Drawn out into the Steppe by the serenity and promise of silence therein, the trails lead me north, and further north still, until the rocky paths vanish all together, replaced, instead, with game trails. Steadily making my way along one such path, passing through branches that gently sway in my wake; the only hooves imprinted on the clay below seem to be those of deer, or the smallest toed unicorn I’ve ever seen, and, as I come into a clearing, I lay eyes on the creatures that had left them. Three does stand in the shade of tall white oaks, interspersed with towering, sentinel pines, at least a hundred years old each, their young saplings and meager tree-children standing many, many meters beneath their elders. It’s hard to decide which to look at, first: the graceful lift of the female deer’s heads, their round, dark eyes wide with surprise, their fawns, with snow-dapples among the brilliant chestnut of their soft coats, or the stand of pines and oak, proud and regal against the blue horizon. So I stop, to take it all in, at least until one doe bounds from the clearing, and her companions follow suit, their white tails exposed to me as they crash into the cover of the forest. Duir, arriving alongside me, watches them flee with a sad expression. Why you scare them for? he complains, having, so far, gone out of his way to meet any and all four legged creatures who’d crossed his path and weren’t bigger than he is. Didn’t know they were there, I reply, an overtone layered into the mental phrase that suggests, perhaps, I was a bit disheartened they’d left, too, must be good grazing, though, if there were so many, right? I try and recover, making my way into the clearing, my tail curving about my haunches as I move, eagerly, towards the patches of wildflower and grass they’d been eating from. With surprise, I find a patch of wild strawberries, noticing, as I see them, that some of the bushes along the far side of the clearing seem to be blackberries, also - almost as if someone had once tended a secret, hidden garden here. Regardless, large and fully ripened, they look way too good to pass up, and I happily begin munching away with Duir, doing my best to remember how I got here so I can one day make it back. [ OOC: LOOK FOOD ALBRECHT maybe they will both be nicer with full bellies? ;D It's gonna work this time I just know eet ~~ ] |
@Albrecht
Aurora Basin Impersonator atk: 6 | def: 8.5 | dam: 2.5 |
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 17.1hh :: 19 (Orangemoon) HP: 60 | Buff: NOVICE |
Strom :: Suma Ball Python :: None Townsen |
Aurora Basin Lord atk: 7.5 | def: 11.5 | dam: 4.5 |
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16.3 :: 4 HP: 70 | Buff: SWIFT |
Duir :: Royal Cerndyr :: Earth Spirit Bunnie |
Look who here, Duir says, lifting his head from the blackberry bush he’s shoved in into, a few of the dark, plump treasures dropping to the earth below, and rolling about in wild directions. Moving to pick them up, having nearly lost his retained worry that I’ll assault the old man again, he glances at us both while he nibbles. And? I ask, after looking over my shoulder at the geezer, now sharing our secluded patch of paradise. You don’t think weird he here? asks the deer with a snort, exasperated with my stupidity, and short mindedness, not common area, this. I scowl at him, the sweet taste of the berries on my tongue soured by his noble notion that I should, I don’t know, apologize or something, or at least strive to mend the rift between myself and the old man with some means other than cold words, or silence. About to tell the lightning marked cerndyr to mind his business and otherwise fuck off, the words are stolen away by the clamor of something back by the geezer. Turning about quickly with a trained pivot, I’m ready to fight whatever it is, horn angled to kill; I’m left feeling pretty foolish when it’s just a fawn. Dropping my guard, watching it with disbelief at its smallness, I look over at my buck, who’d I’d been so quick to wound with my words only moments before, with soft eyes. Remember? You were delicate like that once, too. With a deer croon of hello, Duir moves to approach the spotted thing, but between Albrecht’s soft greeting and the drawing of a strange stag, the fawn bolts. Standing in disheartened disbelief, he makes a sad, wallowing noise and stares at the swaying foliage, where the babe had fled. It leaves me awkwardly facing the hollow hearted man, however, and I can’t pretend I haven’t noticed him, as he can’t pretend he hasn’t me. With on ear tilted back and a lack luster expression of greeting, I admit defeat. "Hey, Albrecht," I open, not bothering to close the small distance between us if he doesn’t, "nice place, huh? I wonder who tended it. I've never seen it before, and Ai... Erebos, Adelric, and I used to explore out this way almost every day." |
@Albrecht
Aurora Basin Impersonator atk: 6 | def: 8.5 | dam: 2.5 |
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 17.1hh :: 19 (Orangemoon) HP: 60 | Buff: NOVICE |
Strom :: Suma Ball Python :: None Townsen |
Aurora Basin Lord atk: 7.5 | def: 11.5 | dam: 4.5 |
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16.3 :: 4 HP: 70 | Buff: SWIFT |
Duir :: Royal Cerndyr :: Earth Spirit Bunnie |
