for good reason he never questioned why. He’d been content to be a part of the less-talented mass of characters watching the world spin on, eking out their smaller existences in a world shaped by dark or light Gods, and his life had been a good one because of it.
He only supposed that Ciri might’ve been one of his kind. The type to settle in one place and get to know the trails, so to speak, before moving on to something better. Obviously, he was wrong.
Starlit and fierce, she spat back at Kestrell. His expression dropped in disappointment.
There was just enough light for him to see her tensing like she was uncertain (or maybe even offended?) at his advances. That was when a younger, fresher version of himself might’ve thrown his head and backed off, intimidated. It would’ve been the smarter thing to do in any case. But Kestrell was seasoned enough by now to understand weakness when he saw it, as plainly as Ciri had picked up on his bum knee.
She hadn’t been very subtle in her reaction, either; Kestrell watched her use some sort of magic to cover her skin with beams of light, and did nothing to stop or interfere because he was nosy. Is she healing? He wondered, his eyes dancing curiously over the silver-marks covering her pelt like spiderwebs.
One panther-lunge. That was her attack. Maybe one good bite or kick before recoiling as a defensive measure, while he was stuck with three working legs and a thick skull.
He’d take those chances.
Determined now, Kestrell stubbornly favored his bad limb and stared Ciri down in the dark. The Meadow was nearly quiet, made even more so by the lapse in conversation between the two pegasi. When the mare spoke again, Kestrell couldn’t help but cough up a brutish laugh.
“Came in too steep.” He shot her an insufferable, charming smile. “Flying certainly won’t be fun for a day or two.”
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
It’s a good thing she knows nothing about him including the thoughts in his head.
Weakness.
What would destroy her more, the fact that he looked at her and thought such a word or the fact that he was right?
She can feel his gaze on her and scowls when she looks back at him, sees that determination that pools in the dim silver light that floats between them. The red stars around her merely darken into a more bloody hue as she chews at the inside corner of her lip and eyes the leg he now favors. Surely this is a trap, another one of the Curse’s little jokes and then this moronic stallion would turn into a hive of bees in the shape of a horse before her own bones would lock and hold her hostage as he placed the whole hive inside her… Or something like it.
It had to be a trap, the way he still shoots her that smile and laughs even as her lips twist deeper in their frown. She says nothing in response, those frantically churning threads of silver in her eyes never stopping or slowing their movement despite the weariness that settles beneath her dark ravaged skin. Finally, she moves towards him as if accepting her fate. If it is Gale in disguise, then there’s nothing she can do about it anyway. Besides, better the Curse is focused on her then somebody else, somebody innocent, that can still find joy in life. That doesn’t know any better.
The wings that had been pressed against her sides move further upward along her back, her movement stiff and slow until she settles just before him, her pupil-less gaze unwavering as she turns her scarred face up to him and releases a long breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. “There are some herbs by Hyaline’s lake that might help with that. Mixed with the mud it creates a paste that helps with infection.” She doesn’t look down at his injury or explain how she knows this, instead keeping her gaze focused tightly on his face and not caring that suspicion had slipped through her own guarded expression. “If you can’t heal yourself that is.”
Intriguing company, a clear night, comfortable weather -
Kestrell’s thoughts couldn’t be farther from Ciri’s. He was too busy studying her manners; she seemed nervous, fidgety. When she glared at him, (a little quirk Kestrell actually liked about her) the pitch-black mare’s true thoughts were obscured by darkness. He couldn’t read her eyes, or necessarily capture the intensity in them, but Kestrell had sense enough to read body language. After what seemed like a moment or two of hesitation on her part, Ciri moved toward him and the insufferable grin vanished.
Progress, he thought.
The two were just close enough for comfort. Kestrell could observe her thoroughly from his vantage point, and he didn’t spare an embarrassed or cautious moment before his eyes were drawn to the little spots of glowing light covering Ciri’s otherwise tattered skin. Even her wings were drenched in starlight, showing like little galactic pinpoints in an otherwise velvet sea of black feathers. It fascinated him, more than the slight intrigue she betrayed when at last the stubborn mare questioned Kestrell’s ability to heal himself.
“Technically, we can all heal ourselves.” He corrected her fearlessly. “Some of us are just faster at it than others.”
He couldn’t help himself. Her seriousness begged for a more spirited counterweight, and Kestrell was always in the mood for pushing his luck.
