"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
She has never liked the springtime. All around her, they celebrate – an end to the cold, to the bone-deep chill, to the pervasive darkness. Light and flowers and new beginning, all around, the earth damp and sprouting green in its fecundity, new life all around. New seasons. Yet Annapurna had not grown up with seasons. She had grown up with only the cold, on some wild mountaintop where she was the only thing to exist. It was an impossible existence, for most, but with a god for a father many impossible things were made possible. She was made for winter, or made of winter, depending on how one wanted to categorize her. Was she a horse, even, or something other, some entity bred for cold and emptiness? She certainly looks like winter made manifest, bespeaking snow and ice. There’s a coldness to her, too, the air around her cooler. She often freezes what she touches, finding comfort in it, and frost crackles at her hooves as she moves. Ice, too, crackles over her skin, a thin layer of it that she wears like useless armor. She likes the river, in the warmer months, because it is easy to change. She wades at its edge, ice spreading out like ripples. Her eyes, a sharp blue, look out. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for. She never is. She has not totally adapted, is still a stranger in a strange land, with ice around her ankles and frost on her breath, an anomaly in the springtime.
03-17-2020, 08:18 PM (This post was last modified: 03-17-2020, 08:21 PM by bean.)
Bean is blown here and there, like a brown dandelion puff caught by the wind. Okay, that’s giving too much credit and lending too much grace to the image. Bean is a bit more like that scraggly dead stray piece of withered weed that is blown about and somehow lollygagging in the common lands.
Meadow, forest, river - she haunts them all. Haunt might also be a bit strong or inaccurate. Bean is no ghost, not even a zombie risen from the grave. Guess she’d have to die first for that to happen, and also have magic or magical friends that can raise the dead. She is however, just impish enough to be considered a nuisance or a strange ray of sunlight.
Then again, she might be as daft as a daffodil. Oh look! There’s some now along the muddied path that she happily and carelessly traipses down. Bright to behold and quick to capture Bean’s own mud-dull eyes. If she stares at them any longer, she’ll be liable to trip over her own feet!
So of course she stops to give them a good long sniff. It’s just a friendly hello after all, though the daffodils look a little worse for the wear afterwards. Bean has daffodil-dust all over her nose and adorning the grin that covers her mouth. Such a silly thing she is! But now maybe she’ll refocus her attention back on her aimless meandering…
Which she does all while shedding bits of unnecessary winter-fur. Bean still manages to look unkempt and well, quite like something the cat drug in, as she resumes her jaunty stride down the path that ends in a swatch of fresh grown grass just before the river. Oh look! More distractions, except not some yellow little flowers this time.
Nope, it’s cool rushing water that speaks to a dryness in her throat that she hadn’t known was there and a tall pale mare at the river’s edge. Bean moves closer, respecting that personal bubble and don’t-come-near-me look the other seems to wear. Until she catches sight of the ice spreading across the surface of the river. How cool is that?!
If it was possible at all, her eyes would be bugging out of her head right now in sheer awe of what she was looking at. It didn’t seem possible though she knew it was; this land never disappointed in the strange and extraordinary. Of which she herself was neither.
Okay, she might be considered strange after all or at the very least, rude for stating so intently at the ice and the river and the pale mare that seemed to tie it all together. “I’ve never seen anyone do that before.” she commented heartily from her spot not too far from the other. Bean had no sense of volume control during times of excitement and she definitely felt excited at the prospect of this chance meeting by the riverside.
"Will they be afraid of me?" she had asked him, lost, terrified, reeling, and he didn't speak. He didn't speak because the answer was yes, that they would be afraid of her. She was a lion and they were rabbits, but saying it was too much, would have broken her. He couldn't have known, then, what the Mountain would show her, the darkness that she had inside of her, balled up like a fist.
"I have."
She is wrapped in shadow and hard to see, stepping between the trees, and her voice is hushed, almost grim, still troubled by the visions in the painted mare's dream world. The dreams left her breathless and confused when they were over, when she blinked and she was not the ghost of an elderly mare that had committed hundreds of murders, including the murder of her friends and... a lover? The thought of love now makes her stomach flip and she feels foolish. Halcyon is a friend and nothing more, and she would never kill him. She would never let her desire for freedom destroy everything.
Would she?
Fear stings her belly like the ice that grows around the pale mare's ankles, crusting the surface of the river with shivering white. She has seen a trick like that. Leilan - her father, the ice dragon, now. He rears up in her mind out of smoke and fire and ice and mist - the burning of the Isle and she flinches away from it. The thought of him being a dragon fills her with guilt and the shadows draw up more thickly around her, but the youth forces them away. She does not want to be the shadowy assassin in the forest. The shadows fall reluctantly, trailing instead at her feet like hounds following their master, and suddenly she is away from the trees, away from the darkness, and the clear light of spring falls golden on her. She is equine, still. That trick of the paint mare's dream stayed. For now, the young lioness remains quiet within but for the slightly feline hint to her movement.
