"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
The tundra is vast and white, and from where she stands up in the mountain, the trees scatter like dark constellations against the snow. There are birds in this sky, though they come far and few in-between, and she thinks she can see the glimmer of frost where it melts from the feathers on their backs. This must be why they choose not to come so far north. There are hardly any animals this far up, though occasionally she saw the flash of a thick white tail as a fox disappeared into a pile of snow and stone beneath one of the pines. She knew there must be others, bears or wolves, but none had ever ventured through the narrow gate to be trapped within the ice walls. Perhaps this kingdom felt like a prison to those who didn’t know any better, like being swallowed by a mouth ringed in ice teeth. For Australis though, it was home, it always had been- and she had never let these walls do anything more than protect her. For a moment the bay girl thinks about slipping away to visit Sunder and Gold again. Though she was technically their niece, they had all been born around the same time. They met during one of Isle’s visits back to the forests surrounding the Chamber, back to visit Oksana and Makai, and Australis had taken an immediate liking to the black sabino colt. Though admittedly his sister was obnoxiously aloof, and for the most part seemed to disappear when Australis came around, she had taken to slipping out of the Tundra to visit as often as she could without her parents taking too much of a notice. She wasn’t entirely sure they would’ve stopped her, but she also wasn’t willing to find out. Lately it seemed like her parents were always on edge, Isle with little Eione nursing at her side, and Offspring with the ghosts he had carried home with him from wherever he had earned all those wounds. Leaving now felt a little too much like poking deliberate holes in the fabric of whatever was holding her family together still. So with a sigh she shakes her head and stays, smiling a little when the bone snowflake bounced against the bay dapples of her dark neck. Sunder had made it for her, for the not-so-little tundra princess, taking a sun-bleached piece of bone and twisting it into her mane into the shape of a snowflake as unique as she was. It was a gift she loved, and she enjoyed the weight of it against her skin. Carefully, the bay sabino mare picks her way along a narrow trail worn down by days and days of use from her own hooves. It had been awkward at first to come up here, awkward as a child until she had grown into her body. She wasn’t delicate like her mother, crafted from willow and sinew, nor was she quite as large as her father, built for war and battle. Australis fell somewhere in between, with legs that were solid with heavy white feathers, and a thick mane and tail that hinted at her draft heritage. But her body was long and slender in a way that made her look perpetually young, trapped just beyond gangly childhood. If she was beautiful, it was only in the way that wild things are. There is a sound from up ahead on the trail and her dark ears flick forward curiously. But the wind is at her back, tangling fingers in the rope of her mane, and she cannot discern who it might be without a scent in the air. So instead she slows to a halt, her dark eyes brown and bright and wild beneath the silk of her forelock.
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die and where you invest your love, you invest your life
The Tundra was vast and white, but it does not protect him like it does her.
He was an outsider, and he knew it. He had come under his father’s rule but had never taken the oath. He had never taken up the mantle or joined the ranks or done anything to make his father proud. Instead he had done what he had since learned that he did best: he secluded himself. He had eluded his father’s questions and faded into the distance, living on the scarce outskirts of the kingdom as a vagabond. More often than not, he flirted with the border—never quite entering but never really leaving to go anywhere else either.
It made him an intruder, but he didn’t mind.
Today, he was further in than he normally allowed. His pace was slow, his pale Roman nose dragging along the ground as he languidly hunted for the grass. The only thing left was the nearly-dead blades that were tough enough to even survive the Tundra winter. They tasted like air and dirt, but they were enough to sustain him. He himself was only a ghost of a stallion anyway. He was lean, muscles roping over his slender frame, the only real bulk coming from the feathery angel wings that he kept pulled in tight on his sides. He had discovered it was harder to note the difference in size, the uselessness, in that position.
Not that he was particularly vain.