“Your mud remedy -” he started up again before she could bite back, “- did that come from personal experience, or was it a kind recommendation from some other stranger?”
The spotted stallion thought of Pinko, Tinkaara and the rest; his vagabond group of buddies disbanded last season, but it was nearly time for them to regroup again in preparation for the winter months.
“I do know a healer, of sorts, if you need one.” Kestrell offered, just sly enough that his own interest in her habits and solitary existence might be noticed.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
When she moves towards him and in the glow of her crimson stars sees that intolerable grin wipe clean off his face, her own scowl twists into something more satisfied. Good. In his head, he sees it as progress. In hers, she sees it as a very small win. One she desperately needs. Now that she is closer to him, she can’t deny he was a rather good-looking stallion. However, good-looking stallions were a dime a dozen in Beqanna and the vast majority were more trouble than they were worth.
The loss of his grin is enough to lose some of her initial suspicion. If this was the Curse, she thinks that grin would have only intensified as she stalked her way towards him. Would have stopped her in her tracks with a blink of an eye as invisible fingers grabbed her bones. What little satisfaction she gains is lost in the response he gives about healing. The question of personal experience. She stares at him, boldly, for a moment in silence. The silver spinning of her eyes never losing their speed or consistency. “Then you’ve never been truly broken.” She finally responds flatly, casting a look over his mostly unblemished coat.
She slowly begins to circle him like a demonic wolf, an angry ball of starlight, darkness, and furious red. “I could change that if you’d like a taste.” Stopping when she reaches his head again, trying not to show the fatigue that forces her to stop. She doesn’t bother to respond to the question of personal experience. She is well aware of the way his gaze had traveled over the stories on her skin. He already knows the answer.
Raising her head proudly, defiance sparking in the cold glint of spinning steel. “I need no-one.” She says slowly, glaring at him and daring him to say otherwise. Wrinkling her nose in distaste at the metallic clang of offensive blood that hits her nostrils as she catches a whiff of his injury. “But you can take or leave my advice.” A slight wince as she shrugs, tossing her raven forelock to hide it, and begins to turn away from him.
He’d meant to be quick-witted, not quick to wound the battle-hardened mare. That had been the least of his intentions tonight, but despite his best efforts the brute often came across those who never appreciated a well-timed joke. Even less so, there were a select few who claimed to find him annoying, which Kestrell hardly believed. Certainly she wasn’t one of them!
He couldn’t quite put a reason to it, but there was a good story here. Good enough that he allowed her insult to stand without reproaching it, while being wise enough himself not to assume their respective histories were anything alike. He could see how she might think less of him when comparing battle scars, but neither one had walked a mile in the other’s skin. She meant to wound him, but her attack only half-struck its mark.
“I’ve never been anything but myself.” He grunted, half-amused at her offer. “Let’s keep it that way.”
A little thrill of honest fear took him by surprise, then. Kestrell was too outwardly cool to let it slip, but the idea of how she would break him did cross his mind. From the looks of her, Ciri was certainly capable; he was wounded and she gave slight indications of being ‘unwell’, which leveled the playing field, but there was no denying what Kestrell had known all his life:
She was magical. He wasn’t.
It’s because he’s known this truth for so long that the potential scare passes away quickly in his mind, here one second and gone the next. Ciri (sneering and tossing her head, disgusted by him) and all her stars could’ve struck him down right there in the Meadow, if they wanted to. Kestrell was nearly positive the substantial balls of light weren’t cool to the touch.
But she hadn’t. He’d been confronted with magical beings more than once, actually, and in situations much more dangerous when compared to an irritable alpha female, which was exactly why the forlorn rogue knew what it was like to be wounded by one. Maybe not broken like she claimed, but certainly something like it.
Poisonous vines, horse-eating birds, Kelpies, etc. If one could dream it up, one could find it dwelling in some dark corner of Beqanna or another - and they almost never gave their victim a choice when you stumbled across them. They were destructive, evil, and sometimes only kept at bay by stronger powers or sheer dumb luck, and of all the things in this world that gave Kestrell a reason to frown, they were first among them.
Ciri isn’t like that, he thinks. She’s once bitten, twice shy.
