"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
i'm not crazy, my reality is just different from yours
His name meant The Terror. Yes, in capitals because it was that important. It was some random bit of knowledge his mother had passed to him with amusement glimmering in her eyes as she looked at him. Mischievous...perhaps. But something scary? Something to keep hidden and locked away? No, he was not that. He was rather typical, even with the dark teal color that made up his mane and tail. His black coat was normal. His features were normal. Yep, everything about him screamed...normal.
Others might not be okay with that, but he was. Despite the fact that any one could be related to him (which worried him a little bit if he ever finds "the one") on his father's side, which perhaps wasn't so normal. Ginia had loved him, nurtured him and encouraged him.
And so now he was grown, far from his mother's side (she had hinted at other siblings from her side somewhere) and more curious in the way the light slanted across the branches of the willow tree than the social interactions of those around him. That was to be expected of course when one was more used to the quiet solitude. The noise around him was too much for him.
Not quite all the way normal then.
So he moves from the meadow, loathe to leave behind his willow with the stream that ran beneath its branches and slid closer to the border of the Forest where he wandered, deeper until the branches barely allowed the light to hit the forest floor and everything was cast in a bit of a green light. And then blessedly, it was mostly quiet and he went about looking at his surroundings.
She is not a terror either, though she is far from normal.
Carinae is child of gods and stars, and lived among them, once, in a timeless existence that lasted seconds, or an eternity.
(Time had not mattered, when the galaxy seemed to go on forever and all around her things collapsed and were reborn.)
But that life is no more – she is anchored, now, made mortal and grounded by forces she doesn’t comprehend. She is mortal now, and gravity wears heavy on her hooves, dragging her into the earth like weights.
Once thing remains – her coat shifts constantly, reflects the sky, whether it be stars or sunlight, clouds or lightning bolts. She wears it all, every constellation she walks beneath, and pretends, for a moment, that she will go home again.
She sees the boy. He is like so many other boys. There is something to his face and body, a moment of familiarity she can’t quite place. She doesn’t know it, but they share a father – a common thing, here.
She is made idle, in the forest’s shadow-dappled grounds. And though gravity pulls her down, she lifts her head high.
“Hello,” she says, as a patch of starlight shines through to alight upon her neck.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
i'm not crazy, my reality is just different from yours
He had lost track of the time that he had spent out here, until a slanting ray of light shines in his eyes. He blinks and then he is lost again in time, something he finds so relative. Subconsciously he knows it is dark, because it is harder for him to see things to study and the branches above him that hide the moon (was there even a moon tonight?) and keep whatever light it might have offered from him. It was dark.
But he was not afraid.
She moves amongst the shadows, beautiful with the way he sees the stars glimmer on her neck and his eyes instantly move to the sky before they slide back to her. "Beautiful." The word on his tongue is out before he can stop it and he cannot help but slide closer to her to study her coat more thoroughly. His lips hover just over her skin, over the stars that hide there, even while the rest of her coat seems to be empty and dull, like a vast black hole just waiting...waiting.
He is not so normal then, as it takes him long moments for him to realize that she had spoken to him first and that is what made him turn from looking amongst the branches. "Oh." He says, his eyes meeting hers and finding that same pull there in her eyes that he felt in her coat. "Hello." He finally says with a crooked smile.
She prefers the night because it reminds her of home.
The stars creep out and sometimes they are so bright and close she’ll stretch her neck up as if they were something she could touch, something cradled in the palm of the hand like a bird. She likes the stars on her back, and though she is naught but a mirror she imagines she can feel them there, set like memories on her skin.
She aches for it, for them, for the timeless dark she swears she once knew.
She prefers the night because they once kept her alive, the stars.
He murmurs something - beautiful - and she smiles. It is not surprising, she’s heard such things before. It is not her face that elicits such responses, she knows, it is that she walks like a piece of the sky fallen.
(In a way, she supposes she is, though she fell much further than the sky.)
He is near, perhaps too near, but she feels the night in her bones so she does not step away. She lets him preside there, close enough that she can feel the heat and smell the scent of him, the fecund earthiness.
“I’m Carinae.”
