[private] dear wilderness, be at your best; svedka - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: Explore (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: The Common Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=72) +---- Forum: Forest (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=73) +---- Thread: [private] dear wilderness, be at your best; svedka (/showthread.php?tid=30227) |
dear wilderness, be at your best; svedka - aureline - 09-08-2021 Home had stopped feeling like home a long time ago, but with the appearance of the strange, brindle stallion who had taken over Tephra, she found that there was nothing that kept her heart tethered there anymore. She was certain her family would move on, certain because of the rumors, because of the whispers of nightmares haunting sleepless nights, certain because of the slow exodus that had already begun. Individuals and families alike seemed to be moving on to elsewhere - and though there were some who seemed resigned to stay, she could not help but wonder how long that would last. She is no stranger to sleepless nights, to dreams shaped by fear and horror, memories kept alive for far too long and twisted into something more gruesome than they ever were at their origin. She knows the cracks they make, the invisible fissures that stretch across her spirit like the veins on a birch leaf, many and forever and intricate. One nightmare is exhaustion, two is a quiet kind of dread. But a month of them, a year? She knows how that can change someone, how fear is so good at carving away these little pieces until, before you’ve had a chance to notice the erosion, you are someone else entirely. She is eroding. She is not herself. When she finally unfurls her wings and takes to the skies, there is only some strange kind of dissonance inside her chest. It lives beside her heart, inside her heart - or maybe it is all that is left of that timid beating thing inside her ribs. There is only one figure she looks for down on the shores below her, but when she does not spy the familiar gold and white basking in the humid warmth, she leaves the volcanic land without even a quiet goodbye. There is a place in the forest that isn’t quite theirs, a tiny meadow made by a few trees that had fallen after a long summer of storms, and she knows that her best chance of finding him is in that quiet spot of sunshine where everything is lazy and quiet and perfectly right. She lands carefully among the grass and flowers, pausing for a moment just to absorb the peacefulness of this halfway place. Not a home but certainly an escape. Home, or the closest thing to it, is the man who stands in a pool of sunshine while wildflowers sway against his legs. “Aha.” She says, and at once she can feel this darkness inside her soul retreating from the light of him. There is a smile on her lips now, something soft and warm and full of easy mischief as she crosses this little patch of open grass to join him. “Right where I left you.” As she reaches him, her lips find the curve of his jaw in a gentle kind of kiss, just a whisper of intimacy as she draws back to face him. “Hello Svedka.” But she needs more of his warmth, more of his light, needs him to help her chase away this seeping cold inside her chest. So she steps close again, touches his jaw and his neck, traces the curve of his shoulder with the soft of lips warmed by the sun beneath her skin. “Can you stay awhile?” aureline dear wilderness, be at your best RE: dear wilderness, be at your best; svedka - Svedka - 09-19-2021 let my shadows prove the sunshine Svedka never has been one to be tethered to anything; he has ventured into realms beyond, both physically and mentally, uprooted almost constantly (whether it be his own doing or some dark force tearing him away) and never truly finding a place that could settle the aching wandering of his soul. Despite this, the milk-and-honey stallion always found himself drifting back to Tephra, back to the lava flows that run intricicately through the inland stretch of grass, back to the cool shadow of the volcano and the black sand beach that carves itself like a charred serpent against rough, dark waters of the ocean. svedka @aureline RE: dear wilderness, be at your best; svedka - aureline - 09-26-2021 It is an unceasing wonder that even the warmth of this man with eyes the color of every summer sky and a smile bright enough to rival the light of the sun cannot reach to thaw the ice that lives inside her chest. She thinks there might be more of it every day, that there are new layers inside her like rings of growth within the trunk of a tree. He is the closest thing to solace that she has yet discovered, and though it eases something inside her to be near him, the secrets she keeps hold them apart. She knows she should let him in entirely, let him know these broken parts of her heart, the ragged weariness of her soul, she even knows he would accept it all. That he would care for her no differently than he does now. But admitting it to him feels like it would be setting those truths in stone, making them permanent in a way she still pretends they are not. So she lives behind a mask of light and sunshine, lies past smiles that don’t reach all the way to those beautiful molten eyes. It is easy to do so when almost everyone would like to pretend that the dark didn’t happen, as though if they do not acknowledge it then it will never exist, never find them again. She thinks he is different, that he does not build a life around pretending, but she is not sure. “I’m here, aren’t I?” She asks in a way that is so delicately evasive, smiling at him with a practiced kind of levity that bleeds out of the fractures of brokenness inside her eyes. “It seems as though almost everyone has gone already. All the families that have been there since the beginning, raised there as children and then raised their own children there.” There is a furrow in her brow when she pauses, her eyes wandering from his face to track the path of her shadowed thoughts as they draw a frown to her dark mouth. “I thought I would raise my own children there someday.” She admits, blinking once and returning her gaze to him. “But I suppose so much of that will not be true.” She turns from him to hide the way pain etches itself like fractures of dark throughout the delicate glow of her golden face, pretending instead to stretch and sigh and reach out to brush her lips over the velvet soft petals of the flowers beside them. Aureline is so unlike her mother, so unsuited for a family. But she only knows who Isle has come to be and not the wary, wildling creature her mother had been at this age. Neither does she understand the ways in which Isle had been broken, both her trust and her heart, before she became this culmination of love and kindness that Aureline is so familiar with. “Where will you go now?” She wonders aloud, abandoning the flowers to look back up into Svedka’s snow-pale face. “I doubt Tephra will be safe for a long while. And even once it is, I imagine it will no longer feel like home to many of us.” She does not mention how the humid volcanic forests had stopped feeling safe a long time ago. That when she smells the smolder and the sulphur, the volcanic ash, she is reminded of the way her father had been reduced daily by the same dark that had wrapped strangling fists around her throat. Tephra has not felt safe for a very long time, and Gale had nothing to do with it. If anything, he was the perfect mask for her to hide behind, the perfect reason to leave and not be questioned. aureline dear wilderness, be at your best @Svedka |