It was just...easier to keep conversation shallow and light when he did not have to worry about questions about the disfigurement. (Can you still fly? What happened? Are you injured?) Tobiah disliked the conversations even more when the questions were swallowed; he could see them dancing unspoken in their eyes, the strained focus on his face. It exhausted him to pretend to not notice their pretending; it exhausted him to stay polite. Recently, the desire to give into his frustration had ballooned under the surface.
It made him all the more likely to skirt around life whenever he saw it.
Thankfully, his wings were disfigured and not his other (in his opinion, more useful) traits.
Invisibility had become a crutch for him. When he was younger, he had only been able to hold onto it for minutes at a time, but as he had grown older, it had become a muscle that he had flexed and built. Now, he could remain unseen for days at a time before it slipped from his grasp. It afforded him an anonymity that he found invaluable—and it was likely the only reason he had been able to live as a vagabond and stranger in the kingdom for so long. Unfortunately, today, he was not so lucky.
As he walked, nose drifting through the piles of snow, he did not see her. In fact, he did not see her until his shoulder had bumped into her. Startled, he snorted and leapt backward, dropping the invisibility before he realized what he was doing. He was dismayed to see the delicate wildflower in front of him; after all, it was most likely only the second female he had never come across. His expression fell to one of stone for a second, his light gray eyes becoming sleet as he took her in. Finally, after too many seconds had passed, he finally managed two words: “I apologize.” His voice was gravel and rust in his throat. He shook his head. “I didn’t see you there.” He attempted a smile, but even he knew it probably looked more like a grimace.
Australis did not serve the kingdom either. Even before the magic had been withdrawn from the land, before the cave was returned to nothing more than ruined stone, Australis had not participated in the initiation. It was true that for most of her life the kingdom was only servable by the male population, but there had been a window, an impossibly small window, but a window in which she could have pledged herself to this fortress of snow and ice. But she hadn’t, and she was quite certain she wouldn’t unless her father asked her to. This place, this kingdom, it was home. It was her ice and her snow, her mountains and her aching blue skies. It was her safe place, and her family’s safe place, but the people weren’t hers and she cared little for politics and war. It was home, and it was good, but she was as much a stranger to the people as he was. It was not them she loved, not like her father did. It was the land. It was the birds and the foxes and the storms that crept up over the horizon to bury them in new snow. It was the impossible openness and sleeping so close to those strange silver stars. So yes, she was a stranger, but not to the important things. The sound up ahead grows closer, the shuffle of feet and the quiet snuffle of cold breaths, but still she can see nothing but the open air and swirling snowflakes. Her dark eyes narrow beneath the furrow of her brow and then drop in quiet uncertainty, and only then does she notice the imprint of hooves in the snow. They aren’t hers from earlier because the wind would have wiped those away hours ago, and only after watching for a few more seconds does she realize that there are more, appearing closer and closer with every stuttering beat of her heart. She should be frightened probably, concerned by what she cannot see, but nothing has ever harmed her, especially nothing here, not in her mountains. So she remains stopped, cocking a hind leg to settle in and watch as those hoof-prints appeared closer and closer until they were right in front of her and she could see the snowflakes bending around a sinewy shape. A second later she felt him collide with her shoulder and watched with a growing smile as the invisibility fell away to reveal a spotted palomino stallion she was certain she had never met before. She doesn’t even notice the stony way he watches her because she is too busy trying to place him, to place the scent of the tundra on his skin, of snow and ice and cold dirt. But when she looks to his face there is a frown pulling at her mouth, darkening the corners of her eyes because she is sure she has never seen him before. But he speaks and the shadows fade from her face in the wake of a smile that unfolds easily at her mouth. I apologize. He says and she cannot help but cock her head at him and wonder at the stiffness of the words, wonder if although he apologizes, he is not sorry. “You don’t need to,” she says instead, swallowing her curiosity beneath an amused smile that somehow doesn’t turn into a laugh, “I don’t mind running into strangers.” But then he speaks again and that smile, completely unaffected by the way he grimaced at her, reached up to soften the corners of her dark eyes. “That’s a coincidence, because I couldn’t see you either.” She laughs, finally, a bell-like sound and then reaches across for a second to touch her nose against his. “I’m Australis.” When she pulls back it is to look at him again, her dark face soft and bright beneath the watery yellow light of a sleepy sun. “Do you live here?”
