"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
It had been hard to leave his side that long-ago day, harder than she expected, but she knew that she would wake to empty sockets and the graveyard grin, and that she could not bear it. Pretending came with a cost, breaking the illusion meant her breaking heart. So did running, of course, but that pain she knew so well, a familiar hurt she could never stop pressing against like tonguing a sore place on the roof of her mouth. When his eyes closed, she'd wrapped herself in shadows as she had done to him, and she stepped out of them again at the other side of the stygian deepwood, breathless and glassy-eyed but not alone.
The darkness is her home, even though she had known the world around her was dying - did die, no matter what Cassian may say - Beryl had not felt fear when the sun was lost. In the darkness, she is never alone, even if her companions are not the usual sort. It's rare that she molds the shades into recognizable shapes, she likes them best as they are, the way their shapes reflect where she stole them from, and the time of day. Some are dappled and thin like leaves, some thick and obscure like the ancient darkness lurking within Nerine's granite sea-caves. In the morning they are wispy and nebulous like smoke and at night fat and luxurious as well-fed cats, but now it is noon and their edges are tight and knife-sharp, and if she concentrates on them just so they can cut through any blade or branch or bone in her way.
Everything is in her way right now. Though she cannot see it, she can feel the sweat that darkens her neck and trembling sides from sun-gold to almost chestnut, and when she swings her head moodily to bite, she can see how the children have moved within her, unwrapping from one another, prepared to escape the prison of her ribcage.
It has, to put it mildly, been a distressing pregnancy. She has seen with every passing day how they change, each blade of rib, each curled shell of their hooves, the vertebrae all in a line, like small stones pressed together to mark a path in the earth. The children baffle her, Beryl marvels at how they prove and disprove Cassian's theory of a living world - they must be alive, because they grow, and yet they are just bones. Like her. Like everyone.
In a well-protected copse, she beds down in soft moss and the shadows curl around them with their woodsmoke voices hissing soft warnings to intruders that cannot hear them but will no doubt see the unnatural way they swell together like ocean waves, the way those dark teeth and blades and strangling tendrils reach outward. Stay away. The Mother of Bones and her children do not seek company. Within the walls of darkness that she's built, shades drift tenderly over still damp bodies, over the tangled jigsaw puzzle of her children curled up against one another.
"Blackwell," she says softly to the shadows as they brush cautiously against the colt. She can feel their skepticism.
fire, they say. They like the filly better and bend fondly against her.
At first her world is darkness. It is comfortable and familiar, an old friend she would call on fondly for the entirety of her life. When the light comes, it is unkind and cold. She knows immediately that she does not like it. Not at all.
But there is warmth beside her, and then the shadows return, curling around her like lost and lonely friends. She hums in happiness to have them back. To know that they had not abandoned her.
When she blinks her eyes open, the world is bleary and indistinct. But in the moment, it hardly matters. She recognizes the weight of her twin beside her, stirring against her. Poking her with his hooves. No, she doesn’t like that. Not even a little bit. So she pokes him with hers.
The other is steadier and flails far less. She likes that much better. As she squirms, haloed head butting against warm and golden skin, she recognizes the presence as safe and familiar. As home. As mother, though she does not have the words for any of this yet. She presses closer, humming another happy sound low in her throat.
Perhaps the light had been cold and unfriendly, but to finally see her mother’s face makes it all worthwhile.
Cassian stumbles to a halt just outside the wall of shadows, uncommon frown tugging at his lips. Then, he sighs. He had been searching for what felt like ages, and now, when he’s certain he’s finally found her, she has surrounded herself by very angry looking shadows. He’s beginning to think she was avoiding him.
Fine then, he would wait. He’s very good at being patient.
Which is of course a lie. He’s terrible at being patient. After all, hadn’t he just trekked all over heck and back looking for her? When he had finally gone to Nerine, he had found some… interesting things. Or rather, someone interesting. Noel had introduced him (though first he had been surprised and delighted to learn about her triplets. Which quite possibly delayed him for a day or two). Anyway, after a rather flummoxing conversation (involving being asked if he knew his siblings thought he was pretty tasty???), he’d been rather unceremoniously pointed in this direction.
Truth be told, he’s still baffled about the whole encounter. But, as it turns out, the rather strange guardian of Nerine was probably right. So, with another sigh, he settles in to wait.
