the Rift


[OPEN] we all have thorns

Ranjiri the GoldenShade Posts: 372
World's Edge Mare atk: 4.5 | def: 8.5 | dam: 6
Mare :: Hybrid :: 16.0 :: 5 HP: 62 | Buff: NOVICE
Mara :: Common Rougarou :: Shadow ali
#1

give me hope in the darkness
so that I will see the light


I was all too eager to get out of the Threshold after hearing Resplendence explain why the invasion had happened. Some small part of me wanted to rationalize it because they were scared after the Goddess had committed so many murders, but a bigger part of me just wanted to be upset. For a while I hadn't even thought about the day my dad died. I'd kept myself busy and I'd formed a scab over the wound, but just like that it had been ripped away and I was left hurting again.

I wanted to be angry with my mother, my aunt, Uncle Archi, the Basin ... everyone that helped with the invasion. It was because of them that I didn't have a dad anymore, and I knew that my dad hadn't been a huge part of my life, but I still loved him and they helped take that away from me. And I supposed I could rationalize that it hadn't been them that directly killed him, but they had caused it. If they hadn't planned an invasion, if they hadn't stolen him and made it so he had to try to escape to protect his herd he wouldn't have died. I wouldn't have been there to see when it happened and watch him struggle to breathe until he finally stopped.

I sighed and glanced over at Dragomir and it hit me then that I probably hadn't been the best company since we left the Threshold. I had only really spoken to him once just to tell him that it was a far walk to the Dragon's Throat and that he didn't have to go with me, but he was still there. I was grateful for that and the steady rain that lasted through most of the journey. The closer we got to the Throat, though, the more it lessened until the rain had completely stopped.

"There's not a bridge to get into the Throat anymore." I said, because I could hear the waves crashing on the beach and I knew that Drago wouldn't be able to go much farther without wings or a key. "Gaucho blew it up..." I hadn't been there for it, but I'd heard enough talk to know what had happened. "You have to have a key to get in because there's this ... magic bridge thing..." I wondered, briefly, what Megaera and Gaucho would say if I made Drago a key and gave it to him so he could visit me whenever he wanted, but then I pushed the thought away. I couldn't imagine they'd be happy if I gave away a key to someone they didn't know. It wouldn't matter to them if Dragomir was one of my friends.

"."

ooc://
they're not on the Heart side, outside of the Throat.

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@Dragomir

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Dragomir Posts: 275
World's Edge Glazier atk: 6 | def: 9 | dam: 5
Stallion :: Equine :: 17" :: 7 HP: 64.5 | Buff: NOVICE
Bunnie
#2
She was quiet all the way home, which was fine by the equally stoic stallion who escorted her – he spent most of his time in silence, and so was comfortable with it, even when his company was normally one who seemed to almost shun the notion of quietly existing. Steadily his large hooves plod into the soggy ground, his ears listening to the soft song of the wind and the rain, pale eyes occasionally glancing over at his beautiful Ranjiri, disliking the strange moroseness on her usually smiling face.

Ranjiri was very brave, Dragomir had decided some time ago, even before she had shown up baring marks of battle and disease to greet him on his return. No matter how dark the realm of Helovia grew, no matter how bleakly dim hope lay on the horizon, she always seemed to be able to find the will to carry on. As he walked alongside her, replaying what he had learned while standing in the drizzle in the Threshold, determining, after much of the walk was through, his thoughts and memories categorized and neatly filed away, that he would not mourn the severed ties to his past.

How could he? So many he knew in this land had survived worse than their friends moving to another herd land, even if it had been at the cost of every ideal he had thought they’d held above all things. That he can no longer trust fully in the golden light of those he had lived his first, adult years with, is a notion that he still finds bitter, outside of his preferred flavors, but his resolve that it cannot be changed, that it can only be accepted, grows with each step to the south.

Surely it was much harder to accept that the strong, concrete figures in your life were now only ghosts.

The painted stag does not ask her for the story of their kin, does not wish to see her cry or watch the pain relived in her crimson eyes, not even when the sea appears in the horizon, an unbroken steely line. He accepts what little she has said and lets it slip away with the rest of his dark thoughts, trying his best to be in good spirits when she at last turns to him, explanations on her lips.

That there had once been a bridge is news to him; he’d never been so far south as the Throat, and had only the slightest of notions that there was a herd land in the region (gathered from herd meetings and conversations with those who lived there). As she describes it, however, he narrows his eyes and peers across the wind tossed ocean, seeing in the distance that there is, indeed, an isle out there.

