"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
07-28-2016, 12:50 PM (This post was last modified: 08-11-2016, 12:27 AM by Brine.)
Her eyes glide over the meadow, the soft song of birds cooing beyond her reach. She stands independently, with a soft breeze lightly lifting the long thick feathers creating her mane and airing beneath her wings.
So little, she is. Little but fierce. Her body is lanky and petite, still developing into a women yet her personality is so bold. Too loud for a body so restricting. She is caged and held like a giant in a human cell, her mind so overbearing that soon she will begin oozing between cell doors until the entire infrastructure crumbles beneath the force.
Her heart is pounding—with a painful but persistent boom with every beat—because she fears she might see her mom. It wasn’t so long ago, her being nestled between the comfort of her mother’s neck, hugged close against her shoulder. Her body hadn’t reached beyond her leg, hidden almost instantly within her mother’s black coat. Had it not been for the light blue tint developing with Brine’s age, she could have disappeared into her mother’s body altogether.
Back then when Brine thought their relationship would be forever, back before she got lost in a hail storm and… well, no more being huddled within protection.
Feathers ruffle as she internally motivates herself to move, an action that lately required too much thought and negotiation. Her left talon breaks the bond first, and of course the rest of her blue roaned frame is now expected to follow. Breaking through softly landed snow is easy, despite how her legs sink in to her knee.
Winter had always been her favorite. How trees look like iced sugar in the morning, and how crystal-like icicles draped down from hanging surfaces in beautiful decoration. How the sky seemed to either be a florescent blue or a calming serene grey, and the feeling of snowflakes softly landing on the bridge of one’s nose.
Her eyes land on a shadowed area along the treeline, and instinctively she meanders over. The blackness indulges her like dinner, hiding her feathered body within the safety of it’s reach. Much like her mother; the blackness providing security.
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die and where you invest your love, you invest your life
The meadow is new for him.
It is warmer here then the Tundra, although both lands are technically locked in the embrace of winter. But that season manifests differently, he finds. Where the Tundra is barren and harsh with ice, somehow blossoming into the steel and cold he had always enjoyed, the meadow is softer. The cold does not reach into your bones. It is more delicate and arguably more beautiful, although he cannot say that his heart is touched by it. Instead he notes the differences in an almost clinical way, pale eyes taking in the new land with more apathy than anything.
The only thing that it stirred in him was discomfort, all of the bodies milling about causing him to shift and move to hide himself before he remembered that they could not see him. Invisibility paid off sometimes.
It wasn’t that he was anti-social…it was just that his mother had whispered tales into his head from a young age. Tales of fairies who gave him gifts, but not free gifts. He was gifted with wings—large, beautiful, strong—but then cursed with only functioning wing. The wing on his right was beautiful, but it was smaller, the muscles knotted and strength seeping from it. He would never leave the ground despite the feathery appendages embracing his sides.
Then there was his immortality. He liked to think that he could feel it sometimes. The way it simmered in his blood. When he was younger, it had seemed less important, but now he could not imagine life without it. He had grown for years, but then it was like he had taken root; instead of aging, he remained unchanged—as if carved from rock. He was eternally young, his body never weathering or showing the years as they passed beneath him.
But that was not given freely either.
His immortality was tied to his heart. It was anchored in his detachment. He would live forever, so long as he lived without love. When he had been young, he had not understood, but as he grew older, Tobiah began to understand. It even seemed poetic. He was given the gift of time, and he paid for it. What at first seemed a curse became a blessing to him. He would never need to worry about the pain of rejection or the pain of loving something that would in turn leave him. He was instead given a life that would unfold freely and eternally; a life to mold as he saw fit.
Still, it was a gift he had to guard, and he did not often make himself vulnerable to creating attachments. So you can imagine his surprise when the bird-mare crosses his path and he says “What are you?” before he stop himself. For a moment, he imagines himself just bleeding away (after all, he was still invisible) into the shadows—but the curiosity of the situation gets to him first. His slowly becomes visible, the shadows revealing him for what he is: tall, lean, so pale a gold that he becomes cream. His feathery wings wrap around his barrel and his steel eyes show nothing but an aloof, impartial curiosity. For a second, he thinks of apologizing for his bluntness, but he thinks better of it and just waits.
08-11-2016, 12:28 AM (This post was last modified: 08-11-2016, 12:29 AM by Brine.)
I am a huntress.
I am a woman of incredible eyes, sharpened talons, and softened feathers. I am a horse made eagle, with a wing span enough to create a large gust of wind and claws large enough to wrap around the hock of a Clydesdale. Yet here I am, dwindling like a dandelion in the cover of shadows; they cover all my scary secrets.
Pupils dilate, quickly enlarging and minimizing, in and out, as mice of prey scamper through emerald blades. I am not hungry, I am bored. However when I am standing, I am hungry. If I am not busy, I crave anything and everything. I crave fish, and mice and grit. I crave everything but being here, and yet here I am.
Let me rephrase myself; I am not a good huntress.
I swing my head to quiet an itch at my shoulder, only beneath my wing when suddenly hear a masculine voice. Spooked, I pivot hastily to analyze the intruder head on, my ears pinned tightly against my scalp: I see nothing.
“Your newest nightmare if you don’t reveal yourself at once,” I know I am not threatening, my voice being more frustrated than terrifying. I don’t have the energy to catch a salmon, let alone fight paranormal activity. Though, I do believe it is the effort that counts, not only the delivery. Unless it was a real battle, in which case whoever does not win is most definitely a loser, regardless of the effort shown.
