"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
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
Doubting herself had been a favorite pastime of hers, ever since Blue had left. Eyas doubted at first her own abilities, then the validity of that power and finally, her own spirit. What good were her gifts if they couldn’t show her the one horses she wanted to see? And later, after meeting Set by the River and using his magic to view her own soul, Eyas wondered heavily if she was predestined for a life filled with the dark arts. That maybe @[Gale]’s death and everything that came after it was just a product of some latent evil inside of her, playing catch-up.
It only takes Blue’s touch to wipe away those fears. He wraps his neck over hers and the years of personal torment wash clean away, reminding Eyas of her inherent goodness and simultaneously the limitless value of their shared, natural-born powers. The pressure of his embrace squeezes hot tears into the corners of her eyes, and Eyas soaks in the quiet moments happily. She feels immeasurably blessed. Without thinking, her lips skimmed over his neck and up to tug possessively at his mane. Their father’s mane. It was an old habit resurfacing; for years now Eyas has shied away from physical contact but she remembers nearly always being close enough to touch (or be touched by) her favorite triplet.
She can’t possibly read his mind, but Eyas thinks she can sense the unspoken question - along with a very brief sort of hesitation - behind Blue’s touch when he comes across her ‘body art’. He surprises her by not asking outright… she would tell him anything, now. But she was too happy to care much. His existence was proof they had a literal eternity to catch up. “I can’t predict the future,” She indulges with a smile, leaving his mane alone at present, “but more than likely yes.”
“I’m sure it’ll be because of them.” She elaborates with a pleasant sigh. It would be easier to relay the past few years through sight-memory directly to him instead of trying to explain a convoluted mess, but Eyas thought a large dose might be off-putting. “Things are complicated in our family right now Blue.” Eyas did her best to summarize.
“When I go,” She turned the tables quick enough, picking up where she left off with his mane except this time, Eyas busied herself preening the feathers at the crook of Blue’s wing, “would you want to go with me? To see mom again, and dad too?”
His own eyes are bright with emotion, though the tears he sheds are lost in the thick bristles of his sister’s mane when pulls back. The scratch of it beneath his chin is a sensation he didn’t realize he’d forgotten, and he repeats it just for the sensation alone, which elicits an unconscious smile. This is something else the two of them share. This, and the way she beats him to the first tug, taking advantage of his distraction. Gale snorts sharply, but he is still grinning even as he reaches for her dark hair in response, stopping his attempt only when she begins to speak.
She can’t predict the future, Eyas says, but the answer that she gives is firm enough. Gale nods, because that is a good answer, though his dark head tilts inquisitively as she continues.
He has imagined that his family has remained exactly how they are in his dreams. They are together. They are in the red land. There have been some visions - recent visions – that contradict this belief, but they have never been enough to shake his faith. Surely the image of Mom in a redwood forest, Dad in a desert, and Wingless Brother in the common lands had just been one-offs. Surely they hadn’t left the first home that Gale remembers? Or maybe they have, he thinks, as Eyas tells him that things are complicated.
“Complicated?” he repeats as Eyas begins to smooth the white feathers at the base of his wing. Why does everything have to be complicated? For years he has held on to the wan hope that once he knows where his family is that everything else will settle into place again. There will be a Gale shaped hole, and he will fill it, and everything will go on as it always had. He realizes, though, as his sibling grooms him, that he is not the same Gale that he had been when he had left them. How could he expect them to not have changed when he most certainly has?
“Yes!” he answers, enthusiasm at the idea melding with a shiver as she tugs at one wayward feather. “Yes, I do. I want to see them.” And then, more hesitantly: “They’ll want to see me too, right? I didn’t…I didn’t mean to leave.”
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
complicated, she nodded silently into his shoulder. The best word to summarize what disaster their family made ensuing the trauma of their parents losing a child. She and Pteron had been complicit in the chaos, if not active in it. Tiercel (gods, she’d hated him as a baby but how clearly things looked from his perspective now!) had left and retained the honor of a nameless wanderer. Good for him. Marni too, it would seem. Their younger siblings were growing up like strangers to them, even if Eyas knew them inside and out - literally. So yea, things were a bit complicated.
But maybe… maybe not for much longer.
Maybe not with him here, now. He might not be the Gale she left behind in a grave but Blue is still her brother. He has the power to heal old wounds and possibly even help avoid new ones, if that’s what he wants of course. And he does - he says as much to Eyas’s unspeakable delight. She closes her eyes and buries her romanesque nose into the shadows underneath his wing, biting her lip to keep from smiling uncontrollably. Better for him to be with her like it should be, instead of staying here on the Resort. It would’ve been hard to disguise the shattering pain of even thinking about leaving Blue behind.
