"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
He had wavered at the border of the kingdom, the glistening sands spread out comfortingly behind his back. It has been years since the wild child had even considered exploring the outside world once again. But he has decided it was finally time to go back to where it had all began for him.
The meadow was, at first, a seemingly welcome space for any and all to gather. But this pleasantly warm summer breeze was vastly different from the horribly traumatic winter he had barely survived as a foal. He had been lucky that Ima had found him when she had, for he undoubtedly not survived to see the end of his first winter.
Hazel eyes regard the different groups with a cool disregard - no others interested him past Ima and those that she considered to be hers. The wild child had never fared well with strangers and he stuck mostly to the outside of the lush, verdant meadow. It wasn’t the openness that bothered him (the desert stretched and remained vast for miles on end), but the suffocating crowd kept him irritated and on edge.
Truly, he did not know why he had returned to this place.
A tantalizing glimmer reflected out from between tall strands of wild grasses and his eyes widen in excitement. Perhaps he would be lucky enough to accompany Ima back home! He rushes towards the figure in the grass, but only to be gravely disappointed and confused. This boy was definitely not Ima, even though his coat reflected just like hers perfectly. The warm gold and flash of silver failed to assure the wild child and he glares at the stranger in suspicion.
Why did he resemble Ima so?
Munroe was on his way to great affrontedness.
He scrutinizes the boy’s back but fails to see any wondrous wings like those of Ima. This must be some sort of laughable imposter then. And he was not amused at the attempt. The wild child remains tense and wary, ready to fight or flight at any second.
But he is not shy in demanding an answer from this boy.
He is flickering along the edge of a meadow that became their graveyard.
He knows their beginnings, their middles, their ends, and it leaves his eyes dark and cold. He has seen the vivisection. He has seen the lightening. He has seen his sister bound and bled and smiling, and it has ruined him. He is made of sunsets. He is made of rivers. He is made up of hazel trees, and all of the memories that once lingered between the eyelets of the leaves on those branches.
They were earthquakes, and he was a shockwave.
One had a face that could launch a thousand ships, and the other was a dark lyricist. They made music together that wove threads that sounded like the seams that bound the universe. They were everything. He was nothing.
And he is still nothing, flickering along the edge of a meadow that feels like a graveyard when it comes.
It asks for his name, and Elektrum is happy enough to oblige. He turns his golden cheek, and a smirk slithers along the edge of his lips like a snake through the grass.
“I am Elektrum,” he says, neither warmly or cool, and he touches his nose to the other’s cheek. He touches his nose to the other’s cheek and the world dissolves around them. It flashes pieces of here and there, of light and dark, of now and then. What they are left with is a backdrop of olive trees and ancient columns. What they are left with is cobblestone beneath their feet, with emptiness around them that not even the Gods could fill.
The stranger offers his name accompanied with an oily smirk and the wild child is struck with a sudden feeling of impeding danger. He was always more attuned to his instincts than most others and he was prepared to withdraw from this unsettling situation. But he had not even taken one step back in retreat before Elektrum lunges forward and makes contact with his face.
Before his wide hazel eyes, the world shifts. Just as it had done once before (his memories who had thought it kinder to hide away from him than to torture him with his brief time in Nessa’s playroom). There are flashes of both light and darkness; the surroundings blend constantly between haziness and sharpness.
It was nauseating.
But it soon clears and the spinning space finally comes to a standstill.
They were certainly not in Beqanna anymore.
He scrambles backwards - away from the boy and his shattering touches. A loud clattering noise resounds from his hasty steps striking the cobblestones beneath his feet. Munroe observes their new surroundings with a sense of growing horror and reluctant awe. Strange squares rose up from the earth in sparkling white marble ad carefully laid cobblestones led the way to some unknown destination.
He’d never seen the like; he’d never even possessed the imagination for some of the things he was seeing.
His bewildered state soon faded and transposed into a fit of anger. Munroe knew this boy had something to do with their sudden journey. Despite his misgivings, he took an aggressive step towards Elektrum. The wild child halted just as quickly when he heard the boy’s question and he tilted his head in slight confusion.
Munroe lived in the moment; he was not one to neither dwell in the past nor worry about the future.
His needs and desires were simple: a full stomach, a cool drink of water to quench his thirst, and some shade to take shelter in when the desert sun was at its highest. But he was always happiest when beside Ima’s side. She had saved him and loved him and always cared for him.
12-10-2015, 10:40 PM (This post was last modified: 12-10-2015, 10:42 PM by Elektrum.
Edit Reason: stupidity
)
It doesn’t matter where he takes them, or when, only that he does. It’s the simplicity in the transaction alone that thrills him; the power behind gifting that which they cannot hope to afford that sends the hot prickle of adrenaline down the ridge of his spine. He, himself, has eluded this truth despite it showing readily on the surface of his reflections. It reads like sentences through the lines on his body, but he doesn’t see the danger in himself or his manipulations. He doesn’t care that he tangles threads of time and space each time his heart aches and he needs to display his own self-worth to the world.
He doesn’t think himself dangerous, but the dangerous often don’t.
So, he tears the universe into halves and makes it into what he wants. He bends time and space to suit his will, gives hips to girls too young to know the meaning of them, and casts glass-clear windows of would-be futures to those without the hope of them. There is a power that he holds in the palms of his hands that slips between the cracks of his fingers – it spills out like oil into the sea of everything else. He doesn’t think himself dangerous, but the ocean will be black before long.
He had hoped for awe. He had hoped for wonder. He had hoped, and fallen short when the dismay in his travelling companion’s eyes is palpable. The hiss and click of teeth and the sound of clattering on cobblestone is enough to flatten his ears out against his head and tickle a nerve Elektrum will not readily admit exists – but there is just enough cruelty spun into his flesh to ignite a spark of aggravation that coils behind his black eyes and curves through the cavernous bends of his mind. There is just enough cruelty spun into his flesh to make resentment an easy choice.
“Ima,” it says, and Elektrum does not bother to conceal the boredom in the sigh he huffs next, but there is a flash and a bang. There are flickers of light, and flickers of nothing, and they’ll invade his senses of everything else. There is everything and nothing simultaneously. He looks out across a horizon of time and sees every height and groove of every edge and corner that exists. He sees then and now. He sees when and why. He sees what and how.
And then he sees something that he himself has never had. He feels the heat off her flesh, and it’s a maternal warmth that heats his bones. He sees Ima. He knows.
And then there is a flash and a bang, and he is once again himself beside his aweless companion. “Ima,” Elektrum repeats, with a hint of smugness that coats the syllables and makes them bolder. It isn’t subtle, but there is not much about him that is. “Very well.”
But there is just enough cruelty spun into his flesh to make a choice that is less than kind. There is a flash and a bang, and he takes them to a beach. There is nothing save for the dark and muddied skies, the sand. The tide is rolling out and unearthing ivory bones normally buried beneath the curl of blue ocean and sea foam.
“This is the last place she was,” he says. He doesn’t say why, and he doesn’t have too. The answer is obvious, written in the marrow of the bones littering the shoreline. The answer is obvious, reflected in the hungry black eyes of the scavenger birds flying circles overhead.
“This is what you wanted,” he says, with a smile that reads victorious.