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die and where you invest your love, you invest your life
He is a stranger, but something tells him he is the first she has ever met.
There is something about her that tells him she hardly ever knew a stranger; there was something so open and inviting about her. Something so alien in the way that she smiled at him, visibly relaxed while he stood there with muscles tense and his mouth pulled taut. He had never been as calm, as open, as gentle as she was now. She was a spot of sunshine in the snow, dark and warm and completely foreign.
He had no precedence by which to judge her or determine his next course of action. He guffawed at her comment a little, the sound rusty and unused, unsticking from his throat and peeling from his tongue. “The drawback of invisibility, I suppose.” One corner of his mouth life valiantly into a smile again, but it was crooked and all wrong, so he quickly wiped it from his expression—face going stony once more.
“Australis,” he repeats the name, thinking on it for a moment. It was an odd name (although he had not met many other souls and truly did not have much to compare it against), but he decided that he liked it. It was strong and interesting and tasted like spices and adventure and things that he could not name.
“My name is Tobiah,” he offers, out of absentminded politeness more than anything. The goodness of God—or at least that is what his mother had told him his name had meant. Secretly, he thought that it must have been some kind of running joke; surely his existence was no sign of a benevolent being.
Bringing his slate gaze back to her, he watching unblinking for several moments before he shrugged and then pointed his Roman nose toward the border. “Ah, no.” He shifted uncomfortably, unsure if whether he was going to be reprimanded for walking into a kingdom he had no claim toward. “I thought about it when I was younger,” he thinks about offering more about his decision but draws it back. “But I live on the outskirts over there.” He straightens up a little before looking back to her. “What about you?”
Her entire life had been constellations of unfamiliar faces, strangers - though she had found none of them to be all that strange. The Tundra was a busy kingdom, and even though it sat cold and uninviting, surrounded by a nearly impenetrable wall of gleaming ice, there had never been a shortage of newcomers. In such, she had also never learned fear. There were few, if any, who would be eager to incur the fury of her father by stepping inside his borders with anything less than good intentions. So when the young stallion does blink into existence like a star flickering out of the night, fear and discomfort are the furthest things from her mind. They are things that have yet to be carved into the soft of her heart.
He laughs at her quip and the sound is full of rust as though perhaps it startled him, too. But this only deepens the smile on her own lips, only deepens the gleam in her dark, wild eyes. He is so different from the others, and there had been so many others, all vowing and vying and eager to serve their new King. But this one, Tobiah, he was refreshingly new.
Her head tips a little to the side, her chin jutting out curiously in his direction. “A drawback?” And there is another smile against her mouth, a dare in her eyes. “I think going unseen is the very point of being invisible.” There is a moment then, when that smile fades a little and her eyes widen slightly, a moment where she wonders if Tobiah, like Isle, still struggled to control his abilities. She stays quiet a beat longer than she might’ve otherwise, eyeing him as casually as she knew how before pushing the conversation on and past just in case.
She turns to look in the direction her points, her brow furrowing once her dark eyes landed on the lonely distance. But the reprimand he is wary to receive does not come, it will never come. Australis is many things, but she is not a diplomat, not a warrior, and the politics of not allowing a stranger inside the border - especially one who makes her laugh - are of no interest to her. Instead, when she turns back to face him with a brow still furrowed beneath thick tangles of black mane, she ambushes him will a different question. “Do you live alone, then?” And for once her smile is tinged with something darker, etched just a little more heavily with shadow against her quiet face.
“Oh, me?” She says when he reciprocates the question, realizing quickly that a self proclaimed outsider would not be likely to recognize one of the Tundra princesses. But instead of sharing this with him, she finds another smile, this one effortless and easy when it curls around her mouth, and says cryptically, “Yeah, I live around here. Mostly you can find me in the caves beneath the mountain. Kingdom affairs aren't really my forte.”
