"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
he setting sun bathes her dark coat in lilac and tangerine orange. It flickers right like the bonfires where her mother and father first met, bonfires where she would come to meet her own father. The forest was still bright with the colors of spring, an overwhelming spectrum of green, pink, white, yellow. The forest, it would seem, compensating for the dreariness it no doubt faced during those harsh winter months. It is the sight of lilac and lilac alone that drags Elliana’s blue eyes away from the path, worn down by decades of other footfalls treading along just as she does now.
Her mother had always loved how lilac only blossomed after a harsh. She said it was the earth healing itself, like she would heal those. Funny, how after all this time, all this fighting, she too would become a healer like her mother. The perfect combination between her mother and her father. The ability to fix, but only by using what her mother feared most and what her father was made from.
Those dreaded, dreaded shadows.
Elli has always been more comfortable in the darkness. Ever since she was small and her spidery, baby legs were too long for her body, and her face was dark and unmarked by worry. The only break in her own shadowy skin, the heart on her forehead, the leg dipped in white, and a crescent moon on her shoulder.
Before her mother (torn asunder by the death of her brother) was no longer capable of caring for Elliana as she deserved then. But Elliana, she really only returned the favor didn't she?
She feels lost, and yet she cannot place exactly why. It's a reoccurring feeling of loneliness that swarms like mosquitos to her blood. She cannot outrun it, but she doesn't try very hard. It’s only when the itchiness beings that she ponders actually doing something about it. She walks until it stops feeling like her feet are sinking, she hums until her ears stop their ringing, and clears her mind until she cannot remember a single moment except for now.
It almost feels like Delumine here, the very first place she had ever fled to. And if she were thinking of something, if she were remembering anything, it might have been a tale of twin unicorns, who gave her both a kiss and a scar. The kiss atop her head, the cut of the horn against her heart. A rose instead of a heart she was promised, and Elliana would think it good.
For rose’s have thorns.
And what a fortress it would be.
06-06-2021, 07:38 PM (This post was last modified: 06-06-2021, 07:41 PM by Aela.)
YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela comes from Taiga. Her golden coat is lathered in sweat. Her fine mane - normally so well-kept - is windswept and wild. As she continues to travel away from the North, as she remembers what she has found, the whites of her eyes manage to show from time to time. She didn't mean to find it - and she certainly hadn't meant to hurl the memory at the Northern King, but Nashua had infuriated her.
Who was he to tell her that she wasn't to come to Taiga?
Who was he to command her anything?
The two siblings had come together somewhere along the rocky Taigan coast. She had thought that he might be like the others siblings she had met - like Reave, like Gale - but the striped pegasus had wanted nothing to do with the sister his mother never brought home. The one that Lilliana had asked Nashua and Yanhua to keep away from. 'You are not welcome here,' the young King had decreed harshly. And Aela - who only follows mortal law when it suits her - had given the pegasus a slow, saccharine smile. She had taken a brazen step towards him, relieved that she atleast didn't have to give the precedence that she cared.
She stepped forward and fell into a memory.
It isn't far from where Aela stood in the present. The peninsula was surrounded on three sides by crashing waves and yet the silence was the loudest thing of all. 'What happened, Lilli?' a voice says. It is concrete; hard. It leaves no room for excuses. The waves continue to break along the shore and as the silver figure stares at her daughter - one that was missing a child and showing too many ribs - she gets no answer. So Aletta resumes the role of Regent, the bearing of the Queen that had ruled alongside Valerio. "Lilliana." She says, wielding her tongue like a sword and cutting straight to the heart of the red mare.
Slowly, she turns her refined head to look at her mother.
Her blue eyes had been dull and listless before; the light gone from them. But what burns there now is terrible - so terrible - that even Aletta recoils and steps back. 'I wish Frostbane would have torn my throat out that day,' Lilliana says, wild and gone in her grief. 'I wish that Cazador would have reduced me to ash.' It takes the gray mare a moment to understand. 'I wish I would have stayed in Culloden.' The dawning finally comes: her daughter speaks of the tragedies they had suffered in Beyond. Events beyond their control that sent so many lives reeling. 'I would have wished for anything else.' She finally says and that is when she breaks. 'Anything but this.' The ice in her voice thaws but there is no warmth left behind.
There is nothing but Aletta's blazing anger.
That memory had been powerful - potent enough that it been shared between both brother and sister - and when Aela looked up, Nashua's green eyes were full of their grandmother's wrath. 'Get out', he had told her, thinking that what she had done was intentional. For once, it hadn't been. The palomino had managed to share a few memories of their birth mother out of spite - pressing them into the grieving corners of his mind - and then fled from Taiga, away from what she had encountered there.