“And what if I need you?” She doesn’t get far before he asks, just loud enough that his voice will carry weight along with it.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
She might have laughed, a raw startling sound that hadn’t come from her mouth in years, if she had an inkling to what about her had worried him. In the state she was in, malnourished and weak, patches of gray fur that was slowly growing over into smoky black… She was the one who would be the underdog in this fight. He doesn’t know that she hadn’t touched her connection to the stars in years. Not since the day she had died.
She feels that to an outsider looking in, it would be obvious her disadvantage to him. Yet she still pushes, snaps, and snarls, egged on by that unrelenting storm of red and black that swirls around her chest. A tornado of pure fury with no release. Ciri was a mare who had nothing left to lose. After spending a year in the ice, she thinks that perhaps even the terrifying nothingness she had found in death might have been better than that cold hell she had been trapped in.
She hated being alive. She feared death. Her world on this plane was a purgatory now.
Perhaps the thing about Kestrell that gets under her torn skin the most isn’t that irritating grin or his stubborn enthusiasm. It’s the reminder of a life that she had once lived before, signs of a simpler time as a wanderer. She had been a rogue too, in her younger years. Before the Underneath. Before Amet. The scars she had earned in those years had been few and far between. She had been sharper, quicker, wrapped in the wild joy of freedom.
The Underneath had stolen her carefree innocence, had shaken the core of her being, had shown her exactly what she was. What she still could be, perhaps. A dream that seemed to grow further and further away from ever actually happening. But she sees them in him for some reason. Those small glimpses of a past she had tried to forget, reminding her what she had loved doing. Helping others, protecting them. She senses that in some way, he is sensing that in her… That she’s the one that needs saving.
Her anger roars in protest and her stars turn as dark as the stained blood she had once woken up to in this very meadow.
That was what had brought her from the Heavens to begin with, what had sent her into the body of a small foal warm in the womb. A child of time and space. The swirling of her eyes churns with an emotion she hadn’t felt in awhile. Something like sadness, or regret. It’s washed away by the flames of her temper, her injustice, but like the lightning pains that she sometimes still feels in her chest… This sensation lingers slightly too.
She is sick of him, sick of looking at the freedom he carries so easily compared to the weight she carries across her scarred stardust shoulders. ”I need no-one.” She challenges him and its true. She doesn’t. She had been living a very lonely life for a very long time. She had accepted it. She was starting to believe that stars could never understand a mortal life, would never be able to navigate such intense emotions.
Turning from him, she is only a few steps from him when his voice washes over her hazy red backside. And she freezes, her muscles visibly tensing as she stares straight ahead of her. Hesitating and trying to reason why.
”What if I need you?”
Nobody had ever said that to her before. Amet had once said ”I need to find who hurt you.” It hadn’t been what she needed to hear. It had never been I need you. And little did she know that soon she would know just exactly how fine the dragon-king had been without her. She knew what it was to be wanted, desired, hunted, tortured. How it felt to be rejected, forgotten, spurned, betrayed. What would it feel like to be needed? For nobody had ever truly needed her before. Neither dragons, the North, even in her struggle with Gale there were far more opponents than herself that had the abilities to truly take him down.
Nobody needed her. So why was he claiming he did?
Why, for a split-second, did her stars turn from bloody red to tarnished gold as the weight of his words found her?
A dark laugh spills from her smoky mouth, slowly turning back to him, her swirling silver never slowing despite the sliver of emotion that had managed to slip beneath her rage. She forces the sneer but her heart isn’t in it despite the heated storm that battles within her. “Your better off without me.” She says quietly, her face turned up to the tall stallion. “And that’s the best advice I can give you.”
The further away from her, the better their chance of survival. Of a happy life, of hopes and dreams. Of a purpose that she had long lost the summer night she had died for nothing. Truly nothing.
The best protection she can give anyone, especially to him, is by making sure she couldn’t take anyone else down with her.
Carefully she moves away from him and stretches out her shimmering black wings. Without the cover of feathers, her weathered figure becomes much clearer when illuminated against the little moonlight that lingers. She pauses only for a second, glancing over her shoulder at him. Hesitating. “It's Ciri, by the way. Thane of the Isle.””Should you truly need me” hinted at the corner of the uncertain thin smile if he manages to catch it. And then she is forcing her tired wings into the chill of the night, her mind racing as her heart beats frantically from something more confusing, for once, than her unrelenting anger.