"My father can do something like that," the confidence of her steps does not carry into her voice. The grimness fades a little, remembering... perhaps not happier times, her childhood was not filled with joy as some are, but there had been love, and a shaky smile tugs at the corners of her grey lips as she looks up at the pair, one white as snow and moonlight, one like a wren, flitting through the undergrowth and chattering boldly, "He doesn't like when the water gets too warm, either."
She looks at the mare, small and wide-eyed with a hint of yellow at her muzzle, and isn’t sure what to make of her. Annapurna, while not rude, is certainly not outgoing. It befuddles her, the mechanisms of socialization. This should come as no surprise, for she is a woman who grew up in isolation, who rarely spoke – and when she did, her words were often carried away by the wind before she could even hear them.
But she smiles at the mare, because, as we’ve said, she isn’t rude. She likes company – it is one of the reasons she’d stayed – and the mare seems bright enough that she might not mind the ice at her feet.
“I’m good with the cold,” Annapurna says, her attempt to explain it.
Before she can add more, another mare appears, this one younger than them both. Annpurna nods at her in greeting, watching shadows move around her, seemingly of their accord. This world is full of strange magic, but she still feels so new to it all.
“Sounds like a smart man,” she says. Not that she begrudges anyone for their temperature choices, it’s only that cold is mostly what she knows, and so it is what she gathers about her.
“I’m Annapurna,” she tells them both, though neither had asked, and she has yet to learn their names.
03-23-2020, 07:29 PM (This post was last modified: 03-23-2020, 07:31 PM by bean.)
They are like snow and mud, things that mix but shouldn’t as they stand there and a voice joins them. Others might find it to be an interruption but Bean has always preferred company. Probably some old herd instinct that persists in her like the cold does in the air, just a nip of a chill that lingers and refuses to go away despite the sun that warms their backs and the soggy ground all around.
Can’t say she’s all that surprised that someone has else seen this kind of magic before. This land was rife with it, as if the magic was more prolific than the mundane and Bean fit quite right in the latter - as mundane as anything could be. She has never seen so much magic before, never imagined that so many magicians could populate in one place.
She has to wonder then, if that makes them ordinary. And her, less so because she cannot procure ice on the top of the river like it was nothing, like it was as intrinsic as breathing, and took no thought or exhaustion of power at all. Bean has no great gifts to give or make but for the smiles that find her face freely. But she is tugged from her thoughts by the appearance of the golden girl from the trees, attracting the light of the sun as if spun from it.
Each of them smiles and Bean relaxes further, not aware that she had somehow tensed up in the exchange of words from the third to join them. Smiles are her coin of the world and they mean everything is alright, usually. She has yet to meet a smile that lies to her, that was falsely presented or cruel. Probably because Bean threw them off with her boldness, her strangeness, and her furry little self that never quite seemed to belong among them.
Bean doesn’t mind the ice at all! She came from a place that had enough of it for it to be familiar, to be a reminder of a home that was only that - a home, or perhaps, just a beginning to her strange tale. “Oh you are!” she gushes enthusiastically, because she has no sense of volume control as usual. This time, she notices the shadows that move oddly about the palomino but accepts it for what it is - more magic.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Bean.” she announces to both of them. Not bothering to nod or make any other social niceties besides grinning like the fool she is.
04-23-2020, 10:02 PM (This post was last modified: 04-23-2020, 10:05 PM by Beryl.)
Light a candle, cast a shadow.
Her heart thuds heavily in a miserable breast as the other mares greet her, let her blend herself into their gathering as though she belongs there, but there is a sense of intrusion the she can't shake and it stops up her tongue like a mouthful of hair. Her dry throat sticks to itself, makes her choke, and instead of responding in kind to their introductions, she lowers her head to the icy river and drinks too much water as if to drink away the awkwardness that she has brought with her like another one of her shadows. The water cools a parched throat, but nothing more.
It occurs to her that this was a mistake, coming in among these two, and her lack of experience hides from her their own lack of social niceties, that one is as cool as the ice she makes and the other a touch too bright. Beryl feel ill-equipped to handle either one of them and it leaves a sour taste in her mouth that she swallows thickly. The shadows she forced away flow to her feet again, drawn by the anxious stutter of her pulse and by the worry that gathers at the creases of her eyes, and the cool air feeling of their touch bolsters her. She returns Bean's smile again, hesitant, but more genuine than the first time, then looks to Annapurna with a nod.
"He's the smartest man I know!" She doesn't add that he is the only man she knows, and she doesn't add that she is avoiding him because she cannot stand the sight of dragons, not even one that breathes ice instead of fire. Not even one that saved her. There is that feeling again of ice-water filling her lungs, as if she is drowning, and she coughs lightly to relieve the imaginary pressure, letting the sun warm the chill from her back,
"You're awfully far south for someone who prefers the cold." And then, with a shy laugh, "When I was younger I worried he might melt, but he never did. You won't, either, will you? I can't offer much but I can get you out of the sun." The shadows stir and darken, grow thicker until the space within them is dark as the deepest place in the forest at their backs, but she holds them back from the other mares, unsure if the offer will be welcome.
