"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
Last week she hadn't seen a dead man or his blood. Last week she hadn't met Quell.
Quell had nearly taken up all of her thoughts after she returned to Tephra. At first it didn't seem strange that the Ischia boy wouldn't leave her mind, but when she woke up for the second morning thinking about his wings and the way his lips looked when he was angry, she wondered if she had what her sisters called a crush.
But there had only been a few days where she got to enjoy these new feelings, enjoy the way she would catch herself humming little songs and smiling to herself while she thought about crossing the sandbar again.
Then she had followed the threads of Isilya's magic, and they lead her to the scene of an execution, and her world had changed again. Suddenly she spending her time trying to think about Quell, the stars, the clouds, anything to get her mind off the way the crystal tree held the old stallion up, off the blood and the corpse. She had felt sick since she saw it.
Her little brow is furrowed when she sees one of her sisters grazing in the distance, and she walks towards her with her head full of the images she cant get rid of.
11-03-2020, 08:04 PM (This post was last modified: 11-03-2020, 08:07 PM by Julia.)
Julia is, perhaps, the quietest of her sisters.
Laia tames the skies with her wings and Locheed is fierce with her spikes and scales. Julia loves and adores them for all their wild differences. But where that leaves her is something that she is still figuring out. Her days are spent mostly walking with their sire, Raul, and learning what she can of the Tephran flora and fauna; the painted yearling has already started to think that she'd like to follow in his hoofsteps someday. Julia thinks that she'd like to heal, to make flowers blossom, and to help make wounds fade.
(There are days that Julia thinks she would like to tackle the entire world but she knows better than to try and carry the weight of everything. Better to start with her family, better to try with Tephra first.)
While Julia is quiet, the footfalls of her youngest sister are as well. The Tephran lifts her head from her morning meal and spies the apricot filly approaching her. She is close with her sisters; they have no secrets and so Julia knows most of their thoughts - stumbles across them. Her gift of telepathy with her family is unpracticed and sometimes she doesn't know what is thought or said, especially when all four girls cluster together. While she can't discern exactly what has @[Starsonder] so troubled, Julia can see the trouble clear enough on her younger sister's apricot face.
She smiles in hopes of lifting the dark furrows she sees gathering on her Starsonder's brow like summer storms.
"And where have you been today, little wanderer?" she playfully asks when the young filly has come within earshot. Julia moves towards her sister, reaching out to gently touch her cheek if she'd allow it.
Sometimes Julia just seemed to know things. Things like how she was feeling or thoughts she thought she hadn't said out loud. It had made her love her sister even more, to feel so known, she had never had a thought to hide before.
The playful tone that greets her would normally incite a flurry of happy words and a quick recount of the things she had done and seen in the last few hours, but today, she barely lifts her eyes. Starsonder shrugs, her narrow shoulders rising and falling without much commitment. But the touch on her cheek is an immediate comfort, and her indifference seems to lift. She leans into the gesture, then steps forward to fall against her sister's side. Her withers are a few hands below Julia's, and the older girl's shoulder is soft and warm against the filly's cheek as she nestles her face into the tan fur.
"When's mom coming back?" Her little voice is gravely and muffled, doing nothing to hide the way she's feeling. She hadn't minded when Warlight left, she had even looked forward to the change of pace and enjoyed the freedom she had found in the first few days. But then so much had changed, and she had begun to wonder if the bad thing would have been prevented if the antlered warrior had just stayed home. Her mother's absence wasn't truly at the heart of Starsonder's troubles, but it was something easy to articulate, and she didn't know how to say that she had seen a dead man.
11-13-2020, 05:32 PM (This post was last modified: 11-13-2020, 05:35 PM by Julia.)
Julia catches her younger sister's hesitance with concern that shapes a line on her brow and causes her pale lips to tug downward. It wasn't like Starsonder to be so melancholy. The youngest member of their little family was usually bubbling like a brook with stories or as bright-eyed as a full moon with some discovery.
But Starsonder has nothing like that to share today.
The only thing that lifts between the sisters is the rise and fall of the apricot girl's lithe shoulders.