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die and where you invest your love, you invest your life
Do you live alone, then?
The question rips a laugh from his throat, one that is dark and husky and harsh—the sound like a bullet in the cold Tundra air. The ferocity of it almost surprises him and then embarrasses him, as if he had shown too much, said too much, explained too much. He was deeply personal by nature, something that was only aggravated by the vulnerability of his gifts. It wasn’t in the cards for him to get overly close with anyone.
As soon as the sound of his laugh died on his lips, he went quiet, expression wiping clean as he looked at the ground, focusing hard on the wisps of dying grass as they swayed around his hooves. There were things that he did not mean to share, did not mean to reveal. He wouldn’t have even chosen to start this conversation if it had been up to him, but since he was here, he knew that there was not much he could do. So he swallowed hard and then glanced up, holding her gaze for a second before looking elsewhere.
That level of intimacy was just a little too much for him to handle.
“I do,” he finally replied, pale eyes looking toward the border and wishing that he was still there. “It’s not so bad.” It was lonely, is what he meant to say, but he had long since told himself that loneliness was just something that he would have to learn to live with. Loneliness was his life and there was no way for him to get around that. “It’s quiet over there. A lot of time to be with your thoughts.” He meant it as a good thing, but after he voiced it, he wondered why it sounded so damn sad hanging in the air between them.
Shaking his head, he sent the tangled tendrils of his mane flying, the mess of it falling down both sides of his thick neck. “What are the caves like?” he asked before he could stop himself, genuine curiosity showing in his eyes before they shuttered close. “I have heard that one such cave was used as part of the initiation into the brotherhood.” He had considered it once: walking through, earning his scars, serving beneath his father. It had been a dream that he had ultimately given up, but one he liked to hold onto for some reason. Perhaps one day, he would. Or, perhaps, he would spend the rest of his days hiding.
He laughs and the sound is so unexpectedly harsh that her face darkens a little with uncertainty. She hadn’t been expecting that from him, the dark that blossomed like a bruise against his lips, and when he goes silent thereafter she wonders if maybe he hadn’t expected it either. Her dark brow furrows a little, the whorl of white on her forehead disappearing beneath thick tangles of black forelock tipped with frozen, rusty ends. She wants to ask him why he laughed like that, without any humor gleaming in his face, but when his gaze drops determinedly down she finds the question whisked from her lips.
Instead she chooses to share the silence with him, quiet for as long as he is, though instead of watching him she lets her eyes drift to the points of purple and blue mountains in the distance, noticing the way they broke up the view like violent bruises. She doesn’t mind this quiet, the way silence stretches between them as smooth and untouched as the surface of lonely lake. It is a busy kingdom, but she does not live at its heart. He has always preferred the echo of empty caves and the impossible heights of the mountains set like a crown beneath the stars. She thinks it is because she was born outside these walls, because she has known more than just this kingdom of the north.
From her periphery she sees him shift, and she turns her gaze back on him at the same moment his pale eyes find hers. There is none of the dark from earlier, none of the harshness, so she smiles at him in a quiet way - the subtle upturning of lips and the softening of a furrowed brow. But he looked away again almost immediately, and she followed his gaze with a frown and her head cocked slightly to one side.
“Do you ever worry you’ll get too comfortable with being alone?” She asks quietly after a moment, turning to peer out across the way to the border since it seemed like her eyes had a way of burning his face when she watched him. And then, “quiet is good.” She wonders if he’ll laugh again, this time at her, because it should be obvious that being quiet is not one of her strengths. Instead she cocks a hind leg to settle in beside him, content to stay until the muscles strung so tight beneath his skin finally snap and carry him away again. “What things do you think about, Tobiah?” He must think about everything, he must be made from the constellations of thought with so much quiet to drown in.