His remarks are short and meaningless, the sort you can’t reply to without feeling like a jackass, so I don’t, instead nodding in silence, dropping my head back to the tangy leaves and sweet berries at my hooves; not that I mind the vapid nature of the conversation, really, considering that he lets slide my almost mentioning her, and it merits little of my attention to remain involved, otherwise. Even when Duir still stares after the fawn, wishing it would turn back, I’m looking inside, staring after my own proverbial, fleeing spirit, her black tips wings spilling embers, as she turns her back to me for the last time. I don’t know if I would rather mine come back, or leave forever. I’d seen my sister since she’d stormed away from Erebos and I that afternoon, of course… but no words had been exchanged in those mass gatherings, in which she had stood among her real family, and new friends, and it had ever since seemed like my brother and I were the only to notice her, the missing piece of our once inseparable being. Her eyes were always cast on Gods, on speakers, on the strangers standing alongside her, with a warmTH that had once been mine; those eyes never seemed to see us, at least not anymore. I’m glad to be here, where memories of her don’t rise to mind, where all I have are these few fleeting moments. It makes it easier to push her out of my mind entirely, to chase her deep into the dark, winding woodland of my not-dealing-with-that mind acreage. Fuck her. "I guess," I answer, looking up without raising my head all the way, tilting my head and shoulder in a nonchalant, unicorn shrug, "its not really the home I remember. Things change, though, right? Not all of them were bad, even though a lot of them were." When I’d come home first, I’d been unable to stand the thought of it; my home, my kingdom, it had carried on without me! All the differences had pressed in on my youthful soul and burned it. Now, however, more time within this existence, and having been forced to deal with more and more change the longer I dwelled in it, I’d begrudgingly come to accept that all I could do was swim, wherever the current of Time decided to sweep me. Didn’t make it any less of a crock of bullshit, especially when the river eddied in whirlpool of death and revived Gods, or the left branch, the ruse, of trying to help Erebos out becoming a swift waterfall of responsibility (accompanied by a Divine threat of who-knows-what should I fail). A waterfall which I was actively trying to thwart, being out here in the woods, doing fuck all. I redirect my thoughts to more pleasant things: the positive changes, so to speak. "For one, that Thranduil is who knows where," I laugh, happy that the prying gold is wherever else but in my face, asking questions I don’t have answers to, or do, and would much rather he simply go fuck himself than answer, "did you ever have the, uh, honor of meeting the Laurelin, yourself? I can’t say I know much about your history with the herd. I was, er, out." |
Aurora Basin Impersonator atk: 6 | def: 8.5 | dam: 2.5 |
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 17.1hh :: 19 (Orangemoon) HP: 60 | Buff: NOVICE |
Strom :: Suma Ball Python :: None Townsen |
Aurora Basin Lord atk: 7.5 | def: 11.5 | dam: 4.5 |
Stallion :: Unicorn :: 16.3 :: 4 HP: 70 | Buff: SWIFT |
Duir :: Royal Cerndyr :: Earth Spirit Bunnie |
I’m not sure if he’s mocking me or agreeing, or if it’s a different emotion all together that makes that bark of a laugh so tense. Regardless, he doesn’t reply with anything particularly notable, and doesn’t leave or start shouting, either, so I figure its all going okay, no matter what the guffaw was. Maybe he’s just losing his mind a little bit, like people said lots of folks did, as they got older, from too many knocks on the head or something (I’m not a doctor, okay). He claims to not know the Laurelin, which I guess is true. There is no point in lying about it, not really. My lips upturn at his proclamation that he’d simply arrived and no one had chased him out, and I’m about to chuckle a little bit at the thought of Deimos scowling at the elder’s presence from afar, wondering if it was honorable or at all necessary to kill someone who was liable to drop dead at any moment anyway. “Wasn’t anyone around,” though, has a cut to it that stills my amused laughter, and lessens the degree of tilt to my smirk. Was that really why? Somehow I felt it was more to do with my Uncle’s demented sense of what was just, which had truly found a place in his son, who was every ounce of Knightly that his sire had striven to be, through murderous means. I denied that it could be anything else what so ever when I presented myself with an ulterior truth: he’d punished me for taking from the weak, as I’d been taught to do as a boy, but had let an infiltrator do as he’d pleased. "Emptiness happens to failed empires," I tell him, a cold truth that resonates throughout history; those who seek to conquer the world often find themselves all alone in its vastness, in the end, when the winding of fate and their crafty wiles failed to deliver their desired prizes to their hooves, "those who once lived there alongside him in the old era are dead, or banished, or worse – they turned their backs upon him, as if he was not still there." Like my entire family, I think, and it hurts like hell to do so. I stare at the strawberries at my hooves, and think of my bitch mother, and of my father, following Torleik to the mists, back to the land he had once watched fall to the Qian. I think of Beowulf, d’Artagnan, Hotaru, Krieger, Sialia, Thranduil: all of the men and women who’d stood tall in my youth, who’d left and not returned, and my stomach clenches with anger at their faithlessness, and is sick with self blame that I can count myself among them. "Its the price to be paid for failure," I tell the old man with hard gold eyes, hiding all these things I feel behind the cold indifference I had been taught made you a man, "or for choosing too dark a path, or shit friends to walk it with. I am not certain which the folly was yet." |
@Albrecht