The notion makes his heart flutter faster, memories of the island of his youth coming to mind – yet the sweet memories are quickly dashed away by the thought that someone, this Gaucho, had blasted the stretch of land binding it to the shore away. Wide, his blue eyes move away from the shore and back to his friend.

"He won’t mind I’m here?" he asks – not truly willing to incite anger from a guy who can blast such a vast stretch of land into smithereens. The name, one that is surely famous throughout Helovia for his deeds (the same man having been brought up in the Threshold), is unknown to him, and the stallion is ever wary of strangers since his encounter, long ago, in a willow grove.

However, the idea of a magic bridge, and keys which activate it, is interesting enough to make whatever wariness he has about pissing someone off slip away into the back of his thoughts; the worry that had lighted in his pale gaze is now replaced with a curious interest, the fervent glow of discovery soon leaking out onto his usually unresponsive features.

"How does it work?" the intrigued stallion asks, looking to his friend with hope that she might have some idea as to its mechanisms.

[ OOC: Yeah I'm not excited or anything. xD ]

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Ranjiri the GoldenShade Posts: 372
World's Edge Mare atk: 4.5 | def: 8.5 | dam: 6
Mare :: Hybrid :: 16.0 :: 5 HP: 62 | Buff: NOVICE
Mara :: Common Rougarou :: Shadow ali
#3

give me hope in the darkness
so that I will see the light


I was glad that Dragomir didn't ask me about my brother or my dad as we walked back toward the Throat. I tried to keep my expression neutral so it wouldn't look as sad as I felt, but it wasn't something I was good at. Momma always told me that I wore my thoughts and feelings on my face and she would joke and tell me that I would never make a good thief like my aunt. Anyways, the silence was nice. There were too many times that someone had tried to comfort me by telling me that it would be okay, that it would start to hurt less with time, blah blah blah. Drago's silent company, somehow, was better than all the words anyone had spewed at me.

But the silence had to be broken when we finally reached the ocean and I explained only a little bit about the bridge and Gaucho when Drago finally did speak to ask if he would mind if he was there. "Gaucho?" I asked and I shrugged. "Hard to say, but it doesn't matter." Because Dragomir was my friend and if Gaucho showed up and was mean to him I would just have to stand up to him and worry about consequences later. "I don't think he would as long as you don't start any trouble. And where we're standing isn't part of the Throat." Megaera and Ampere were different stories altogether because I didn't know them like I knew Gaucho. I hadn't been through as many trials and heartaches with them as I had the Sultan.

"How does it work?"

"I'm not really sure..." I admitted because I'd only used the bridge a few times, but I'd been so distracted by something else to really take notice of how the bridge worked. "But you have to have a key to activate the bridge ... its some kind of magic." I stepped into the ocean water and looked at the island in the distance that was my home. As much as I loved the Throat I found that, sometimes, it could be a bit suffocating. My friends that didn't have wings had no way to get across to visit me. It was so isolated. "I can make the keys." I said and I finally looked away from the island and back to my friend. "I can craft metal." I wonder if he'd be proud of me for being able to craft like he had. "I could ... see about getting you a key." I offered. "That way you can come and visit me whenever you want."


"."



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@Dragomir

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Dragomir Posts: 275
World's Edge Glazier atk: 6 | def: 9 | dam: 5
Stallion :: Equine :: 17" :: 7 HP: 64.5 | Buff: NOVICE
Bunnie
#4
She tries her best to ease his worries, her moonlight mane rippling over her shoulder as she shrugs, the golden tips catching the desert sun in vibrant contrast to the sleek ebony that largely colored her. Her boldness, her assertion that it would be fine, only further instilled the idea in Dragomir’s mind that she was far braver than he ever would be; he had only ever brought one other to the wood of the Edge, and he remembers being flustered and overwhelmed with the notion that he was going to get shouted at for bringing strangers home – even when Kahlua had told him he was more than welcome to.

She seems, as usual, so much more at ease than he is, as if she’s used to bringing others to visit or stay on the island across the sea. Maybe she is – he’s never really thought to ask the gold, black, and cream mare a whole lot about what she does when they are not together.

He is glad to know that he’s not technically trespassing and nods that he understands, for surely he had planned on no trouble what so ever – he’d had his fill of adventure swiftly, and at a young age. He wanted nothing to do with dramatics or violence, had often skirted his duties while living in the Edge if it meant confrontation, or cross words. Avoiding confrontation is, in part, why he is here, for more than one reason.