“Oh I know that, I know.” She reassured him, quick to smile and withdraw her head far enough so he could see it. “They do too. The impossible is hard to believe sometimes, that’s all. For us it was impossible to think you’d ever come home…”
Again, she found herself winding up against his side and pressing feverishly against the shape of his wings and warmth, afraid that he might disappear again if she didn’t physically cling to him. It took Eyas a second or two of silence just to calm down again; she couldn't disguise the way she’d trembled. Once she had, though, it was easy enough to continue. “I actually need your help. It’s dad, he’s… kind of sick. Well he, er…” The words didn’t quite seem to fit. The smaller pegasus mare gave a frustrated stomp and sighed. “@[Gale], do you remember look-see? This would all be so much easier if I could just show you, like that.”
Eyas inhaled deeply. She could taste the scent of tangy, briny water on his skin and she could smell the subtle notes of perfume that were uniquely his own. Masculine but sweet, heady as a fruit blossom. Slowly, she eased a step or two away until their eyes met squarely. “Trust me?”
Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free
The pace at which Gale had pieced together his memories has been remarkable. Remarkable for its slowness, that is.
For months there had been nothing more than little bits of color and fragmented shapes. Like dreams only half-remembered upon waking, the more desperately he reached for them the more quickly they had slipped away. And in those early days he was desperate, chasing what he refused to despair of catching. The slow pace of life on the island resort was not reflected within the brindle creature’s mind, but in time, the lull of the place had seeped into him. Gale – Blue, then – had reached out still, but more carefully, more deliberately. The colors lasted longer, the shapes became more detailed.
The first memory that had come back to him in full was the last one he’d made. Soaring across the sky, not too far behind his father. The world stretched out below his hooves, the wind blew at his dandelion-soft mane which had finally grown long enough to peek into his line of sight. The world below him, and something causing his heart to thrill with excitement. And then – black. Black and falling and falling and nothing.
He thinks of it again as Eyas reassures him, and he swallows around the tight knot of emotion it always elicits. It remains as she speaks of coming home, and he presses back against her just as hard. She trembles – or perhaps he does. Gale touches his face gently against the puckered scars at her shoulder. He does not have memory of these, he reminds himself.
This is real. This is now. It is no trick of his eyes or his mind.
Raising his head, he breathes in the salt air. It is sharp and crisp, as it always is. Peace and quiet, he lets himself remember, and an absent smile has begun to form on his face just as Eyas begins to speak of their father.
Sick? His bright eyes narrow in concern, then further in frustration as his sister fails to elaborate. She brings up look-see, the obvious solution to nearly any puzzle, and yet his frown deepens. Why does she not just show him? What is stopping her? He almost asks, pauses only because she steps away.
Trust me?
”Always.” He answers. There is more damage to her than the scars he can see, Gale thinks. She is his sister. There is nothing they had not shared, and that she now must ask if he trusts her? She has never done anything to make him doubt her; Gale does not think that she ever could. Dad is sick, Eyas had said, and Gale decides in this moment that once their sire is healed, he will make sure that Eyas is as well.
”Show me,” he says, his electric-blue eyes growing dull as he slips instead behind hers and opens himself to seeing what she has, through both her own eyes and perhaps others’ as well.
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
cAll this time a sliver of ice had been piercing the deepest part of her, and @[Gale]’s magical promise dissolved it with one word. Always.
He meant it, too. Came back from death, unbelievably, and that sounded like one hell of an always to Eyas. The buckskin girl gave him a knowing smile and relaxed, then she winked and sparks seemed to flash in her glossy black eyes. That was always her sign that she was using her gift, the little sparkle of light before Eyas would slip into another’s vision. She laughed at the sensation of Gale riding along, a faint tickle at the base of her awareness: he was looking at himself, through her eyes - something she alone had been subject to hundreds of times when she came across other horses, something that forced her into isolation by preference - except this time Gale was forced to look at himself in the light she saw him glowing in.
He was magnificent. Her twin towered (at least from her perspective), above her raised face. His wings were just everywhere, draped over his sides like a living cloak. Their shape and texture made her want to run her nose across every feather, just to see if each one felt as soft as they looked. A perpetual glow of light shimmered across his skin whenever he moved or twitched, radiant. It gave him the texture of navy velvet, even if his coat was somewhat dirty from their swim. She counted each of his glimmering stripes in her head, sighed deeply with familial affection, and then exhaled.
