the Rift


[OPEN] ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC... whales?!

Zèklè Posts: 166
Outcast atk: 8.0 | def: 10 | dam: 3.5
Colt :: Pegasus :: 14.1 :: Three HP: 67 | Buff: NOVICE
charks
#1
Zèklè
A grown stallion with a crooked smile flapped his wings and soared.

The air was water. Flight was effortless. There was no windchill, no ache of muscle, no gravity, really- just the endless expanse of the open sky and the easy, powerful pulsing of two perfectly beautiful and complete wings. Beneath him lay a sea of clouds, through which swam dark and distant figures, leviathans of the deep. Around him, a pod of whales, his guides and friends - perhaps he was a whale too? He wasn't really sure, but it didn't really matter.

It was hard to be sure of anything, in a dream.

Zero laughed and tucked his wings, diving gleefully between his grey companions. Down he fell, until his hooves licked the clouds and fish jumped around him, swarming for the attention of the marvelous boy. No, not boy- the lightning-backed stallion was the king of them all! Great wings folded against burnt black sides and Zero was standing upon the surface of the clouds, his weight easily supported by the fluffy sea despite his truly impressive height. He often dreamed himself like this: tall, complete, with two wings and no metal oozing from his damaged side. It was a good dream, because Zero had yet to learn about nightmares.

He began to run, strong legs surging beneath his body, falling easily into a lope toward the distant horizon and the rising sun. Around him the sea parted, and marine life rose up to surround him, hippocampi and rays keeping pace with his stride, the great shadows of sharks cutting powerfully through the clouds. Laughter left him like steam, rolling off his body in waves of joy.

And all around, the whales sang.

Around him, the whales sang.



"Hey!"
Everything is awesome when we're living our dream
Image Credits!

Nymeria Posts: 182
Outcast atk: 5.5 | def: 8.5 | dam: 6.0
Mare :: Equine :: 16.2hh :: 3 years HP: 69.5 | Buff: NOVICE
Lilómiel :: Plain Black Dragon :: Fire Breath Wanderer
#2
Bad romance, turned dreams into an empire.

She stood in a cathedral, one fashioned idly after the Ancient Rotunda and yet larger than she could ever imagine. It stretched on in both ways forever, a great and immortal hallway, sunlight streaming in through arched stained-glass windows to rest on a soft and somehow reflective floor. With each step the floor was mashed beneath her hooves, the silken texture springing back after she moved away. The air smelled of winter cold and summer grass, a queer juxtaposition that she could not decipher as pleasant or unpleasant, comforting or disquieting; and in her peripheral vision, shadows stretched and shifted, flurrying wings and whispering voices made into darkness. More strangely, perhaps, Lilomiel was nowhere to be found—nor could she feel his insistent, nagging weight pressing on her skull. It was divine.

Nymeria knew she had a purpose, being here; that there was a reason she wandered down the endless hallways, with only blue skies around her and the world falling away. Whenever she moved towards a window, curious to see beyond this place of white and blue and gold, the window stayed away, remaining in precisely the same position no longer how long she walked towards it. One would think that in this bizarre and fantastical state of being Nym would know herself to be dreaming, but she didn't. This place—while vaguely discomfiting—was where she was supposed to be.

And so she walked, never tiring, and never approaching her destination.

Except, unbeknowst to her in this cloud cathedral, something was changing with each step she took. Age began to inscribe itself upon her cheeks, her eyes, her shoulders, her spine, her hips; she swelled and thickened into ripe womanhood, and shriveled into an ancient mare. While Nymeria felt no pain, no arthritis, nor was she even aware of the change, eventually she crumbled into dust entirely. And at that point, she, still walking and clueless, was reincarnated to youth and cherubic, flushed cheeks and bright eyes.

A shark sliced through the window. Eyes rolled back, massive and gray and ghastly, it swam silently before her, gills shuddering in the warm air. And then, without warning, it turned away and swam through the other side.

The songs began, an orchestra of whales, their haunting tunes hanging in the air.

Mildly astonished, Nymeria halted, wearing the body of her older self, a woman in her prime.

"Whose there?"

image credits
@[Zèklè]


Yes I lied, don't think about you all the time
All my switchblade words ain't aim to cut your sweet delusions


Zèklè Posts: 166
Outcast atk: 8.0 | def: 10 | dam: 3.5
Colt :: Pegasus :: 14.1 :: Three HP: 67 | Buff: NOVICE
charks
#3
Zèklè
It broke through his dreamy haze with the violent brightness of sunlight between trees- no, that's not right. She sounded like the moon, cold and white and alluring, distinctly feminine and indistinctly real, an echo of an echo in the echo of a dream. It drew him like a lightning rod, an without pause the stallion redirected the frightening force of his momentum toward the siren's song, muscles surging easily and wings outspread, cutting rivulets through the cloudy waves.

