"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
The secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
Eurwen
She returns down the Mountain in silence, and slightly bedazzled. With a quest that had sounded more like a scolding, and a task that seems near impossible to her. How can she learn to be whole, when so much of her is missing, when the filling of the hole that she asked for, is used as a sort of bait?
Never she minds, then - there are other things to worry about. The change in leadership may be upcoming, and with that, the whole of the north may be different. It’s not a bad thing - just one of those things moving forward as they would. And perhaps she should move forward too, and not look back - not look for her holes. But she finds that that is harder to do than she’s always thought, and that she had always pushed this back because she had other things to focus on.
Only now, things seem to come back thrice as hard as before.
She doesn’t hear anyone approaching as she wanders through Taiga, though not as northbound as she normally would. She goes north-west, aiming for the part of the forest that borders and flows into Nerine - a part of the world where her mother seemed to have found her mental rest - room and time for a break, then, a recharge.
She doesn’t make it there, exactly; a familiar glowing figure can be seen, and she snaps out of her mesmerizing. Putting a name to the mare’s shape, Eurwen offers no more than a watery smile, for she has no more today. ”Hi Lethy,” she starts meekly, awaiting the other mare’s response. Perhaps the buckskin has something to share - if not, if anything, it will be good to talk to a friend, and have her act as a sort of distraction.
She eyes her daughter thoughtfully, asleep in a deep covering of moss and fallen branches, she had kept her promise to herself and had loved her with every once that she had loved her other children (despite the noticeably staggered teeth that were starting to come in). She had not expected a careless trist with a random man to have ever happened, but in the midst of emotions ignored and pushed away it had. Her amethyst eyes wavered over the buckskin filly before leaving her to her peaceful dreams.
There were other things she needed to focus on in this moment where motherhood could be laid to rest with her sleeping babe. She moved through the thick forest searching out the splattered sunlight that forced it's way in here and there. The soft glowing purple lit up enough around her that becoming familiar with all parts of her home had become easier.
Her eyes are pulled then to the source of her name. Allowing a name to be placed with the other woman she smiles softly in return, her own face drawn by exhaustion itself. "Hello, @[Eurwen] ." she can sense the pink spotted mares distress cloaked around her filling the spaces around both of them, with eyes lined with slight wrinkles and lips pulled with gentle laugh lines she dips her head softly letting her peace flow around her into the air, into the ground, into what ever would accept it. "What's wrong, Eurwen?" she says softly.
09-09-2020, 07:39 AM (This post was last modified: 09-09-2020, 07:41 AM by Eurwen.
Edit Reason: Typo fixes
)
The secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
Eurwen
The dotted mare raises a corner of her mouth, a half-smile of the kind both her parents had mastered, but her mother perhaps more than her sire. It’s the smile of feeling lifted, away and distracted from a problem, but not fully emotionally separating from the event, as it were. Her feelings are hard to describe, and frankly she doesn’t feel a need to. Lethy had always been able to accept her as she was, right in the moment, and the buckskin Matriarch’s question did not feel like an intrusion. An invite, perhaps, to talk if she wished.
At first, she didn’t think she wished to. ”I visited the Mountain,” she says with a bit of a shrug. She knows the mare has, too, and that this information might be enough to give her an idea of the things she wasn’t talking about. Eurwen looks to the newly-made dragonness, eyes lingering on her sleek form for a moment as if her answers might be hidden there - and then, she returns to the mare’s purple gaze. ”I asked after my mother.” comes the smothered confession, ”and they told me to learn to live with it.”
Her face, while usually diplomatic, calm and easy because she simply felt that way, now seems older and more worried, a crease or two etched in a face that was usually inviting to most. Deep brown eyes find nothing to latch onto, yet she is otherwise perfectly still; turned inward, brooding over the meaning of these events. Breckin had left, and during her own physical challenges, the troubles of her kingdom, and her own daughters, she had never had the chance to learn to cope.