He assembles like crystals all shimmering into one solid figure. A golden hue, contrasting heavily against the blackness of shade, and I feel myself staring maybe a second too long. He looks like the sun after years and years of fading, with soft hair and wings that surround his barrel like a blanketed night sky. If I wasn’t so angry with him, I might have found him rather attractive.
Alas, I have issues forgetting things.
Aggravated, I swish my tail menacingly (hah, or so I thought) against my flank, my nostrils erupting with air to form a disgruntled snort. “If you are some form of my guardian angel, please by all means resign. You aren’t very good at your job.”
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die and where you invest your love, you invest your life
There is something about her anger that pleases him.
He was not an overly cruel stallion, but it was comforting to be around someone with so many barbs—with such a sharp tongue. It did the work for him: the keeping people distant. You couldn’t be close with someone who was threatening to tear your head off—which meant that he was safe. He didn’t need to worry. He didn’t to be concerned. It relieved him, the feeling washing over him momentarily.
He still stiffened at her voice and laughed, the sound not unkind but not soft in the air. It cracked out like a whip between them and he smiled with sharp edges as he fully formed. “You don’t know the first thing about my nightmares, princess.” And she didn’t. His dreams were normally quiet things. Things that started out so slow like the ocean lapping around the borders of his vision. Then they turned dark, stormy. They were like being thrust into the middle of the hurricane. They were of drowning. There were of his wings being stripped from his back. Screaming as his immortality peeled back from his flesh.
They were of love. Always of love. And all the ways that it could kill him.
He watches her with narrowed pale eyes for a second, roman-nosed head tilting to the side so he could consider her. She was unique—a melding of bird and equine that he had never seen before—but he was not afraid. What he feared was much deeper than physical pain. “I cannot even begin to express how much I am not your guardian angel,” he huffed loudly, “and how much I would never want the job.”
Watching over someone? Taking care of them? Serving as their guardian? It was perhaps the worst calling that he could imagine and the antithesis of his entire purpose of life. “Do you need someone to look out for you?” he asked finally, unable to resist the barb. He pulled his feathers in closer and then fell silent.
My eyes settle on his poised face like a hawk sighting mouse. He does nothing, his expression a perfected sculpt of coldness and passiveness that I cannot begin to assume his thoughts or intentions. He disintegrated from the darkness that I once felt so safe in, and now had tarnished my view of what was safe and what is not. And to top it off, his face is a sculpture, and no emotion reads from his eyes.
“If this is what a princess looks like, then perhaps it is good I have avoided kingdoms all together,” I level out my tone to sound neutral, though it is evident I am guarded. Guarded because he is magical, guarded because I can only fly so fast and I can only stand to fight if I can see what I am fighting. A slight flicker in the twigs above us allows the sun to peak, beams lightly cascading across his face, and I become distracted in his golden coat.
Heavily large wings wrap themselves around my sides, though they are far too bulky to fit my barrel as his appears to. He speaks of nightmares, but I cannot relate to this. Demons of my mind have not come to haunt me yet, I am still free of their torture. My only nightmare being death; I am petrified to die. Petrified to realize that there is nothing beyond blackness once my eyes close that last time. Petrified to learn that an afterlife was a folks tale made to instill hope in living creatures.
But that nightmare only haunts me before I sleep.
“Just because I am not your nightmare yet, does not mean I will not make the cut,” blue eyes angle at his golden stature before lifting my feathered head to level with his own, seeing him analyze my frame, “enough staring. I come to the shadows to avoid it.”
His guardian angel comment rolls of my shoulder, I may as well consider myself lucky. Whatever haunts him has his own mind preoccupied, and heaven forbid he attempts to juggle my fate along with his own. My eyes shift to stare beyond the shadows, eyeing the distant mingling of other equines.
His tone, again, breaks the silence. My, what a talker he is. Carefully, I dissect his question as it molds through the air like a piano note. “No, I do not need someone to care for me,” a hardness forms my aura as I shift moods, “I have done well enough so far.”
Instinctively my eyes raise, appearing to challenge yet my intention only out of sincere curiosity, “what about you?”
08-28-2016, 03:01 AM (This post was last modified: 08-28-2016, 03:33 AM by tobiah.)
my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you. ————————————————————
Part of him feels bad for having put her on the defensive; the day could have easily gone a different way had he been softer when she had simply demanded he reveal himself. He did not have to snap the way he had. He did not need to bite at her from the get-go—driving a wedge between them before a second had passed. So part of him feels a twinge of guilt for the sharpness in the set of her mouth, in the inclination of her jaw as she challenges him with her gaze—guilt that he had placed that in her.
But Tobiah has never been particularly good with apologies so he does not start now. Instead he shifts, feathers rustling as his sides as he tries to get himself into a more comfortable stance. When she fires back the question at him, he fights that urge to snarl back, knowing that to do so would only drag them further into the muck. Anger was as dangerously close to love as affection; he couldn’t risk either strong emotion.
So, he yields to the question, giving her the rare courtesy of honesty. “I never really had the choice,” he says bluntly, pulling back the veil slightly on a history he usually left concealed. “I left my mother at a young age and never spent much time around anyone after that.” She had been a fine mother, but he had longed to see the brotherhood his father had ruled over; he had longed to see the land of ice and solitude. The thought to it had struck a chord in his young heart, and he had answered the call.
The fact that he had never risen to more, never even taking the pledge, did not overly bother him.
“I bet my excellent conversation skills conceal my lone lifestyle well,” he jokes, one corner of his mouth lifting into a quick flash of a smile before dropping again, leaving his face somber and neutral once more.
