"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
07-30-2020, 01:13 PM (This post was last modified: 07-30-2020, 01:18 PM by Aela.)
They don't come to Taiga often. Aela and her mother often spend the majority of their time along the borders of Hyaline and her mountains, the River and Loess - one of Beqanna's many kingdom trinities. The golden girl prefers not to get too close to the River (chaotic things, rivers and streams and oceans) but she doesn't mind when they follow it to the Common Lands. The open space of the Meadow or the quiet of the Forest is preferable to what happens when she comes close to another ghost.
For reasons she doesn't understand (or yet know), they keep coming back to Taiga. The Northern forest itself is calm and still; Aela doesn't mind so much that they are there. But why not go further North? There are rumors (or so she sees from the spirits) of monsters and Magicians. Of queens and dragons. It's enough to make any youngster curious, even one as cautious as Aela. So when they return to Taiga, Aela drifts through mist - North.
(She had approached the Mountain for similar reasons; she had felt the Magic stirring and singing and dancing beneath that stone precipice. She feels it humming in her chest now, like she is entering the epicenter of something powerful.)
The moorlands are vast and open, like she's seen from borrowed memories. Glimpses of proud ledges, sweeping views of the gently rolling terrain of Nerine becomes real when Aela's blue eyes finally take it in for herself. The yearling had traded Taiga's fog (though the scent of pine and fir still cling to her gilded skin, a dampness she can't seem to shed) for this vision before her. The chestnut filly stops on one knoll to watch the heather and meadowgrass sway in wave-like motions, a veritable sea before her with the actual one crashing against the rocky coast in the distance. The noon sun is pleasant and warm, making this memory all the more appealing to the mute girl.
What all of the North shares, besides a penchant for independence and solitude among its residents, is a cool humidity - though unlike the Taiga where the fog curls between the trees like a familiar cat, in Nerine it blows in and out at the whim of the sea, and on the Isle it freezes, gilding trees with ice and tracing hoarfrost across the beaches. In the highlands of Nerine, the fog streams like water, back into the sea or south to the low Taigan wood, and it reveals a sun that lingers close and bright, blazing its light to break and bounce against the wild granite cliffs.
When the sea-mist shreds and breaks away and midday light strikes him, he gleams, the dapples he takes from his mother shining like gold, like drops of summer sunlight bursting against his skin. Beneath him, his shadow wears the reflected light like a brindled fawn curled between the forest ferns. His mother would call it gaudy and roll her eyes as though he can control his skin and only shines out of an excess of teen-aged ego. Others might find the play of flickering light lovely, the bold shine in sun and the much more subtle way he gleams at night when the bright moon is wide and full, and the loveliness might distract the eye away from the truth, that beneath the benefit of his hide he is nothing more than a gawky colt barely past his first year. He is thick-kneed and thick-necked and the tarnished silver strands of his tail barely brush his hocks as he strides across the moorland with a frown he doesn't mean to wear. His mane stands stiff and short and upright - a thing of his father's, though he can't recall it - and the mottled gold-brown wings fold unevenly at his sides, one hanging lower than the other, a habit purely his own.
Wherewolf's pace is brisk as if he is on important business, though he is, in fact, going nowhere, only in circles, slowly growing mad. He is bored and sick of the wild winds and crashing sea and the staring sky that watches him no matter where he is. The colt is sullen and brimming with an anger that his family does nothing to soothe, but there is nothing in Nerine to vent the angst that builds in his chest like boiling steam, so he travels the high, empty, grassland with his sharp-tipped ears laid back and his mother's scowl curling over his soft lips. With nobody near, he squeals a curse at the smooth blue sky, the worst one he can think of, striking the grass and rolling his eyes for emphasis.
He sees the girl, then, quiet, small, delicate, and a whispered voice in the back of his mind tells him that he should apologize.
07-31-2020, 11:49 AM (This post was last modified: 07-31-2020, 11:52 AM by Aela.)
