Private cold be travelers far from home,

J A H I N - - -

He's moody and irritable.

Makeda's sudden appearance into the world of living had left him reeling, spinning. Everything is changed now and it's left him in a sad state of paralysis; unable to move forward with his life.

He's not entirely sure what he should be feeling. Betrayal? Relief? Anger? He believed her dead and she had let him believe it for years. What kind of a person does that?

A Davke woman, of course he thinks in a tired, resigned sort of way. And why would he assume that Makeda would act any differently when she had always done what she wanted, what was best for her?

He's tired of the snow, tired of the cold. That's what he tells himself as he leaves the borders of Solterra behind, but in his heart he knows it's a lie. He cannot be near her, not now. Now who's more a woman? he scoffs at himself and his need for "space". He should be hardened and calloused, as Davke life had fashioned him to be.

But he goes anyway, not wanting to face her stirking violet eyes and demure lips. He can't. Not again. Not when he had let her go, had finally moved on. But had he really moved on? He couldn't honestly say but it was certainly a nice thought.

And so he fulfills the need to be somewhere he's never been before. He finds himself climbing in the mountains, sweat lathering his skin even though it is the dead of winter. He's no longer sure if he's in Solterra or Denocte, and finds he doesn't care, even though he's never stepped hoof outside of Solterra before. Up here the air is cold and clear and he can breathe more freely.

these scars long have yearned for your tender caress
to bind our fortunes, damn what the stars own ---

@Isra

RE: cold be travelers far from home, - Isra - 09-28-2018

Isra who thought to fly

oh I'm searching, searching, searching for something I cannot recall

Up here above the sea and walls the air is cold in a way that burns and stings at her lungs like smoke. She's high enough that when she hangs her head over the edge the canopy of pines and dead branches looks only like a green blanket left forgotten by ancient lovers. Her hooves feel lighter when she lifts them to shed clumps of snow. The bits of ice look like diamonds when she shakes them loose from her mane and they tumble down the rocks before shattering.

Isra thinks perhaps that she might fly for a moment before the blanket of trees caught her. If only she were brave enough to leap, to pretend wings might sprout from her shoulders like the strange horn that suddenly sprouted from her brow beneath the waves.

But the sky has never called to her as the sea has, and the daylight full of thick clouds looks colder than a darkness scattered with lights. So she continues down the path, to the place where the trail splits and leads to the rest of Novus, her Court or to the place where the clouds look thick enough to hold weight and the heavens feel close enough to touch.

For a moment her eyes look back up, up, up with longing as her bones start to feel heavier the lower and lower she walks. She exhales and the heat of her breath makes a curtain that fades out the trail back to the top. The inhale sounds like the start of a sigh and when she casts her gaze out it stumbles across him and the inhale tumbles into something like a gasp.

Perhaps she should be ashamed to look like nothing more than a fool, a blot of brown and black and sea against the pure white snow. But Isra only moves towards him, headless of anything but the heat rising up from him and the ice falling from her like pearls. She sees only the dark red of him, the spiral of his horn that looks more like a weapon than her fragile spiral of bone.

He looks like a character in one of her stories, violet eyed and crimson (when he has only white to surround him) enough to seem as if he's made for war. Isra blinks and blinks and her body trembles with worry that he's just another creature she's imagined in the mountains.

“Are you real?” She says with her eyes closed and thinks only when she opens them to smile at his still there form that she must seem as mad as a fish who dared to walk on air.

@Jahin

RE: cold be travelers far from home, - Jahin - 12-31-2018

Are you real?

The voice is hushed, almost a whisper and nearly lost in the sigh of the wind on the mountaintop. He pivots, facing a stranger with eyes like the sea and hair of ebony. Jahin likes the sea, but it is so vast, so barren. He recalls standing on black sand, watching the waves writhe and twist as if there was a massive serpent beneath the surface, just like the old stories he had been told as a child. He recalls feeling small and insignificant before the vastness of the ocean and it doesn’t please him to revisit the uncomfortable memory.

“Last I checked,” he said, flipping an ear forward and backward in slight wariness. He had heard tales of people losing their grip on reality up here where the air is the thin and the cold bitter.

