05-13-2021, 11:37 PM
She was already awake by the time the sun rose, those burning plasma-ringed eyes lifted intently to a light that climbed shyly to the edge of the horizon, hovering there quietly for long moments until it finally tipped over into the bottom crease of a slowly waking sky. She stayed long enough to watch the stars fully disappear, to watch pink and gold spill into a sky that would later be cloudless and cornflower blue. She stayed until her heart stopped racing, until that quiet fear she spoke of to absolutely no one faded like the midnight sky inside her chest.
It felt like she would never be able to sleep again, not for long and not without nightmares. Dreams of a world filled once more with monsters, with screams instead of birdsong, and the wet tang of blood clinging to everything like a dark promise. She dreamed of a sun that never came back, of her father dying without it and her mother mourning him. She dreamed she died too, that she never got to meet her sibling growing inside the swell of mothers belly. She dreamed until those things woke her, and then the nightmare of being beneath a black sky was real again.
She never fell asleep after dreams like that. It was easier to stay awake and wait for that promised light to fill the crease in the skyline.
Easier still to avoid sleep entirely.
It’s why she is still in the forest when dusk claims the sky in streaks of red and muddied blue instead of finding her way back home to be with her family. Likely Magnus and Isle would enjoy the time alone together anyway now that the oppressive dark had ended.
She follows a trail of hoofprints in the snow, having been drawn to it by the way they were different from the other churned up tracks that seemed more like paths hollowed out of the white. These prints were solitary and untouched, and for whatever she chose to walk beside them to keep from ruining them with her own. Perhaps someone would stumble across these later and think it had been a pair of friends who left this mark behind. The thought made a faint smile curl at the corners of her dark, delicate mouth.
But then a familiar scent hits her - the sulphurous aroma of home that clings just as stubbornly to her own hair and feathers. She pauses, her wings lifting at her shoulders to let the long dark feathers resettle into place. It takes only a moment to find him - he is a spot of cold gold in a swirl of winter white, the tell of a shiver racing down the length of his spine. She watches him in the time it takes for her heart to beat eight times, and then she is slipping forward as graceful as her panther even in this equid form.
“You smell like home, yet I do not recognize you.” She says by way of greeting, drawing up alongside the man who is like her and yet somehow different. Where her buckskin is a shade of gold that seems warm like sunshine, his is a shade so bright it reminds her of cold ore. Her sister is that color too. She studies him for a moment, and her glowing sun-eyes alight with the swirls of red and gold plasma burning within the rings of her irises. Despite the strange intensity though, her expression is warm and kind and there is a kind of easiness that pools like sunshine in the hollows of her delicate face.
Her eyes drift from his face to notice the sleekness of his coat, so thin it shines like molten ore far more suited for the humidity and sunshine of Tephra. “Are you cold?” She asks him, and her glowing eyes dance as she eases closer to let him have a taste of the unnatural heat radiating from the glow of her radiant body. “You can tell me no but I most certainly won’t believe you.” She tips her head at him, so slight but it spills the dark tangles of her forelock across the white sun marking on her brow. “I’m Aureline. Care for some company?” It happens so fast, the flicker of some quiet pain that ripples through her eyes, a grimace that threatens the curve of her beautiful grin. But then it’s gone and with it any indication of why she is looking for company in the growing dark instead of finding her way home.
aureline
dear wilderness, be at your best
her armor is thin as the fabric of her dress
@[Svedka]