The solitude suits her just fine. Aela can wrap herself in the blanket of fog that breathes in and out of Taiga. (The Isle is another thing entirely; how does a horse without wings reach that supposedly barren wasteland?) In Nerine, the moorlands are open and exposed. The land breathes out here in a way that Taiga can not. There are no tree limbs or large ferns to get caught on; nothing to catch a soul.
Her blue eyes rove the soft knolls - gently rolling across and over the small hills - sweeping up all the lonely (lovely), empty spaces in their depths. The spring breeze is sweet; it brings scents of new meadowgrass and the displaced smell of a waterbird, a snipe that has flown too far from the rocky coast. Curious (as she's never seen such a bird before), the yearling takes a cautious step forward while her ears revert into the cornsilk tresses of her fine mane. Her slender head dips low as she slowly takes another one step towards the mottled brown creature. It sees her coming from the frozen place that it hunkers down but its something else that sending the long-billed creature taking to the sky in terror.
Aela catches a glimpse of it from the rapid (terrified) memories that it sends flying out in between frantic wingbeats.
An angry scowl that curls like smoke over his dark lips. Retreating ears that don't have the luxury of her lovely, flaxen locks. His is upright; bristly, jutting up like the crags on the Nerinian coast. When she finally turns around, her gaze lingers briefly on the uneven way he holds his wings. (It makes her think of the short-limbed bird, of the frenzied way it flew away. Can he do the same?) He asks a question of him and the filly pricks her ears forward before they flick back again. Aela lifts her head and her attention to the now-empty patch of vibrant blue sky above them, visibly disappointed that her entertainment had flown the proverbial coop.
@[Wherewolf] is gruff towards her, and Aela already a great mimic, doesn't miss this opportunity to return the favor. She raises one long, lithe leg and strikes the ground, echoing his anger. For emphasis, she rolls her bright blue eyes with his dramatic flair until the rest on the colt again. It takes all her skill to hide the smug grin that tugs at one corner of her golden mouth.
Even as he makes his demands, he keeps walking, his course shifting slightly to bring him closer to the strange girl standing silently on the rise above him. He does not see the bird that flies away (what does he care for birds, though he shares their wings?) he only sees the way she lifts her willow-branch legs and mocks him. The scowl curling across his lips deepens, his eyes cool and hard, flashing angrily when she seeks them out again with that smirk ghosting across her face. If he were given to bouts of poetic thought he might compare her bright eyes to the sky above them, washed clean and clear by the passing rains, polished to a shine by the fog and burnished by the sun. His own eyes are like the sea, stormy and fickle, sometimes more grey than their usual blue-green. Wherewolf, however, is not a poetic creature.
"Are you deaf?" It is less a question than an accusation. He stands too close to her, still bristling, the feathers of his wings ruffling, trembling, his head reared back atop that thick neck so that he looms above her, "I asked you a question."
He has no right to his anger towards her and he knows it, but what should be embarrassment only feeds into his churlish bullying, fanning flames lit by someone else, by something else he cannot name. Nothing answers him except the ever-present wind and the crash of waves, the rustle of grass grown high beneath the golden sun, and because he cannot pin his ears any further than they already are, he turns them forward again and narrows his storm-surge eyes, lifting his chin with a haughty sneer.
"I know you heard me, you must just be too stupid to answer." Just like everyone else in this wasteland, he thinks, turning his dark head from her, stepping away as though to take his leave, "Ugh, well, never mind. If this conversation is anything to go by, you'll love it here, but I'm not wasting my time. If you see Neverwhere, don't tell her--" he stops and laughs harshly, more bark than anything else.
"No, never mind, I don't think I need to worry about you saying anything."
08-06-2020, 08:06 PM (This post was last modified: 08-06-2020, 08:09 PM by Aela.)
Her blues eyes watch him - curious, at first - and then amused as he zigs and zags towards her. Like he can’t make up his own mind about which his direction he wants to go and that should worry (intidmiate?) Aela. They quickly move to the wings that hang at his sides and she finds it harder to contain her smirk.
Carnage help him if he ever decides to fly.
The colt comes close - too close - if she had known about personal boundaries. Aela - who has learned to communicate through touch and memory - knows nothing about them. So she lifts her head and raises a brow as he continues to speak. She even wonders briefly if he is one of those oafish types that thinks if he speaks louder, she might hear him better.