She was in his dream like a memory he never knew he had, tall and statuesque, radiant in the dark. With the force of a tidal wave he crashed upon her, and she upon him- he grinned, lightning on the auburn lips, suns in his eyes and laughter on his tongue. Easily the boy circled the girl, the man circled the woman- Zero looked upon her with the delight of a child but the face of a man, and saw in her, for the first time, femininity.

She reminded him of someone else, someone with a skull on her face and legs as long as the sky, but the feeling she gave him- well, it was entirely alluring, and new.

He did not pause in his motion, though he did not seem to be leaving her- he simply rotated around her as a satellite might the sun. The words that fell from his lips were clean, as clean and deep as the ocean trenches that stretched beneath their feet. "I am Zèklè -" he wanted her to know his whole name, for here he was whole, more than merely Zero - "Son of the Lightning and King of the Whales!" Had he been awake, the introduction would have been foolish*, but the freedom of dreams provides brevity and poise to even the most questionable of speeches, and the stallion truly believed in his words.

Carefully Zero regarded his new companion, sunbeam eyes sparkling in the light of the clouds and sea. "You, I think, are a warrior queen- perhaps the most beautiful I have ever seen."

For a minute his voice was a boy's again, sincere and free of all knowledge of guile, and he shifted back to what he was, young and innocent and full of faith. Between them, an orca's dorsal cut the sea; he vanished behind it, and when he re-appeared he was once more a man, strong and whole and ruler of his world.


*I say it would be foolish, but let's be real: such an introduction would be pretty par for the course in the case of our Zero, perhaps with a couple more exclamation points thrown in.
Everything is awesome when we're living our dream
Image Credits!

Nymeria Posts: 182
Outcast atk: 5.5 | def: 8.5 | dam: 6.0
Mare :: Equine :: 16.2hh :: 3 years HP: 69.5 | Buff: NOVICE
Lilómiel :: Plain Black Dragon :: Fire Breath Wanderer
#4
Bad romance, turned dreams into an empire.

In the emptiness, Nymeria’s voice rings out too loud. It thunders against her ears and slams against her skin, almost physical in its violence. The echoing, slurring mockery of her voice, a slithering whosethere, whosethere, whosethere, seems to last for too long, and the silence that follows is like a moonlit lake with a surface unperturbed by wind or rain. Or, perhaps, crystal and gemstones and unseen sights, hidden within the cavernous ribcage of the earth and forgotten over the ages. Eerie, and alien; where the shadows seem to flicker without reason and you can’t help but feel the hairs on your arms rising in arrays of goosebumps.

Quiet closes in on her, an unsaid threat perceptive as any living being.

Then wings thunder and down comes upturned earth and frayed lightning, and silver-orange-red all bursting outwards in a hypnotizing display. Light splays out around fringed feathers, glows in a halo behind a brilliant skull, casting the stallion’s face in deepest black. Here, at this point, something should be cautioning her to the possibility of foulplay, but today no alarm bell rings. Instead of stepping back, instead of preparing for possible danger, Nym cannot resist looking at him in bright-eyed astonishment, glued to the faux marble by the angel’s? sheer audacity. Some false breeze comes, conjured up unwittingly and subconsciously, to sweep up the locks of her curly mane and tail, rustle them in the wind oh-so-majestically.

And he, Zèklè, orbits her as if she has become center of the world.
Nymeria, as would be expected, loves it immediately. It feeds to her ego.

Son of the Lightning and King of the Whales.
Some charming, errant smile slides across mature and devious lips, softening Nymeria’s imperious features. Just as Zèklè is more comfortable here than in the living world, Nym is pumped full of confidence, and swollen by a sense of [admittedly false] success. In this dream life, in this dream world, she has done what she has always hoped to do, lived out her every ambition to victory’s highest degrees. When he, her Hephaestus, surveys her (Athena) she doesn’t fear inadequacy; instead, she flourishes beneath his stare, grows and blossoms beyond a natural range of beauty into something fantastical and Aphrodite-like.

Her smile’s voltage is like to kill a man, and the confidence to her stare would scare off even the leanest, meanest wolves.

“Thank you,” Nym says, and her body does not portray sexuality or flirtatiousness as would Confutatis’, but instead a queen’s collected poise. In this world it would never cross her mind to use her woman’s body as a tool—in this world, her mind is all she needs to triumph over her foes. “But as a Warrior Queen,” and she puts an emphasis on those curlicue W and Q, “I’m still Nymeria.” Something playful fades from her tones, a silky edge of steel rising near to the surface of her words.

Then the strangeness is gone and she tips back her head and laughs, and when he disappears behind an orca she only waits in fleeting amusement before Zèklè has appeared again.

“So, Son of Lightning,” she begins. “Can you solve a riddle?”

image credits
@[Zèklè]


Yes I lied, don't think about you all the time
All my switchblade words ain't aim to cut your sweet delusions



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