But then he speaks again and she is encouraged by the flash of what looks like curiosity gleaming in the curve of his pale gold face. It doesn’t even bother her as much this time when he closes his eyes again to shut her out – it’s getting harder and harder to believe he means it, that it isn’t just a reflex from so much time on his own. “It was.” She says, though now it’s her turn to lapse into a somber silence that stretches on a few more seconds than is comfortable. “I never faced it though, I didn’t want to serve the kingdom like the rest of my family.” She pauses, chewing her lip in a thoughtful way. “And now the magic is gone, the scars are gone. It’s so strange.”
She sighs and turns to him again, her face soft and curious- though void of the easy smile that seemed to be etched permanently into the brown and white of her whiskered mouth. “My caves,” and this time the smile does flicker against her lips when she emphasizes the word my, "are where I go when I need quiet.” She steps closer, closing the distance between them to rest her nose against the pale gold and white of a neck knotted with mane. “But I don’t live in them.” She says this last bit gently, pointedly, because she doesn’t believe it’s good for him to be so used to being alone. They are not meant to be creatures of solitude.
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
08-28-2016, 02:33 AM (This post was last modified: 08-28-2016, 03:34 AM by tobiah.)
my memories are full of only black and blue; I should’ve cut my losses long before I knew you. ————————————————————
At first, the quiet had bothered him. It had been a gentle bothering, soft and beneath the surface of the skin. It had been a weight between his shoulder blades when he had been a young colt, all long limbs and awkward angles. He had spent hours skirting around the kingdom, the pale gold of him moving between the snow drifts, wings folding up and insulating him from the cold. He had been hungry for the sight of others—watching them from afar and then watching them from closer when he was feeling brave. He had listened to the meetings that his father had called, watching the way that he had commanded the kingdom.
Dreaming of a day when he would peel himself from solitude and join the ranks.
(He had liked to imagine his father smiling down, proud, when he did.)
But that day had never come. Instead, Tobiah yielded to the pull of the quiet. He had submerged himself into the still waters of it. The bothering had subsided then, the violent tide pulling inward into a simmer and then silence—the waters of his life deep and undisturbed by ripples. Then, the quiet had become a solace, a comfort, and, eventually, an armor. He had stopped flickering his ears toward the sound of horses nearby, stopped straining for the sounds of conversation. He had instead withdrawn, gravitating further into the barren wilderness, spending his days near and even beyond the wall surrounding the kingdom.
He did not shadow his father’s reign or listen in on the meetings. He had not even known when his father had stepped down from the throne and when the new king, her father, had ascended. He had stopped caring. It seemed simpler that way—safer. There was no danger when you did not hand anyone the blade.
He grew puzzled at her question and he pressed his lips together in thought, dropping his Roman nose to the ground to give himself a second to contemplate it. For several more seconds, longer than was necessary, silence reigned between them, and he wondered if he never spoke again, if she would simply dissolve into the background—leaving him once more to the quiet nothingness of his existence. Some part of him knew she wouldn’t though; she was the type to be a burr, clinging stubbornly.
(He wondered why he did not mind it.)
“I can’t say that I have ever worried about it,” he finally offered, shrugging. “I think being alone is good.” At her next question, his lips pulled into a smile, but the warmth of it did not quite reach his eyes. This was a weapon, he knew, and he did not trust it—but at least he could guard himself against it. “My thoughts are not particularly interesting.” Or, if they were, they were not something he wanted to share.
“The magic has gone?” he asked, again before he could stop himself, his expression stripped bare for a moment with surprise. “What happened?” He had heard rumblings of war but largely dismissed it; his life was to be too long, too expansive for him to overly care for the day-to-day politics of the land. But for the magic to have drained away? That was something to pique his interest. He took an unbidden step forward, unknowingly closing the distance between them as his ears perked in the tangled thicket of his forelock.