Ironically, he had met Ranjiri in this way – just outside the glass wall of his home, when it was shining, whole, new - having approached she and another young woman (one he remembers mostly as being very, very rude) while they exchanged gifts, he’d obviously insulted them with his over protectiveness of the boundaries of where he shut his eyes to rest. He thinks of the memory and wonders if, this time, it won’t be Ranjiri and himself approached by an overly cross guardian of some sort.

The thought makes him smile, a simple grin that lingers across his face as she tells him more of the bridge, and hints at what else life had led her way down its winding rivers in his absence. While he is disappointed that she cannot tell him much more than that the bridge is magical in nature, his grin wavering, his interest piques as she mentions that she is capable of making the keys and that she can now craft with metal; his ice blue eyes glitter fervently as he turns to answer her hidden question.

"Of course," he says, nodding in accordance that he would only take one of these keys if it didn’t involve Ranjiri getting in trouble – or himself, for that matter. He did like the idea of being able to get to her, all the way across the sea (for it looked like an insurmountable distance to swim).

But, metal! He had never worked it, himself, the Goddess having blessed him with Glass, and for this reason he wonders if it is not the Divine which guards this realm who gave his friend the ability she states so proudly (for he knows very little about the lands outside of that which had been his own). It is a bittersweet knowledge to know that she now creates as he once did, the memory of his magic and the utter delight he had found in its presence almost agony to his soft and sensual heart – and, yet, he feels very happy that Ranjiri can now bring into reality the trinkets of her will, and refuses to soil whatever happiness she finds in her craft with the mourning of his own.

"Metal?" he inquires brightly, "it is a good craft. Much more useful than my glass was."



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Any violence/magic is allowed to be used upon Dragomir at anytime, permitting it doesn't kill or seriously maim him without my permission <3

Ranjiri the GoldenShade Posts: 372
World's Edge Mare atk: 4.5 | def: 8.5 | dam: 6
Mare :: Hybrid :: 16.0 :: 5 HP: 62 | Buff: NOVICE
Mara :: Common Rougarou :: Shadow ali
#5

give me hope in the darkness
so that I will see the light


I smiled when Drago agreed to take one of the keys if I was able to get one for him. I wondered, for a second, how I should go about it. If I should just sneak and make one and give it to him and not say anything to anyone, but then when he did come to visit me everyone would find out and they'd want to know how he got a key. I could ask Gaucho or Megaera about giving one to him, but somehow I doubted that they would be okay with giving a key to someone just because he was my friend. But Dragomir was harmless, he wouldn't do anything to hurt any of my family, that much I was sure of.

"Metal?"

I nodded, still smiling. "Gaucho promoted me a few months ago, but I haven't really gotten to craft much yet." There had been so much going on after the murders. The Earth God's boat, the invasion, and now the recent battles with these new gods. It seemed like everyone was stretched thin, and I admit that my focus had not been totally on crafting.

Drago said that my metal crafting was more useful than his glass and I shook my head. "Your glass was beautiful." I protested and I shook my mane out so it was all laying on one side of my neck, the shiny glass beads glinting from their place in my hair. "I still have the beads you gave me." I said, as if he couldn't see them, bright red against the paleness of my mane. "They make me happy, I think that's useful..."

I watched Drago for a few seconds then I glanced back at the island that I called home. "Are you gonna go back to the Edge?" I asked. "Or the Falls?" I was partly curious about whether or not he would accept Resplendence's offer of a home, but mostly I was curious about where I could find him if I looked for him. 

"."

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@Dragomir

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Dragomir Posts: 275
World's Edge Glazier atk: 6 | def: 9 | dam: 5
Stallion :: Equine :: 17" :: 7 HP: 64.5 | Buff: NOVICE
Bunnie
#6
Whoever Gaucho is, he has some sense if he finds use for Ranjiri, the tall man thinks to himself with a soft smile of praise offered on dark lips; she is a good friend, and Dragomir can only assume that means that she is an excellent herd member, faithful to the last in their trials and tribulations. Each time he has been here for the dark turn of the land, she has been like a light, struggling valiantly against the cold shadow of the moonless night.

That she hasn’t gotten to use her magic yet saddens him, is downright disheartening. There had been no feeling in his short life that had encompassed or defeated that which filled him when the magic coursed through his being and out into reality, when he gently landed back in the realm of reality, untouched by the Moon’s shining starlight, and saw there in the world that which had only been in his mind.