He apparently does.
Aela feels her ears retreat again as she scowls up to the other yearling. What makes him so pretentious? Has his dam coddled him so much that he always feels entitled to an answer? The boy with his angry (crashing) ocean eyes turns his head away and steps away from her, like she might be done with him.
She isn’t. Not yet, anyways.
The yearling reaches out to grab a fledgling, useless wing and Aela thinks of the angriest, scariest thing she can summon. His anger infuriates her and so she unleashes it back on him. (The sound of a Taigan redwood as it snaps furiously in half from the seething of a summer storm. The dragon-horse that flies above the North. A deep rumble of thunder as it shakes the ground. The serrated, glinting teeth of a demon as it reaches out to grab her.)
08-11-2020, 10:49 AM (This post was last modified: 08-11-2020, 10:55 AM by Wherewolf.)
There's a crashing noise in his brain, a screaming, thunderous noise, cracking and snapping and furious and the boy shakes his head but the sound doesn't end. The phantom tremor of thunder under his feet, and he knows it is thunder even though the day is bright and shining. It is like thunder when the storm is directly over you, a flash in the darkness that raises your hair and a deafening growl that makes your heart shudder and sets your feet to running - but to where? There is nowhere to go that the barrage will not find you. It is sheer panic that flows through his body, terror and adrenaline building up and up and he cannot determine the source or how long it lasts. It feels like forever, but it's hardly a second. He freezes at her touch, the sneer on his face falling away and she fills his heart with fearsome things. The shadow of a dragon flickers overhead and the boy blinks, gleaming teeth shine in his face and he rears back, baring his own as he does. He reels backward on his hind legs and feels the filly's dully flat teeth with their firm grasp on his wing - and then there is nothing.
He does not hear his own desperate squeal.
Don't touch my wing!
He doesn't hear how he says this out loud, or the way hysteria clips his voice sharp and tight. He only knows the gentle pressure of her grip.
Neverwhere's son is not a coddled boy. He holds the trauma of an early attack and a year of distant mothering. He has not been able to make his mother love him - and oh, how he has tried! He cannot make her embrace him as she does his sister Amarine. He cannot make her scowl soften the way it does when she is with the appaloosa filly and she has never shown the same concern over his boyhood hurts as she has over the year-old scars on red Lilliana with her tattered golden flame. Jealousy flares in his heart, but it is not this that engulfs him. It is something deeper, something older and darker.
He does not remember it. He does not remember the hawk in the tree or the indifferent way his mother swung her newborn son by the wing and bruised his ribs with her knees. He doesn't remember the hoof that stabbed the soil beside his head, ready to crush his soft skull without a thought. His dislocated wing healed itself ages ago, he does not remember the pain or the fear, but the insecurity roused by the nameless girl's bite overwhelms him far worse than anything she shows him.
Don't touch my wing!
His young voice is a sharp scream, but still he doesn't hear it. He sees nothing, yet wheels back around and charges forward like a battering ram with blind, rolling eyes. His other wing flares, teeth bared and snapping, forelegs striking over and over, seeking purchase wherever they fall. Her, the ground, the sky, his mother, Ama, Lilliana, anywhere - anyone - at all.
08-13-2020, 07:17 PM (This post was last modified: 08-13-2020, 07:20 PM by Aela.)
She’s never done this before so this moment is more of an experiment than anything. With her mother Kota, Aela will sometimes share glimpses of the day dawning as she presses her lithe form into her sides as she tries to wake her spotted dam. With others who might ask her name or where she comes from - if she deems them worthy of the knowledge - she might show them a glimmer of a memory where her name is said or reveal the mighty trees of Taiga wrapped with fog seeping around their mammoth trunks.
@[Wherewolf] has made her angry and this is the first time she has shared that with anyone. Aela has wondered from time to time what would happen if she shared something that made her happy, something that made her sad, something that made her mad. The golden yearling knows she can share pictures but she has wondered if her emotions could distort them.
Don’t touch my wing!