Her younger sister comes alongside her and leans into Julia's lanky shape in a way that is far more familiar than Starsonder's indifference. The gesture is a familial one that has been repeated from mother to father, sister to sister, mother to daughter since Julia had been wobbly-legged newborn. It was an expression of love and solidarity in their family and Julia has never thought twice about embracing any member this way; this action comes as naturally as breathing to the painted girl.
Cocking a hindleg, Julia situates herself in a way that @[Starsonder] could rest against her. "I don't know," she tells her younger sister honestly, and the buckskin girl looks up to the sky. She had wondered the same thing and the longer that Warlight's absence went on, the more pronounced it became. "There are many rounds in the Alliance," Julia explains. "And if Mama had to fight in more than one, it could take even longer." That was how it was explained to her.
She turns her slender head to gently nudge her younger sibling on her peach-colored haunch. "You know she'll come back as soon as she can," Julia says. It was a truth that she whole-heartedly believed (but then Julia has gotten her conviction because Warlight went to the Mountain and returned). Realizing this, the splashed girl smiles and follows with a more playful nudge. "So you should be having adventures so you have plenty of stories to tell her when she gets back."
Without knowing that her sister has already gone to Ischia, Julia brightens with an idea.
She hadn't expected a definitive answer, so the one Julia gives her is not a surprise. Warlight had told all three of her daughters the same unsatisfactory information when she left, and the apricot filly knew that Julia didn't know any more than she did. But what she truly needed more than answers, she is given.
Starsonder falls into that cozy, brown coat, and she feels the storm of her emotions begin to quiet. She pulls warmth and comfort from her sister's steady side, a tangible reminder of the support her family gave her - even if her existence was the uncomfortable proof of something terrible. With her head of her shoulder, she feels the vibrations of Julia's words, and it doesn't matter what she is saying in that comforting tone.
But when she hears the word adventure her young heart beats a little faster. She had ignored the first playful nudge, pushing her face harder against it's soft support, but the second brings her out of her hiding-place with perked ears.
Despite the way heavy tears are set like diamonds on her lower lases, her amber eyes sparkle, and a smile quivers on her lips as she pulls away to look up into Julia's reassuring face.
"Where would we go?" Her voice is hopeful but quiet, barely above a whisper. The world was hers to explore if Julia wanted to come along! She is instantly ready to be whisked away; she would go anywhere her big-sister suggested.
12-31-2020, 05:44 PM (This post was last modified: 12-31-2020, 05:45 PM by Julia.)
Julia's short existence in Tephra has been happy.
There have been no real troubles (that she is aware of). There have been times that she thinks she can pick up on something between her parents - some flickering of tense emotion - but Raul and Warlight have concealed that from their girls. For Julia, it never goes beyond her brow creasing in concern or the deepening of her light blue eyes as she watched them.
The buckskin girl lifts her head and looks behind her, peering down at her younger sister fondly.
What she shares with her younger sister is something that Julia herself believes so this isn't a lie. She doesn't doubt that Warlight will come back. Their mother had conquered (as Julia innocently believes) the Mountain so what could the Alliance do to their two-toned dam that she hadn't already encountered? On nights that Starsonder's elder sister stays up too late, she even imagines that their antlered mother could win the fabled competition.
(And who better to know the depth and scope of dreaming than the descendants of Kagerus and Solace?)
Sonder's tears are waiting for Julia as she gazes at her younger sister, crowning the lashes of her apricot sibling like jewels. There is the trepidation of a hesitant smile waiting for her as well and Julia does her best to coax the rest of it from the yearling.
She blinks, trying to think of the best setting for a grand adventure.
It comes to her in the blazing orange-and-gold fire hues of Sylva. The kingdom isn't far from Tephra and though it has a long and menacing history, there is nothing about it in recent events. It is Pangea that they should be wary of; the fire-bringers that dwell in the East (and even they are reportedly their friends).
A playful smile tugs on her pale lips and Julia reaches out to teasingly pull on a strand of Sonder's coral mane. "What about Sylva?" she offers with glittering eyes, a secret adventure already playing in her mind's eye. "We could leave now and be back before Papa even notices we're gone."