Maybe she wouldn’t care so deeply for the power her God gave her; he couldn’t help but wonder how much more sharply the fires of the molten metal would burn in creation, or if it was simply so warm that it was like drowning in sunlight. He can’t ask, because she has said she doesn’t know, but the questions are still there, lingering and bouncy, what he knows of metal creating sending a million inquiries like wildfire through his mind.

These thoughts take Dragomir, as usual, down new lines of conversation.

"Perhaps you should make yourself something," he says jokingly and with a short, awkward, and rarely used emotional chuckle, gesturing to her wounded wing and remembering a pale, blue marked damsel he had once made a thick, glass cover for such a region, "it is best to start small, and to lose your flight…"

He thinks of dragons pin wheeling and dropping like multicolored bullets through blue, their leathering wings billowing out just when one was sure they would smash into the rocks, to send them spiraling back upwards with powerful, long strokes; the screams that ushered from their lips were the giddy, sheer sounds of childlike abandon, a delight so pure that it had infected him, as a boy, to such a degree that he had raced beneath them, his own laughter falling like rain to the rhythm of his thundering pace.

He wants Ranjiri to have that forever; he lost it somewhere along the way, he’s relatively sure - perhaps in the rain, amidst the willows, or somewhere less distinct.

Life has a way of blocking out the sunlight, turning the robin’s egg of youth into a broken sapphire dappled with grays, whites, blacks.

She is blue, blue as the tropical waters remembered from his childhood, pulling him from the depths of his often overwhelming ruminations with truths and complements. Naturally bashful, the stallion feels a warmth rise beneath the dark hairs of his coat, black lined ears pulling aside awkwardly as he tries to smile and not scurry away. Glistening, his crystalline eyes run across his glass, another small crack breaking outwards from that which has already begun to grow, and yet, the fracture radiates with pride, warmth, especially when he thinks of how she has kept them safely with her all this time, when he remembers knotting them there all that while ago.

"Maybe you are right," he says, when he at last finds his voice, reaching to tousle the strands of her milk and honey mane about so that the beads might sing against one another again, as they occasionally had as they’d walked, as his own tied trinket does when he swats at insects and itches – or when he simply sways the thick ivory and coal strands for the pleasure of hearing the durable glass’ song.

A pause takes the air, a comfortable silence growing as they look at one another; when at last the stillness is broken, it is Ranjiri (an almost usual thing, for Dragomir would happily let his vocal chords rust away if no one bothered to stir him into conversation) who draws his attention from where he had been dwelling in the past, dragging him whole heartedly into a present he didn’t really want to think about – but had to.

Life was full of such pains.

"I don’t know," he says, rolling his shoulder slowly, looking down at the reddish beach that their hooves rest upon, "I stayed to aid Mirage, and then Kahlua. I stayed for my glass."

They are all gone, he thinks, and while Kaj leads the Falls, he had never known him beyond what he saw in meetings – whatever little he had learned of the man’s character was lost on the hurt that Dragomir had suffered to see the pegasus and Kahlua together. He had no allegiance to that King and he had very little knowledge of Archibald, and he had even less knowledge of Torleik and Mauja, whoever on Nieque’s green creation they were.

"I shouldn’t have left," he almost whispers as he stares at the glistening sand, wishing the rain would come again.


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Any violence/magic is allowed to be used upon Dragomir at anytime, permitting it doesn't kill or seriously maim him without my permission <3

Ranjiri the GoldenShade Posts: 372
World's Edge Mare atk: 4.5 | def: 8.5 | dam: 6
Mare :: Hybrid :: 16.0 :: 5 HP: 62 | Buff: NOVICE
Mara :: Common Rougarou :: Shadow ali
#7

give me hope in the darkness
so that I will see the light



I shook my head when Drago suggested that I make something for myself. "I wouldn't know what to make for myself." I admitted. I wasn't a fighter so armor would be useless for me. I didn't want the weight of shoes on my hooves, or weapons hidden in my feathers. I supposed I could make little trinkets like necklaces, but it didn't feel right using my ability to craft for myself instead of someone else or the herd. It seemed selfish to put myself above anyone else. It just wasn't me. "Maybe I could make you something instead." I suggested because it did seem far less selfish to offer to make something for a friend. "Anything you want..."

I wished that our conversation could stay as light and easy as it was talking about my new rank  and my rank magic, but nothing ever stayed easy. There were too many questions weighing on my mind, too much I wanted to know, so I asked where he was going to go. I'd only ever known Drago to live in the Edge, so part of me suspected and hoped that he would go back there. At least then I would know where to find him. There I could wait by the glass wall for him. If he went to the Falls ... I just didn't want to go there.