Aela pins her ears harder against her neck and bites down tenaciously. She becomes determined to hang onto this precious prize her teeth have found. What she intends to scare him with backfires. The almost-palomino colored filly becomes ravaged with Wherewolf’s memories. She doesn’t see a branch or a bird. She doesn’t see a mother grab her helpless child by the very same wing that she doesn’t yet relinquish. Just like him, she is too young to remember why she doesn’t like the sound of crashing waves (they echo thundering hoofbeats) or why she avoids dark shadows (so easy to get lost).
The winged yearling is screaming but she barely hears it.
Instead, she sees a shimmer of the pale-faced mare - the one she has seen in Nerine and Taiga before - as she embraces a spotted filly. The absence of any memories of her doing so with the dappled colt is obvious. A blank space in his mind that he doesn’t need to fill. There is even an image of the red mare from Taiga - the one that Kota has told her to smile at when she comes to visit with her sad eyes - that the silver mare looks at with concern. There are no memories that she does so with the colt.
The filly still doesn’t hear him scream a second time and it’s the unleashing of his other wing that makes her jerk in the opposite direction, determined to keep his feathers between her teeth. His forelegs strike the ground and Aela, being the smaller of the pair, strikes a delicate leg out at him.
Stop! the action says and she glares at him with blazing blue eyes. Her teeth remain firmly clamped on his other wing and her lips lift, baring teeth back at him. Firmly, she reflects what she sees towards him; his large head lurching up and down, the white of his wild rolling eyes, the snapping mouth.
A buckskin front leg makes purchase with one of hers and Aela winces, lowering her head still refusing to release the captive appendage.
Something white and hot burns in his chest. There is nothing else except that burning, nothing except the way the panic squeezes his throat like a lion, nothing but the rushing of his own blood in his ears, racing fast and wild. Adrenaline make the feathers of his wings stand on end as if to make him even larger, but the small, steady pressure on his wing does not go away.
He has forgotten that it is simply a small girl struggling to hold him as he bucks and jerks like a crazed thing.
He does not notice the difference when his hooves find their purchase on her body and when they strike the rocky soil churned up by their young feet in the struggle. She shows him his own awful face - full of fear and fury with blind rolling eyes made of storm-ravaged seas - he flinches backward when those gleaming teeth lined with foaming spittle snap at his face. Wherewolf sweeps his head away from the phantom floating across his vision, and then he lurches sideways heavily. His body hits something - what? - and he falls sideways again as if to trample whatever so firmly and unforgivingly grips his wing. Overwhelm it. Crush it. Destroy it. Though he doesn't know it, his heavier body plays to his advantage in these close quarters.
The colt pulls his wing back to his side with a grunt, hauls her - if she refuses to let go - close to him, and then he rears up above the flaxen filly and throws himself broadside at the ground like the rocklslide Eurwen can cause when his mother makes her angry, like a tidal wave reaching above the mighty cliffs and sweeping everything in its path out to drown in the cold northern sea. The entirety of his weight crashes forcefully from above. He falls in a wild, flailing, tangle of scrabbling limbs, without any thought for his own well-being, and certainly none for hers. There is a heavy impact that knocks the breath from his lungs - her? The ground? - and it adds a choking gasp to his writing, but does not slow the fast, shallow way he breathes through those strained nostrils. Sweat and saliva turn the dirt to mud on his coat and befoul the brilliant gold of his dapples, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, pink and speckled with bright blood.
He is a cornered bull, fighting for its life against lions. From the ground he seeks his feet clumsily and tries to sling himself at her again.
08-15-2020, 08:40 PM (This post was last modified: 08-15-2020, 08:41 PM by Aela.)
What burns white-hot in him catches like quicksilver in her, blazing in Aela’s golden chest. It swings between them like a pendulum - back and forth - until the origination of the memory (the feeling?) becomes forgotten. Where it started no longer matters. All Aela cares about is how this will end.
By the unyielding way that she keeps her grip on Wherewolf’s wing, the yearling thinks it will not be because of her.