Its because the palomino is still running that she doesn't see the other. They almost collide (and wouldn't that be cataclysmic?), but Aela is as surefooted as she is lovely. "Are you blind?" she seethes at the other girl (Aela had obviously been at fault; in another life, these cousins might have been best friends as their mothers had been. In this one, Aela is merely furious for her having her path blocked.)
And there is nobody quite as ruthless as Aela to those who get in her way.
he dreams of water, of how it falls, the plop of hot drops on the desert, the hollow pits they make in the sand; how the parched land drinks them instantly. Greedy, starving. Maybe it had not been a dream, not a dream, not a nightmare. Elliana lives in a sort of nighttime purgatory, keeping herself from both dancing through Delumine’s forest and from the walls of Terrastella. Either one brings her too close, too close to a place where her dream walker guardian could find her.
It is strange. That the thing she remembers most about Terrastella is the shadows, and not the shadows of the buildings, but the shadows that lingered out by the cliffs, beneath every blade of grass, sitting stoically beneath the trees. She remembers laying there for hours, watching them move and change, grow and shrink.
This might be a lie (she is not sure, she is never sure) because the things she may remember most is her brother. She remembers seeing James for the first time, and Elliana, beautiful, dark Elliana, she had smiled like he was a gift just for her. “Oh, he’s so precious,” she had said, grinning quietly at her mother. She bowed her head down to peer into the blue eyes of James. Maybe she saw it when they didn’t, what wild changes he would bring into their lives (what changes, what terrible, terrible, she could have never guessed), but maybe she didn’t, and if she did, she never said so. ”Happy birthday, little brother.”
It is a collision brought in gold and white and blonde and blue eyes and Elliana’s own eyes turn from a mirror into glaciers as the only thought that passes through her is her mother. Elliana is not so blatant with emotion as the blonde girl is, it is hidden behind a steadfast stone face she inherited from the shadow of her birth father. Behind that stone skin blazes a fire of blue, behind that marble mouth hide gnashing teeth, behind the granite of her brow hides a furrow so deep that flowers ache to take root, behind those crystal eyes hide glass shattering and splintering and flying in all directions.
The stone might have crumbled, the marble might have broken, the granite might have split, and the crystal might cracked.
But it held.
Because this was not Elena.
She is too relieved to notice anything else except the collision of knowledge that rattles her brain. Daughter. Lilliana. Fire. Child. Elena.
Elliana pushes through and throws blue eyes up and into her direction. She is older, not as old as Po, not as old as her parents, but older than herself, older than Aeneas, Hilde, even Maybird.
In another life, there is a version of this story that doesn't play out like this.
There is a version where the pair of cousins would meet, and perhaps they had been raised as their mothers before them had been, together. They might have been raised beside a lake and the two of them would have been raised on stories that told tales about horses turned into stars; about a waterfall that brought prophecies of the future; about Guardians and what it meant to be a Light in a world gone Dark.
Perhaps there is an alternate universe where the two of them had been reared together, and in that place, perhaps they learned the importance of the blood they shared.
But Aela had been born a girl to a fallen mother and a Cursed father. Lilliana had been so broken by the time that she came along, that she thought it was a kindness to keep the girl away from all the sharp edges of her family lines. The young mare knows that many can claim kinship with her. Her brothers have proven to be a never-ending obstacle - one emerging after the other - and the sole sister that she knows of is to like Lilliana to be of use to anyone.
Bumping into this mare is a reckoning, and the memories that bloom into her mind rattle Aela.
She knows nothing of the woman that she so strongly resembles. (That had been something that had broken her mother, but Aela had never learned about the Aunt from Beyond that carried a gold coat and blue eyes as she did.) The Seneschal only knows that this mare dares to stare so brazenly at her.
"Would you like to be?" she threatens and takes a bold step towards the other blue-eyed creature. Fire beckons from beneath her skin and the sparks that emerge by her white socks summon a trail of flame behind her as she approaches the small mare that had gotten in her way.
t is almost how funny how girls follow their mothers. Even those girls like Elliana, like Aela who strive to be everything but their mothers’ daughters. There is something inescapable about blood, there is some hard-coded fate in the double helix. Too small to see, but if you feel for it, fumble in the dark like like teen lovers, you'll find it if you're lucky.
(and maybe
when you hear the river say your name,
it is just your blood babbling in your ears)
But even if you feel its presence you can't escape it, the strings of fate. The fork in the road is an illusion. All paths lead here.