"You could stay here with me." I said in a manner that was only half joking. I honestly thought it would be wonderful to have Dragomir in the Throat with me. Maybe he could even craft with me, but...

"I shouldn't have left."

If I hadn't been focusing on Drago I probably wouldn't have heard what he whispered. "It doesn't matter." I murmured in response. "You came back. That's all that matters."


"."

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@Dragomir

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Dragomir Posts: 275
World's Edge Glazier atk: 6 | def: 9 | dam: 5
Stallion :: Equine :: 17" :: 7 HP: 64.5 | Buff: NOVICE
Bunnie
#8
That she does not know what to make for herself is a testament to just how good of a person Ranjiri is – and Dragomir takes note of it with a smile, one that lightens his blue eyes into shining as he looks over at his friend, actually making a tenuous contact with her red gaze (as he does so few in this world). That contact relights from where it had wandered as she suggests making something for himself – his thick neck lifts his head in surprise, though his smile remains.

What a suggestion! He thinks, by far the least selfless of the pair standing on the rim of the sea (not to say he isn’t, sometimes, willing to sacrifice himself to whatever cause is needed). He ponders some sort of figurine shaped as a dragon before his eyes fall upon the red beads knotted loosely in her mane, and the grin that had faltered in his pondering returns to his face in full bloom.

"A full circle, then," he says, deep voice rich with memory, "the same which I made you."

He is not sure if she can recreate red with her metals, the closest shade to it he has ever seen being copper – but copper is more the color of the middle flame, or the sun, rather than the bright crimson of the rubies he had used to color his creation for her. And, so, he elaborates, drawing inspiration, again, from her.

"Perhaps gold?" asks the gentle stag, thinking of how very often he’d think of her with such a metal singing into his ears, as she had said she’d thought of him, whenever his gifts jangled together in absent passing.

Whatever smiles were born of Ranjiri’s new talents are lost on the memory that his home here in Helovia is no more.

The rain does not come.

You could stay here with me, she half laughs, making him shift his hooves about in the sand aimlessly as he looks across the blue water and into the realm beyond. A desert, he thinks, having never seen such a thing (unless one counted the red region which wreathed the Heart Caverns), his mind dreaming of a thousand sights that, likely, were not within at all. What he does know is that there are likely no or few trees, that places for a man like himself to hide were probably few and far between – and, while it maybe wouldn’t be a bad thing, the stallion cannot help but balk at the notion of having to be ever present.

Still, Ranjiri would be there, and, surely somewhere that she called home was also home to others who were full of the same light which he had come to love; that same warmth which shone and radiated from her even now, as she consoled a man who, as he was concerned, deserved the attention far less than she. Ranjiri was wounded, family bereaved, her body etched with sickness, and her heart lined with sorrow. He had fled away from all she had suffered, and yet, she endlessly tends to his sadness with the gentleness of a saint.

Perhaps, he thinks, she hides from her own pain behind my own.

He’d done that before, too, hadn’t he?

It doesn’t matter, gently answers Ranjiri, winning his gaze back from where it had absently drifted out to the Throat, the sea, his hooves. His blue eyes waver to and fro as he searches her face for the meaning in all she has said, as he finds very little in comparison to the measure of ease it has given him. The tight knot that had clenched into his chest as he thought of all that was now gone forever was now a dull ache, because, as she had said – he was here now.

Dwelling on what had already come to pass, and which was unchangeable, was futile. If Kahlua and the rest of his friends were still in Helovia, he could find them now - and if they weren’t, he would be here, waiting for them, as Ranjiri and Resplendence had been for him.

"How are you always so right?" he manages with a chuckle, a long silence having grown between her words and his own in which his face has conveyed every emotion to pass through his oversized heart like images on a supersized screen; his tail swishes behind him, blue eyes glancing out to the Throat one last time before he looks again to her, "you must make more stubborn men furious."

"Maybe I will stay," he says with a smile that is quick and easy in comparison to the emotionally dulled ones of prior, though he still feels some shallow ache within his heart that he has lost much of what he loves forever during his aimless wandering, "for a while, at least."

[ OOC: *flails* I STINKKKK aha basically I didn't realize you had replied to this or did and forgot. One or the other I still made 239549857485 replies I should have done *after* this one. D: But it is here now ~ ]
@Ranjiri
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Any violence/magic is allowed to be used upon Dragomir at anytime, permitting it doesn't kill or seriously maim him without my permission <3


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