The breath of her quiet sigh was powerful enough to blow away Gale and the tiny island of roots they’d been standing on. The sight of him waved and then dissolved silently, grains of a picture turned to ash before fluttering off into nothingness. Around them the island still hummed as background noise, but the sounds of the heady bog seemed to dim in comparison to the vision Eyas was building. She made sure every detail was painfully real, and that nothing was forgotten. After all, she’d spent years looking at and building this particular ‘stream’ of moments, waiting for the perfect time to share them, and now here the moment was.
Once complete, the vision took them back to the beginning… well, the beginning of the end of Wolfbane, that is.
They’re looking through their Father’s eyes. He’s gone to Nerine; the swamp and the trees and sky are all different. You can all but smell the cliffside breeze that shakes a few sturdy pines, scattered around here and there in the moors. They’re walking through a persistent, gray rain, tracking mud. A body of water materializes like a pewter coin and Heartfire is there on the shoreline, waiting for us. We talk; the words have no sound but Heartfire’s lips make shapes and we’re good at puzzling out those shapes. She gives us a vision - a gift, an explanation of Wyrm’s unique shifting. Now we know how to handle dad.
Their vision shifts again, and now the scenes come faster without much clarity. The edges of their sight seem almost fuzzy, while the focus is kept on the horses they see.
They’re with Wyrm, somewhere with a beach. They can’t feel the pain but the shape-shifter’s face is so clear and sadistic. Flecks of red blood splatter over his giant green beak and the sight of him as a weird hybrid animal jerks out of focus now and then, when he moves to slash us. One second he is tearing us apart and the next he evaporates entirely - except his heart. It thuds a few more times in the sand when we rise again to look at it; we can see Heartfire waiting, watching as we eat the little dirt-covered organ. Suddenly things are different. Our vision is sharper, more intense. It switches from the perspective of a mouse to that of an eagle. We are with Lepis, flipping a stone. We are in Taiga watching Aten glare at us. We are watching Heartfire glare at us. We are changing our diet, we are sleeping alone, we are… hunting more often. We know things now without having to ask, we see what others cannot - we predict Celina’s sex and her wings with our heat vision. We meet Lilliana…
The vision spins out again. Eyas is trying her best to hold it together but the end is always the hardest for her to watch. This time, though, she won’t have to watch it alone so she leans on that thought and pushes on.
Newcomers make us mad. We’re aggressive with them, on the borders of Taiga. Not just one horse either, but several visitors are met with our peculiar nature and anger. We reach a boiling point and leave… only to return angrier than before. Lepis is there, and so is Elio. Lepis… her face is so distinct. It’s the look she wears now all the time and it was put there by us, on purpose. We flew with her and fought her. We put our claws around her neck and… choked her. We threatened her life.
Eyas gasped, raggedly. The air from her lungs escaped in a sort-of anguished cry, and the emotion behind her outburst was enough to break the connection entirely. Gale was still with her, so he could probably see how blurry her true vision was, obscured by fresh tears.
“I… I can’t. I have to stop.” She managed to mumble, teetering on unsteady legs. “It only gets worse from there.”
Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free
It is difficult to do with such rust on his skills, but Gale manages to contort his face into a grotesque expression without letting go of his grip on Eyas’ vision. It helps that she knows he is there and allows him to be so, a little bit of reassurance that is not always there when those he watches through are unaware of him. The colors are more vivid and the shapes clearer when he need not focus on keeping his control. Gale lets his sister guide the way, though at the dramatic gusting away of the earth around him, he does flash her an image of himself emphatically mouthing the words “Show off!”
The self that he shows her is smaller than she sees him, darker, quieter. But it is smiling, as he is.
At least until she begins. His body, left behind, grows unnaturally still.
When she finishes – or rather – can go no farther – Gale speak tonelessly. “I always thought I dreamt this one.” His eyes seemed dimmed by what he is about to share. “But now I’m not so sure.”
They’re in the Field, and there are sharp movements and cries of pain, long dark tentacles and slicing blades. His vision was a blur of views, some of them likely imagined and hazy, but the red blood and their father’s face reflecting in the terrified eyes around him were as clear as the nose at the end of his face. And he sees that nose from his own blue eyes, leaving his sisters mind just before he shares the vision. Gale shudders, blinks a few times, and rolls his shoulders. He had forgotten that too long in another’s sight can make him dizzy. He reptends it is just the vision-sharing that makes it so, and not the visions themselves.
