[open] sometimes tension brings us closer - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: OOC (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=24) +--- Forum: Archive (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=81) +---- Forum: Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=98) +----- Forum: Brilliant Pampas (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=103) +----- Thread: [open] sometimes tension brings us closer (/showthread.php?tid=30964) |
sometimes tension brings us closer - Viszla - 07-30-2022 Myrna has not told anyone about the quest. When she’d woken up, confused and disoriented on the Mountainside, the world around her had been in chaos. The palomino doesn’t know how long the storm had lasted, but she had found her mother and sisters amidst the driving rain, and felt immense relief at the sight of them. She’s not strayed far from them since, but in a world so strange and new as the Brilliant Pampas, there is much to do even within earshot of her family. Today she picks her way along the riverbank, every now and then stepping into the water. Her steps are quick when she must do so, for the water is cold. The sun has not yet risen to warm the shallows that she splashes through, and the heat of yesterday had been lost during the star-speckled night. Myrna had been awake most of the night, watching those stars. She has not slept much since the storm. Her left hind foot lands on something sharp in the water. Myrna sucks in a quick breath and looks down. A shake and once over confirms it'll only be a bruise, leaving her free to inspect the water to see what it was she’d come up against, avoiding placing weight on her injured foot. She lowers her head, and the faint glow that emanates from her white horns casts a weak light into the shallow water. There - the pointed tine of an elkear antler, broken and mostly buried beneath the mud of the river bank. Myrna reaches toward it, grasping it between the sharp teeth of the canine form she wears. She’ll take it to the den with the fox kits she’d discovered the other day, Myrna thinks, and watch them wrestle with it. For now she tosses it farther up the bank, then takes a better look at her surroundings so as to remember where she stands. In the darkness of predawn, most of the world is in shadow. Most of it is sleeping as well, but was that movement? The pale golden wolf becomes still, and a moment later becomes a flaxen palomino mare instead, her grey-blue eyes narrowed as she searches the darkness for what she might have seen. RE: sometimes tension brings us closer - Areane - 08-04-2022
Areane hasn’t slept much of late. @ Viszla RE: sometimes tension brings us closer - Viszla - 08-09-2022 She peers out into the darkness of predawn, but sees only the black and almost-black shadows that make up the riverbank and hills beyond. Her twisting ears do not catch the sound of footsteps, and eventually she continues up the river. Myrna is able to keep from thinking of anything terrible for several hours, long enough to feel the air around her begin to warm and the air fill with the sound of birds woken by the sunrise. Just past the grove of fruit trees she’d found shortly after their arrival in the Pampas, the palomino sees someone coming near. At first she thinks it Malik, but as they draw nearer she sees that the dark hue of their coats is all this mare and Myrna’s brother had in common. There is something about her that is familiar, but she has met so few others outside her mountain home. Perhaps she is a relative of someone Myrna knows, and since she is not interested in knowing anyone else, she is prepared to simply offer a smile and carry on. Except the mare, whose dark hide reminds Myrna a little of blue-black butterflies, is staring at her rather intently. MYrna looks up just as the stranger mentions the storm. Her first instinct is to deny it. To ignore it, to pretend it hadn’t happened at all, to keep thinking of anything else but the fact that she’d helped to destroy her home. But the stranger…No, not a stranger Myrna realizes as she looks closer. That one knows how to fly, Myrna remembers thinking; the feathered wings that carried Areane through the howling winds had not been a gift gained only a few moments earlier. “I’m Myrna.” She says, because she has to say something into the too long silence that has now stretched between them. “From Hyaline. Well, I was. I guess from here now.” She has a tendency for the verbose and knows it, so the way that she and the way she draws her lips more tightly closed, drawn in a thin line, has a deliberate air. @Areane RE: sometimes tension brings us closer - Areane - 08-14-2022
Areane has never been good at smiling and carrying on. She has always either avoided the direct gaze of another, or if she was feeling particularly bold that day, the slender pegasus would peer back, wondering if anyone was going to say anything at all. Sometimes they passed her by with nothing more than a nod, sometimes they might call a greeting, and sometimes it was Areane who broached the silence, wondering why she allowed such moments to build into knots within her slim frame. @ Viszla RE: sometimes tension brings us closer - Viszla - 08-21-2022 The ability to become next-to-nothing in an instant makes avoiding strangers a simple task. Myrna might have become a moth rather than a mare, or even a pale smooth pebble at the bottom of the river. Keeping to the company of those she knows is safest. There is no telling what secrets a stranger might be hiding, even one that seems alright. Myrna knows better than most not to trust someone’s outer appearance as indicative of their strength. And yet, Areane looks just like Myrna feels inside, and surely that means something? Wavering between speaking and vanishing, the decision is momentarily stayed by Areane’s question about the Pampas. Myrna’s pale eyes turn out to the rolling hills. The south had sunk before her memories begin, and at first, its return had not been something she considered too deeply. It was here, and that was what mattered. It was somewhere that was not sunk beneath the sea, and was not the strange Baltian sea or the floating Stratosian clouds. The strangers, from their strange worlds, she has avoided most of all. Perhaps if she hadn’t, she might have a better answer for Areane. “I dunno.” Having introduced herself, Myrna no longer feels capable of disappearing, but she dislikes the long silence that stretches after the announcement of her ignorance. “This happened before, right? Well, stuff like this?” It feels better to be talking, she finds, because then she’s not thinking. “It’s gotta be magic, yeah? That’s why everything is. Except even the magicians don’t seem to know what happened either. Maybe it’s…” She trails off, realizing that she’s simply been thinking aloud, and that her thinking has led her right back where she hadn’t wanted to be. “Maybe it’s something that happened during the storm. Did…did we do it?” @Areane RE: sometimes tension brings us closer - Areane - 08-28-2022
Areane’s mind reels as they stand there, a thousand thoughts that just keep spinning out of control, as if she was caught in the Mountain storm all over again. @ Viszla RE: sometimes tension brings us closer - Viszla - 09-17-2022 She watches the lightning dance across Areane’s blue-black hide. It looks different than it does on her own pale body, reflected by the starry mare’s glittering coat, and Myrna wonders if Areane had sparked like this before the Storm. Myrna hadn’t. The comforting glowing light her body had once emitted had been transformed by the power inside the tornado, and the Shadows of her nightmares manifest beside her, warped into existence by the same dark powers that had stolen away Craft and Anatomy’s gift to her. Areane speaks of stories, and Myrna thinks they are probably the same ones her mother had told her. Stories of magic and power, and of the Endless Night that had covered the world before Myrna had been born. The thought of it happening again hadn’t occurred to her, and Myrna’s brow furrows as she turns her blue-grey eyes back to Areane’s. The other mare is as lost as Myrna is, it seems. The frown becomes a rueful smile, and a shrug of her pale shoulders. “What would answers even look like?” The hopelessness seeps into her voice despite efforts otherwise, but she does manage to keep it from her face. “I thought about seeing if the Baltians knew anything, but they say there’s bad magic in the new lands.” Magic that warps what is known, that changes the mind and body. Myrna has had more than enough changes of late, and is not eager for more. @Areane |