In the other story, in the worlds that are hidden in the dark places between stars. Forgotten and half-swallowed. There is no Elliana because in this other story, there is no Tenebrae. In a perfect world, a perfect universe, there can be no Tenebrae and Elena because they were anything but perfect. And incapable of making a perfect daughter. Aela instead knows James. She knows James and Ava and Altair. They romp and play and chase and laugh. They run through the glistening lake until near dark, until they shiver and shake, and wind up where they always do, nestled together as family.
But fate is fate and it will do as it sees fit.
And even in this perfect world, Aela may stare into the shadows just long enough to see a pair of blue eyes that look all too much like her own—staring back at her.
Elliana spends most of her time alone. She likes it this way though. But being alone is the perfect opportunity for fate to find you. So it should not be strange that Aela finds her in the woods, so like how the wolf finds little red riding hood. But Aela bares no fangs and Elli wears no cloak.
She smiles, an odd, brief smile when the older girl blazes at her like blue flames.
No.
Is all she says.
Because Elliana has seen fire before. Had seen it the night she met her father. Had leapt into it, and raced it, had cast flower petals from her godfather’s crown into it. She learned something from that night—
But she will be the one that makes the Fates bow to her. She will be the one to twine the threads of her life. She will be the one who will weave the threads of her own story. Aela has spent far too much time between gods and monsters and all the havoc they wreak to allow something as fickle as Fate to make the choices for her.
Not when she spends her time amongst Magicians, among those who can see the possible things yet to come and those who could shape it if Fate itself rebelled against the path that Aela intended.
This girl is odd. That is the first that catches her attention. Aela becomes fire and flame - an inferno that approaches her - that could scorch her skin and scald out her eyes. She knows that she could blind the other; the darker palomino should recognize that threat clearly enough as it blazes across her skin. Should she keep the other mare planted before her in fear, she wonders, or should she drain her of all emotions that she might beg for the pain of her flames?
(Aela is nothing like her mother. The warmth she would share with Elliana is pain that she wouldn't hesitate to inflict on another; she doesn't hesitate where her mother would have faltered.)
Aela is curious, though, and while she burns like a wildfire, the shadows that curl from the other's skin (like Radiance) prompt her to ask, "Not afraid of my light, Shadow-Weaver?"
lliana, like Aela, will never understand her parents. Elena had become too far gone, drowned in the waters of her responsibility to her Court and so ruined by the love that she so craved. By her adoptive father, who Elli cannot depend upon because he knew the truth and he painted the picture of the perfect father. And her biological father, who she knows so little about, but knows enough, just enough, to not be entirely warmed by the memory of him.
Elli watches Aela the way a bird might watch a stranger approaching, with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. “Watch the eyes, Elli, they tell you more than what you need to know.” Her mother told her. But Elliana can look at Aela anywhere but those eyes because every time she does an inferno lights through her skin like lightning. And one stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning. She should grow cold and turn to leave (there are so many times Elliana should have left but stayed, and so many times she should have stayed but left.) Aela is everything her mother raised her to hate, all the monsters of her stories. But she cannot hate her, not truly, because there is not enough room in her heart for hatred. It is a tiny thing that only holds love and loneliness, often at the same time and often to such a degree that, while outwardly she may seem blissful, she feels quite desperate for something new.
And then the first seeds of ambition plant themselves in the newly turned soil of Elliana’s heart.
Elli, the ocean moans and Elliana tilts her head up, eyes like mirrors to the blue sky, and feels not for the first time that this is the beginning of a thing far greater than she can ever hope to understand. Pieces of eternity line the edges line the edges of her life like tall picket boards, fencing the memories in lest they be forgotten, even if she tries so hard to do so. A featherlight breath rushed past her lips, one she had not known she was holding back. Her smile wings into a grin. She thinks of all the things she's know that are beautiful and violent enough to take the world (like her mother’s dragon, like the sea, like her heart). Something in her small chest bellows and makes her skin tremble like a leaf learning how to turn belly up for the rain. Not right now, she says coolly. Though I want to ask them just how much they can burn.If you just let them loose. Elliana was started by a flame, by a woman of light and a man of shadow. The shadows gather around her as if itching to heal all which Aela has not set into ash. I know there is someone terrified of them and all you stand for. She says and moves closer. I know there is another who admires them, admires you. She stays put. And I know there are still others who are building a defense against them—against you. She pauses and for the first time looks into those blue eyes and sees not her mother, reflecting back at her, but just blue, blue, blue fire. I know things I shouldn’t.
Elliana has been raised by a queen of lambs. She wants to know now how to be a lion.
Her teeth ache, her heart aches, every bit of her aches. She bites her cheek until blood blooms metallic on her tongue. The sting of iron settles her.