He’s not quite sure how long it is - or how many branches he’s flung or leaves he’s shredded - but eventually he falls asleep leaning against a tree trunk, still waiting. Very patiently, he might add. Never mind that the trees are practically denuded to the approximate height he can reach on tippy toes. That doesn’t count.
06-03-2021, 11:28 AM (This post was last modified: 06-03-2021, 11:31 AM by Beryl.)
The children are skeletons, dead before they ever lived, and she breathes their names into their bones, apologetic. They deserve a better mother than her. She knows this is true already, because she cannot see past the delicate curls of those still-soft skeletons, because she forgets, so easily, that there is fleshinvisible to her deceitful eyes. Iska rises first, fierce, with shadows collecting at her feet and the sight of it makes her vision swim, panic rising like cold water, filling her lungs. The filly nurses and Beryl chokes.
No.
Every day that Beryl has lived, almost since the beginning, she has lived in fear, in anger, in regret. Every step has taken her in the wrong direction, but they all started with that first thoughtless step into the shadows, with thoughts of the mythical Pangea her mother had painted dancing bright in her mind. Perhaps Iska, seeking only darkness, warmth, and her mother, would go nowhere but back to the golden mare's side, but Beryl finds herself suddenly unwilling to flirt with that risk. The black walls are thrown asunder, letting the forest's dappled spring light shine through, finally waking the colt who protests softly from his place on the ground and tucks his head against his chest as if to hide his eyeless skull from the sunlight shining through his shoulder blades.
All but one patch of darkness recedes. He should be bones like the rest, but the shadows recognize him as they surge past his sleeping shape and cling to still, black, skin, like streamers of fog catching on leaves. Behind her, the colt has finally found his feet - and his sister, who he nips at with pink, toothless gums, ignoring the slightly blurred shapes of his parents just ahead - and if Cassian were awake, he might see the way she steps forward as if to lunge, sharp-toothed and cat-eyed, when she sees the figure there, waiting. The lioness is there in an instant, in the red and bright anger that floods her vision when she sees the trespasser, but he is saved by the darkness now rolling away from him again, revealing bones lit faintly by his crooked halo.
"Cassian." A single word, and there's a storm in her breast where the anger is fading. Regret blooms like a blade in her side. She wants to apologize - for disappearing, for avoiding him, for there being children. None of this is his fault, it's all her, it's always her. She wants to tell him that he doesn't have to worry about them, but the words never find her tongue, stopped up by the well of relief that he's found her - found them - and maybe she doesn't have to be alone.
"I--" her words stagger in her throat, unsure, not ready to assume that this is anything more than an accident, that he'll stay, that she'll stay, "I'm glad your here."
The shadows retreat with a swiftness that would have startled him had he been awake. But it isn’t until they brush past him that he stirs, brown eyes blinking open in confusion. For a minute he doesn’t quite remember where he is. Which, to be honest, isn’t really anything new. He frequently fell asleep in strange places and woke up confused.
He stares at her blankly as she leaps instantly into protectiveness, features becoming vaguely feline before she recognizes him. It’s his name on her lips that truly jerks him awake however.
Straightening from the tree abruptly, an almost sheepish grin begins to steal over his lips in the moments before he glances past her to find the two small forms antagonizing one another. The colt had stepped forward to gum toothlessly at his sister. She had responded in kind, little ears flattening as she gummed him right back. For a breathless heartbeat, Cassian can only stare uncomprehendingly.
They are both perfect, the colt with the twin circlets crowning his head as flames curl across his cheek and the filly with shadows wreathing her ears. Heart climbing slowly up his throat, Cassian glances uncertainly between the twins and Beryl until her name finally manages to escape his lips on a question. “Beryl?”
He’s hard pressed to know exactly how to react in the moment. Excitement wars with the knowledge he should probably exercise at least some caution. He looks at Beryl again. “Are they…?” He doesn’t quite manage to finish it before shifting forward to press an ill-thought-out but gentle kiss to the hollow just below Beryl’s cheek. Then he glances at the twins again, delight visible in every line of his dark frame, before returning his gaze to their golden mother to ask, “Can I?”