That pretend doesn’t stop the roiling in his belly.
“I don’t want to see anymore”, Gale says. “I don’t think I need to. There’s other things I’ve seen, things like that. I know. I know.” He doesn’t know though, and he doesn’t want to. There;s no need for an accurate counting of depraved acts. A quarter of what he’s seen has been enough. He takes a breath though, and another, in and out with the tide. He’s quiet for a long time, just holding Eyas as tightly as he can. She feels very small against him, like a little child, like someone he can protect. Like someone he should. And so he decides he must.
“I have an…” he trails off as he pulls away, struggling for the proper words, but soon grows frustrated and calls: “Erne?”
At first there is nothing, and then the greyish tip of a broken palm trunk turns about slowly, a waddling and inelegant motion that does not match the fierce intensity in the creature’s eyes as it peers at Eyas. Not a bit of wood after all, but a greyish brown bird with a pale underside and a wickedly curved beak and talons. He looks a little silly head on, but Gale is not thinking of that now.
“I can see what he sees.” Gale tells Eyas. “Not all birds though. Just him. We’ve got a bond, him and me.” He’s been my family, Gale doesn’t add, a stop-gap until Eyas has appeared on his island. “What if he keeps an eye out for Dad?” Gale asks, reaching out to brush the tear beneath her eye. She is soft, and he is very careful. “He will look out,” Gale says, pressing his cheek against hers, doing his best to be soothing despite the tremble in his own voice. “And I will show you what this ocean looks like from down beneath the waves.”
-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-
yes, she thinks sadly as @[Gale] shows her a more recent vision, the nightmare is real. There’s a monster out there, masquerading as a stallion who they both loved once upon a time. He’s hurting innocent people, forcing them to watch the undeniable, unforgivable acts through his twisted vision of happiness. Eyas would never forgive herself if she didn’t do something - anything - to put a stop to it. If Wolfbane could be stopped at all, that is. She hated to think of how things would change afterward, knowing she aided in the death of a once-beloved family member… But Eyas could hardly sleep peacefully while Wolfbane was out there, doing such horrible things.
He must be stopped. And soon.
The silence of Eyas’s thoughts blended nicely with the faint, pleasant rhythm of her twin’s breathing. Gale seemed contemplative too, about what Eyas couldn’t guess. Until she felt him pull away, and the cold left behind in the wake of his warm touch felt uncomfortable on Eyas’s sooty gold coat. Her face crumpled a little; what? she eyed Gale speculatively, even more uncomfortable now that he seemed to be struggling, what is it?
He had a what? An Erne?
Immediately, Eyas’s thoughts leapt to wild conclusions. As her brother stood, waiting, she could feel her pulse quicken and a clammy sort of anxiety begin to creep into her limbs. They’d been apart so long… she couldn’t have guessed, but… Gale was an adult, after all. Eyas steeled herself, completely expecting another horse to join them (more specifically, a younger horse - one that perhaps resembled Blue and a mysterious, unknown “other”) but felt even more confusion as a second or two ticked by and her twin seemed unchanged, just staring at the cross-hatch bark of a nearby palm tree.
Eyas was just beginning to reconsider her stance on the whole, “Gale was fine all alone on an island” thing when the faintest of movements from the tree trunk caught her attention. She focused intently on the same spot Gale was looking at, now; true curiosity replaced the earlier apprehension of her sharp, black-lined facial features - what was that? It waddled closer. “Wow!” Eyas breathed, looking up from where the creature’s intelligent eyes appraised her to where Gale was hurrying through an explanation.
She’d heard of a thing like this before. True animals from the wild forming a bond (which is exactly what Gale had said, almost lovingly) with their kind, whatever Beqannian’s were. Eyas had a few theories of her own, but those were for another conversation. She’d returned to gaping over Erne, anyways - lowering her dark nose as near as he’d let her so that Eyas could satisfy her nerdy side. It was so, so cool! A second pair of eyes to do the leg work! She could feel herself remembering the trip from Nerine down here with an almost pained look on her face.
“I think those’re some of the best ideas I’ve heard all day, baby brother.” Eyas laughed into Gale’s cheek when he pressed closer to her, a reminder of everything that had magically come true for her today. Eyas wished he’d keep reminding her, over and over. “Let’s go - all of us.” She hadn’t forgotten Erne, and the bird got a grateful wink that sparkled like a black gem.
And in that moment - just for a moment - the world was perfect for Eyas again.