“What do you think about when you are alone in your caves, Australis?” his voice softer than it had been, gentle with curiosity as he wondered about the thoughts that tangled in her mind when she was by herself. Were they dreams that made her eyes go warm and large? Were they adventures that made her pulse quicken in her throat? Two thoughts struck him. First, that he truly wanted to know, and, second, that they were rather close, the sweetness of her breath steaming the air. In response, he took a step back, pale eyes moving from her face to the ground as he fought the urge to give in to his invisibility and hide once more.
It is true, there were stretches of time where she left the northern kingdom to explore the meadow and its forests, to visit the vast expanse of family that lived in and around the Chamber. There were strings of days sewn together where she left the snow and didn’t return until its stink of ice and cold and wintery solitude had faded from the brown and white of her bright, dappled skin. She lived as she began, with a soul that craved everything instead of just one thing, with a yearning for both old and new, change and same. But she always came back to the place that was home, the place father ruled and mother raised their children in, the place most of her siblings still remained. Maybe , though, maybe she stayed because she did not know how to leave, because she was not made for such things.
He answers her after a long silence, a silence during which she had watched his face and loved the way it transformed while he considered her strange question. “I think I would worry,” she tells him thoughtfully, curiously, even though he hadn’t asked, “I think I would worry that it would change me, eventually.” Then it is her turn to fall into a heavy silence, pensive, while she wonders why change seems like a bad thing. But he answers her next question and she is pulled instantly from the stewing of her own quiet uncertainties. “I don’t believe that for a second.” She responds in turn, flashing him a half-smile that brightens the dark brown of such wild eyes, though she doesn’t push him for more when he falls silent again. It isn’t secrets she is looking for, and if that is all he has to share then the silence is enough.
His surprise disarms her, the earnestness that etches itself across the curve of his gold face before he has a chance to apply years worth of invisibility in a far less literal way. “You must not have been inside the walls when the warning came.” She muses as she watches him – and it doesn’t slip her attention when he drifts closer still, close enough to touch. “Beqanna took back the kingdom magic, to remind us that everything we have, we have because she has allowed it to be so.” She pauses for a heartbeat and her breath hums in her chest, but she doesn’t look up at him. Instead she looks out across the kingdom and her brow furrows so deeply that her eyes narrow to uncertain slits for just an instant. “She thinks we’re greedy with our wars and raids. She even took the Desert back, buried the whole kingdom beneath the ocean.”
When her head lifts and her face swivels back to catch his gaze, she is startled by how close they stand now. “What do I think about?” She repeats for a second, thoughtful, sharing none of the elusiveness he had shown earlier. “I think about how useful it would be if I had an affinity for light manipulation, or maybe if I glowed like the bugs that fill summer nights. I’d love to know how deep the caves are, but it’s darker than night inside.” Her head tilts a little when she smiles at him, holding his quiet gaze a few more seconds than was necessary. Then her face darkens a little, solemn, and her eyes drift over the edge of the mountain to trace the shapes drawn into the snow by the wind. “I also think about fitting in, whether I’ll find my place or not.” She hesitates and her dark eyes jump furtively to his to see if he’s watching her or if his eyes are on the world around them. “I think it would be nice to belong somewhere.” She isn’t sure he’ll understand.
He steps away from her and without thinking, without anything more than the gentle furrowing of a dark and white brow, the subtle pull of lip corners into a wistful half smile, she reaches out to bury her nose against his neck. His mane is thick and it coils around her whiskers, tickling her nose with the familiar scent of ice and cold, and something she does not recognize from those places beyond the wall. She has it memorized in an instant. “You have invisibility,” she explains then, in a voice that sounds like a frown despite the warmth that builds for him in the bottoms of those wild eyes, “and you act like being here is the worst thing in the world.” She pulls her nose from his neck, touching her lips once to the curve of his jaw before leaning back again. “I need a way to recognize you even when you try to hide from me, even after you leave me here at the top of this mountain.” She smiles again, a fragile quirking of uncertain lips, and then reaches out to nose his mane, lipping at a few of the closer strands of spun-gold. “Do you think it’s possible for us to be alone together sometimes, Tobiah?”
initiate the heart within me until it opens properly