It bubbles up from a deep, dark abyss now, now that her brother had come to tell her that she would not return, that she had been replaced or that perhaps she didn’t want to remember. Either way, she was lost to them, and the hole inside Eurwen’s chest only felt bigger and deeper every time she looked at it - until there was no avoiding it’s presence any longer.
The half smile and clouded eyes pulls at Lethy’s heart. It pulled her back to days when she herself had been “happy enough”, to a time where she was just “making it”. Her amethyst eyes are focused on the Appaloosa mare, thick with understanding. She nods and gives a low hum at Eurwens explanation of the mountain. She could empathize with the rose gold girl, she thinks of her as a girl not because she is young and naive, but because it had seemed forever ago since Lethy had felt just as lost as her.
She listens intently to the unspoken pieces, the questions and confusion. She watched with peaceful eyes at the stillness of the situation, the uneasiness of her eyes. ”It is always hard to live with and accept those unanswered questions and feelings we so desperately deserve.” she said in quiet tones. ”Walk with me?” She had always found that walking through her home, the aging trees, and the new that settled beneath its protective cover always eased her mind and helped her process things better. When I went to the mountain the fairies asked me to talk to others who had had gifts bestowed upon them. Some of those gifts had changed them, I was given the task to search those changes out or lack of. It seemed like an impossible task, who would willingly admit that their treasured gifts had changed them into something they didn’t like? That was the true purpose, I think, for the fairies asking such thing of me.” she but her lip and glanced towards the winter sun that broke through with such apathetic energy.
”It isn’t just the gifts of this place that change people. We have just as much control over the changes of people as we do the changes of life, but we have to learn to live with them regardless... everyone does.” She ends almost with a whisper, her thoughts drifting to those days of change and of struggle before Beqanna, the days of her arrival, her attempt to leave it all behind in the river, and with out any warning the months proceeding Aten’s abandonment along with her son. But if @[Eurwen] were to ask her she would not so much talk about the struggles of those days but the years that followed when she learned to live with where life had left her and how she continues on every day, against all odds, when she should of been gone long ago.
The secret of walking on water is knowing where the rocks lie
Eurwen
Lethy understands, and that feeling on it’s own is a huge relief. It’s not that Eurwen has troubles with what is, really - it is what isn’t, what’s left behind, that follows her into the night. There are no reasons she can see, nothing to justify what’s wrong in her life, and perhaps that is why she finds it so hard to patch herself up, to deal with life as it is. Of course, somewhere deep down, her rational side will tell her that that is the nature of life, that things aren’t always going the way one hopes or plans. And some things aren’t the way they seem.
Lethy has deal with losses too, the inexplicable disappearance of her mate. She remembers too late how close the other mare must be to falling into a similar pit, how much grief she might unearth. She, dealing with the same thing, she, having dealt with literal monsters, she, who knows almost everything that’s in the earth, should know better.
But her friend surprises her, and for that the pink-dotted mare is thankful. A small, more real smile reaches her eyes, though not her lips, and she nods as the buckskin asks her to walk with her. For a moment, they are silent and there is peace. At first, the Matriarch talks about gifts, and the rose-goldenmaned mare does not entirely follow. She is in no mood to question her however, so she waits for Lethy to get to the point she is making.
Learning to live with change, she says, and Wen swallows hard. Her throat feels dry, and she nods, but the sadness is still in her eyes. She supposes that Izora Lethia has guessed the truth behind her quest, but she is no closer to any solution than she was before - although, perhaps, there is a path in the dark that she can follow. But which route to take, and where would that lead?
She stops, both on her metaphorical crossing as on a real one. Her eyes dart left and right, then back to the unnatural violet of her friend’s. ”But how?” she whispers. ”How do you live with something that is not there?” Her voice is thick, and she’s unsure whether it is sorrow or anger that makes the changes in her throat. She doesn’t think it matters, though. [b]”How do you do it?” she finally follows up. If only there were a simple trick, something to soothe her mind. Is that what Lethy does? Or is it something else?