Her heart is racing in her chest, thudding so loudly in her ears that she barely hears his questions, and her thoughts are skipping miles ahead with a million answers to other questions nobody has asked at all. She's lost in that whirlwind until his lips brush a kiss against her throat and everything goes quiet. Her eyes shut and instead of bones and death and horror, Beryl finds herself in Cassian's comforting lie where everything is normal, just dark. She has never been uneasy in the dark, but somehow, this blindness is different. Maybe it's the constant nagging in the back of her mind that one of her realities is a lie, and nothing in her life has prepared her to accept that the truth might be the better choice. She clings to her bitterness, it's almost as dear a friend as the snaking darkness staring back at her from every crack and crevice when she opens her eyes again. The lines of his bones make her heart twist, but she nods, a small, nearly imperceptible thing, not trusting the thickness of her tongue to shape even as simple a word as yes.
Her haunches swing away and she turns back to the pair of foals, barely seeing them through the haze of her pounding heart (and Beryl marvels at how it can be so loud, and not there at all.) They move forward to greet Cassian, bold as children often are, but if there is anything of curiosity on their faces, anything joyful or serious, she cannot see it, and there's a new sadness blooming in her heart. If she's right, they are dead, and if Cassian is, she will never see their faces, never see their smiles or frowns. Unshed tears burn in her eyes but she hides them, reaching out to rest her chin against his broad back so that he doesn't see. It's harder to hide the crack in her voice.
"You don't have to do this," it's an offering, an escape, children grow up so quickly, anyway. She's been alone since she was a yearling; since the Isle burned. How long are they really going to follow her?
"If you don't want to."
She's more than capable of keeping them safe.
Probably.
Right?
In an instant, she is searching her mind for a time when she has ever kept anyone safe. She couldn't save the Isle, she couldn't save Brennen or Nerine, she didn't even succeed in keeping herself safe, but somehow, suddenly, now, she is going to Do Better? The audacity of the thought shocks her back into reeling silence.
When she turns to the two small forms behind her, Cassian readily accepts her implied permission, stepping forward to greet the pair. There is a foolish grin on his lips, matching the soft gleam in his dark eyes. The filly is still eyeing her brother moodily, but she would not be left behind in greeting him. Cassian cannot seem to find words through the thickness in his throat, but he brushes his mouth along the tufts of their dark manes and presses kisses to the curve of their foreheads.
He had never really considered what being a father meant before. It had been hard to, with no father figure of his own to look up to. But he had always found children delightfully amusing. Now though, this is different. Very different than he would ever have imagined. And infinitely more wonderful.
When Beryl settles her chin across his spine, Cassian lifts his head, twisting his neck so he can peer at her. From this angle he cannot see much above her neck, but he grins at her regardless. When her words whisper across his skin however, he is a bit taken aback.
For a moment, he simply stares, an unconscious frown beginning to replace the grin. Then, shivering the skin along his back by way of warning, he shifts, pivoting his haunches around until he is standing beside the twin rather than facing them. The better to stare at her. The pair beside him, so unconsciously mirroring one another, glance between them. Had she been able to see it, it would have been striking just how much they in turn mirrored their father in their matching shades of black.
“I want to,” he replies firmly then, perfectly serious for what may be the first time in his entire life. After having met them, he couldn’t imagine not being there for them. Couldn’t imagine not watching them grow, watching them play and frolic. Watching them become adults in their own right one day.
And then it occurs to him that perhaps this isn’t about what he wants. He tilts his head, suddenly uncertain. “Unless… you don’t… want…” He can’t quite seem to finish the sentence, but it’s meaning is undeniably clear.
06-11-2021, 06:04 PM (This post was last modified: 06-11-2021, 06:04 PM by Blackwell.)
The boy's skin sparks when Iska nips back at him, even though he is not afraid of her, even though, like him, she has no teeth to back up the grumpy tilt of her ears - oh those ears! They dance like... like... well, he doesn't know what they dance like, but they entrance him all the same, fringed with the curls of her black mane and the ringlets of shadow swirling above her head. Like a blackfly, he reaches for them, persistent, barely paying attention to the golden figure of their mother until she moves aside. That is when, at last, the colt stops to peer at the shadow moving closer.
Shadows; they may not embrace him, but they are not unfamiliar. His world has been the shadow of sleep until now, he was born into a bed of darkness with a sister who wears it like a crown. Bicolored eyes turn up to Cassian, their focus still soft, the pupils over-large, slow to adjust to the brightness of daylight, even what little filters through the new spring leaves above. He steps forward clumsily, with too much knee and a wildly switching tail, and the start of a grin on red-gold lips. When the black stallion turns to look at Beryl, he looks, too, ears pressed forward and head cocked to one side, but he is not following their conversation and grows bored quickly. There is so much else to see!