They become hard to tell apart. Both yearlings become a tangle of limbs. A longer, leaner chestnut one striking out here. A buckskin one that scrapes against her. Below the Nerinian sun, they are a spectacle. Glinting, gold stripes, and shining iridescent dapples. There is no stopping the momentum that Aela has set into motion. The bigger yearling uses his size to his advantage and falls heavily to the ground, dragging the girl down with him.
There is a moment where Aela thinks that he is done. She thinks: Good. This is the end. Mud coats her sides and there is no lovely blue sheen coming from her socks now. @[Wherewolf] has seen to it that they are both covered with soft, spring mud and all the loose dirt the pair of them have stirred up.
It doesn’t last long. The colt attempts to pull his wing back to his side and Aela clamps down with her dull teeth. She refuses to let herself believe that she is afraid but his abrupt movement startled her and so she clings to the wing because she has nothing else. Wherewolf pulls her close and Aela digs in her hooves, determined to not make it easy for him. He tugs the wing harder and the slender legs finally relent with Aela glaring her fury up at him from blue eyes. While she looks up over the dingy brown feathers, he comes down.
The moment is an impossibility of seconds and eons. Her gaze widens as he falls and she finally lets go of the coveted wing. Too little, too late. He crashes and though she goes down with him, Aela doesn’t break. There is a searing flash of pain along her side and he’s managed to gash her somewhere. Where the blood comes from isn’t immediately spotted because when the filly raises her head, she looks around wildly forgetting where she is or what is happening.
In a moment of panic, she searches for the comfort of her spotted mother. She jerks her head back and her eyes reveal their white rims when the colt starts to rise. Aela snakes her neck out and bares her teeth, warning him off her. There is no Kota. A back leg finds the unsteady ground first and then a front one, adrenaline moving her at this point instead of logical thought. He lunges at her and Aela resorts to her only defense; the only way she knows to speak.
He moves towards her and the chestnut yearling angles away from him, a too-slow and fatigued sidestep. The brush of his skin against hers might be Aela’s only advantage. (She thinks of the ground and the angry soil, churned and disturbed beneath their hooves. The white lather - like seafoam - on his sides. A dirtied feather, laying forgotten on the ground.)
They fall together, and then they fall apart. His panic is so overbearing that he doesn't realize she has finally released his wing, his heart is beating too loudly in his ears, his chest heaving to quickly with breath that barely sates the thirst of his lungs, and he hyper-focuses so strongly on the thought of escape at all costs that he is lunging at her before he feels the pressure of her small teeth has gone away.
It's a clumsy-footed lunge, his feet finding poor purchase in the slick earth that they - mostly he - has churned up, and it's made clumsier by a sudden feeling of awareness trickling in around the edges of his tunnel vision. Wherewolf blinks his stormy eyes, for a second the world seems too bright and out of focus. Mid-lunge, he finally sees her, small and golden-brown, bleeding and buckling beneath his charge - it's too late to change his course.
Instead, the boy screws his eyes shut, twisting mid-lunge to avoid her with a groan, and failing miserably.
The ground beneath them is like the turmoil inside him, angry and aimless
Wherewolf hits the ground again, hard enough this time that the air is knocked from his lungs and he remains prone, gasping. He hardly remembers what has just happened. She hurt me, he thinks, so sure of himself, so sure of the events lost somewhere in a white haze of anger. Accusing eyes turn up to the girl.
Why are his ribs covered in frothy sweat? Why is he panting like he's run hard across the entire northern plateau? He bares his teeth at her from the ground and slowly finds his legs again, resettling his upset feathers with slow and careful rotations of each wing. She's bleeding and he's glad of it. He's bleeding, too, myriad knicks and scrapes sting his skin - mostly from rocks in the soil when he fell, but there are bruises, too, from the filly's hooves - and his wing aches terribly which reignites a small ball of panic that chokes him when he swallows though it doesn't overwhelm him like before. He stands apart from her, muscles shaking as the adrenaline leaves him, wary and weary, holding one wing tight and one wing out slightly to make him seem larger. The air shimmers next to him, but he is too exhausted to draw up his false-brother now, and the duplicate never materializes.
"What did you do to me, you bloody witch," His ears flatten, his boyish voice sharp and cracking in his parched throat.