She is too delicate and soft to be of Solterra, he thinks, somewhat absentmindedly. The sun and sand would devour her. She looks as if she belongs among the shade of willows and in the green and streams of somewhere more forgiving than Solterra. He does not dismiss the keenness in her eyes, however. He knows better to underestimate someone. She is intriguing in a way he can’t fathom. Plain and modest, and yet otherworldly. Ethereal. Is it the flecks of gold in her eyes? Or the glittering scales that litter her flank like wayward stars?

He frowned, feeling awkward under her earnest gaze and lilting smile, wondering if she might be afflicted after all. “I’ve heard you can hallucinate if you spend too much time up here.”

these scars long have yearned for your tender caress
to bind our fortunes, damn what the stars own ---

@Isra

RE: cold be travelers far from home, - Isra - 01-04-2019

Eventually Isra will learn how serious men of the sand can be, how their gazes and say stories when their lips give only dust. But today, in the golden light that seems sharp when it reflects off the snow, Isra only watches the stallion with something impish dancing in her blue-green eyes. He has nothing of whimsy in his own stare, nothing innocent in the way his horn pierces the air as straight and true as an arrow.

Isra much prefers the dainty spiral of her own horn and the way the wind sings through the hollows of it when a storm is approaching.

It's singing now, a low keening of winter that spreads frost across something deep in her soul. The song makes her think of the bottom of the sea, of both darkness and the secrets of ships and pearls and monsters who have never tasted the sun on their skin.

When she cocks her head at him she wonders if he knows anything at all about the ocean (one of salt or sand, anything that might be deep enough to drown in). She's about to ask him, about to seem more strange than she surely already must.

But they are practical, these desert men and she finds the words turning to dust on her own lips when he speaks. There are war-drums in his voice and the kneeing of hot, summer air. It feels like listening to fire and all the things that hurt to touch. She's at caught as she is terrified and she starts to laugh lightly just to make herself feel braver.

“Perhaps,” She says, because she simply has no other idea of what to say. All the other things she could have said die on her lips when his own lips tense in a frown.

“What else have you heard?” This she almost whispers because she wants to see how long his lips can frown and how long his gaze can burn.

ISRA OF THE SINGING HORN ;
“I just want to be the size of a galaxy, so I can eat all the stars"

art
@Jahin

RE: cold be travelers far from home, - Jahin - 02-23-2019

Already he regrets this bizarre impulse that led him to step outside of Solterra for the first time in his life. How foolish. Jahin has no place here in the mountains, amid the snow and silence and clouds. He belongs in the desert, where he has always lived, and where, one day, his bones will bleach and turn to white grains of sand beneath the relentless sun. As it should be and will be.

Her skin is too lovely and unmarred, surely she is not from Solterra. The softness of it, like velvet, has never been ravaged by the shredding wind of the desert, nor burned by the scathing rays of the sun. Where then? And what? She is fae-like. Her delicate structure, her bold doe eyes. He has heard of such a people in fireside stories and melancholy songs sung by lonely bards in the city, but there is not much outside of Solterra that is of interest or consequence to him.

Until now.

Does he puzzle her? She looks through him and it makes him shift in discomfort. She does not have much to say. But then again, she is puzzling to him as well. Perhaps he is the one hallucinating, and she is not really there at all.

They are from different worlds. She of the sea—of the mist and rain and, dare he say, storm? He thinks she is not quite so delicate as she appears. Her horn is more wind-lute and decoration than weapon, but something about her tired eyes causes him to pause—I should not underestimate this one. She may not be a woman of the sand and sun, like the hard, warrior women he was accustomed to, but the depth of her eyes was like the sea.

And the sea was a dangerous, treacherous beauty.

“I’ve heard that Solterrans don’t do well outside of the desert. I see the wisdom in that now….” He shivers involuntarily, again regretting the foolish, emotional impulse that brought him here. It's so damn cold. He almost says something else, something about the more delicate parts of his body not faring well in this subzero climate, but decides it is probably best to leave that unsaid in the presence of such an ethereal lady. His lips twitch in amusement, but nothing more. “Why are you here, of all places?”

these scars long have yearned for your tender caress
to bind our fortunes, damn what the stars own ---

@Isra