Beryl watches in strained silence while Blackwell turns his attention to his sire's knee, nipping playfully at it, likely to Iska's relief. She doesn't know how she expected this conversation to go, but this is not it. It's getting away from her so quickly - though she did so little to keep control that it's really no surprise - and the conclusion Cassian leaps to leaves her breathless. She's never known him to be at a loss for words.
Heat flushes up behind her eyes as she berates herself. Of course he thinks she doesn't want him around. What reason has she given him to think that she wants him at her side? She has attacked him and run from him, and hid from him at every opportunity, and now that he's found her - found them - she shows him the door. Another example of her own poor judgment, it makes her nostrils flare and the corners of her mouth curve downward, embarrassed.
"That isn't what I meant," she says softly, turning away even though she can't see the hurt and confusion on his face. Her heart feels like a tree encased in ice, ready to burst into a thousand splinters, ready to explode with a thunder that rattles the entire forest, but until then, silent, waiting. In the silence, she chides herself. There are worse things than this, worse things than finding out someone wants to stay with you - but now, in the warm, bright spring, she can't think of them.
"I want you to stay." The words are muffled, whispered into her shoulder, but she looks up at him again, curled ears askance, uncertain. It's not a lie but how long before she does something that hurts him. Again. How long before he leaves her, too? Hope wars with fear. Blackwell has abandoned Cassian's knees for... his tail, perhaps? She cannot see what the colt is chewing on.
"I don't want you to feel like you have to." That uncertainty is still brewing in Beryl's chest, but not when she considers the safety of the twins. She can't bring herself to think that she will fail them as she has so many others. She doesn't deserve them, not after everything, not after Lilliana, but she is resolved that Blackwell and Iska will never know a moment of fear that she can prevent - and among the shadows of the Deepwood, she has significant power. Her voice hardens into a snarl. "I can do this."
Iska flicks her ears in annoyance, eyeing her brother askance as he moves clumsily, nose lifting to poke at the shadows ringing her ears. The filly of course has no clue what he is reaching for, entirely unaware of the dark halo circling her head. So she is annoyed, reaching out to nip at his cheek in return. But when mama moves and the man she had been blocking them from seeing steps forward, she is immediately intrigued.
She frowns as she peers up at him, happily ignoring Blackwell for the moment. The way mama doesn’t seem to mind him, the familiar way he greets them, Iska knows he must be someone important to them. Their father, though she doesn’t quite yet have the concept of father settled in her mind. But whatever the case, she likes him almost as much as she likes mama.
Unlike her twin, Iska remains, brown gaze shifting curiously between the two adults when Cassian swings around to face Beryl. Though the words are still a bit muddled and jumbled, she listens with great curiosity, trying very hard to piece together their meaning. It’s quite confusing to her young mind, but she does manage to piece together that they seem to be confused too. Confused about whether he should stay.
Iska does not like this. Not at all. Stomping one small hoof a bit huffily (though to an onlooker, it must look far more like she’s about to topple over), she inches close to the one-who-would-be-father and bites his shoulder toothlessly. As though that would be sufficient to make him stay.
--
Cassian, momentarily bemused by the way Blackwell is gumming at his knee, dips his head to brush his muzzle briefly over his shoulder. When he returns his gaze to Beryl, his warm eyes are immediately more somber, still uncertain if she would tell him to stay or go.
It isn’t until the words leave her lips - I want you to stay - that he breathes a sigh of relief. Almost instantly a smile begins to wreath his lips again, though it is stayed by the pain and uncertainty on her golden features. Though she tries to mask it in her shoulder, it is too visible in every line. He barely notices his son chewing on his tail or his daughter’s stamping hooves. At least, until she gums his shoulder.
Surprised he looks down at her stubborn features - something she had undoubtedly inherited from her mother - before dropping a gentle kiss onto her upturned nose. Beryl’s snarled statement draws his attention immediately back to her however.
He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t even think when he moves forward to draw her into an embrace. He presses her close, neck tucking over her as he presses his muzzle to her shoulder. “Of course you can,” he says into her skin. And he believes it whole-heartedly. He had never once doubted her capabilities. A faint smile begins to curve his lips once more as he continues, “And I’m sure you’ll learn soon enough that I rarely do things I don’t want to, so you can believe me when I say I want to stay.” He might have ended there, but he can’t seem to help the nearly inaudible emphasis that escapes. “Very much.”