She offers her name, and watches him again. Speech is still slow to come to her tongue, at times.
“Did I interrupt you?”
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
i'm not crazy, my reality is just different from yours
"Do you only reflect it?" He says after a moment. Curious about her coat and how it worked. "Or can you will what you want on it?" His lips touch her shoulder then and he wants to see more, wants to see all of her covered in the beauty of the sky. But he seems to realize that he is close to her, perhaps too close to her for comfort and with a sigh he shuffles his hooves backwards into a respectable distance from her. His ears flicker and while it seems her words might have forgotten, he once again realizes she had spoke when he was studying her.
"Carinae." He repeats, tasting her name like a fine wine upon his tongue. He would never forget her, forget this beautiful star mare. Her name, perhaps, but not the way she looks now, even only partially covered in stars. "Yes." He says, tilting his head to the side. "But it was a welcome interruption." Another long pause where he gets lost in the space along her coat.
"I'm Kyofu." He says, finally remembering his manners and telling her his name. He was fascinated with her, with the way the stars twinkled along her coat. He sighs again, itching to touch it, to run his lips across it to see if it was as cold as he imagined the inky blackness of space to be. But he stays there, his hooves managing to be still as he is a semi decent stallion.
“I’m a mirror,” she says, and a bit of an ache creeps into her voice. Would that she could will it – if so, she would always be draped in stars. She doesn’t mind the blue sky, the clouds, but they do not compare to her birthplace, wearing it in pale imitation on her coat. Alas, she is but a mirror, so instead she merely prays for clear nights and basks in it while she does.
He touches her, a moment of his muzzle in the hollow of her shoulder (she looks like the sky but she feels like any other horse, summer-smooth and warm). It’s nice and strange all at once, for she is not used to being touched, she is used to existing in a vacuum.
She smiles at his name – it’s odd, and she almost repeats it back but something silences her. Instead she looks at him a little more, trying to discern something (she isn’t sure what).
“Where are you from, Kyofu?” she asks, because she loves their origin stories, all so different from her own.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
i'm not crazy, my reality is just different from yours
"That is too bad." He says in reply to her words. A mirror doesn't sound like a very good thing when there was that much beauty in the sky to reflect. "Only the night?" He questions again. He was a curious fellow, really had always been that way. His mother used to shush him or tell him to go watch and learn and so he had. Both, often, at the same time. She had loved him though, knew it in the way that she had touched his brow or his cheek.
He had not paid enough attention when his lips had touched her before, did not remember the warmth that had greeted him. He had been far too intent on her, on the very way she looked and was. He knew that there might be more to the story of her coat than he would ever know. Wouldn't know that their father's were the same. Or that they were of the same blood.
Not that he cared about genetics in that sense. It was the wonders of life that caught him much easier.
"Here and there." He says, tilting his head towards her. "And you?" He manages to keep himself much more in tune with the now instead of what is going through his mind. If he could have shrugged he would have rolled his shoulders with his answer. His origins were nothing special.
She is a mirror, and it is wholly inadequate. She cannot capture the stars the way she once did, and besides, earth only gives them a modicum of what’s truly there. Here, they do not know what the galaxies are like, the way a star looks when it explodes.
(How long had she lived there? It doesn’t matter; time did not exist in such a dark and lovely place.)
Now there is only a slice of the sky, and she is microscopic, a speck of dust on a small planet with a few stars settled across her and a wistful gaze to return.
But she has not returned, she is here, grounded, terrestrial, with a strange black boy who murmurs questions in the nighttime.
“For the whole sky,” she says. Come daytime, she will be blue, or grey, depending on the clouds. She has no color to call her own.
He sidles from her question - here and there he says, saying nothing and saying enough with it at once, turns it back to her.
(She is a mirror.)
“My mother was a star and my father was a god,” she says. It’s too strange a tale to be anything but true, though it sounds like something odd, a creation myth, “and my brother and I lived with them, out in space.”
Timeless, dark, there with Cosmos as worlds collapsed around them and eternity beckoned. She misses him almost as much as she does the sky.
“Then I came here,” she says, “I don’t remember falling. I was floating, then I was walking.”
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
