Charlie lands among the bustling streets of Denocte, hooves scraping against the cobblestone. Firelight lashes the walls of buildings, chasing shadows across the ground. Her heart beats as wildly as the flames, and it burns and burns with something she has never felt before.
The young pegasus has been angry before, felt frustration. When the foals down at the docks had once told her she was too small to play their games. When she has spent so long at the training grounds attempting a throw Commander Marisol has taught her only to fail, and fail and fail again.
This is not anger.
This is oh, oh so much more.
She’d found out from lurking around the castle halls. Charlie is always in places she shouldn’t be, hearing things she probably shouldn’t be hearing. She hadn’t expected to hear about the poor Regent’s nearly one year old daughter, fatherless.
Fatherless.
The girl picks up a stick and points it down at the road at she walks. The sound it makes grinds against all the things inside her she is too young to name, too young to understand. Charlie begins to trot, and then run, until it is practically a buzzing, drowning out everything else. Her eyes are burning embers, bright as the fires that light the darkened court.
When she reaches the markets she stops. There is a sound of something sharp against stone, and she knows Indy has landed next to her. The osprey looks at her bondmate with keen yellow eyes—Charlie doesn’t have to look to know she is preparing a lecture.
“Charlie,” the pegasus flicks an ear toward the bird of prey, as if she were actually speaking out loud, but she doesn’t look at her bonded. “Don’t you think it would be better if we went somewhere less crowded? Maybe you should be alone.” The girl rolls a shoulder and takes a few steps forward, glancing at the stands. The market is busy tonight. “No.”
She feels Indy perch upon her shoulders, a weight that normally would reassure her. “What if we go to the docks, maybe Anil is there. He always lets you onto his ship,” suggests the osprey. Charlie knows that Indy is trying to look out for her, in the way she always has; they are practically sisters after all.
But tonight she does not want to be alone. She has been on her own for so long, and she does not want to go to the docks. She has been filling her life with a pirate’s dream ever since she was just a newborn. Tonight, she wants to be this thing inside her that she cannot put words to.
That’s when she sees the scarves.
They’re lined up all nicely on the surface of the table, some hanging from a rack to better show off how they can be worn. Most of them are decorated in colorful, exotic patterns. But there is one, bright and vermillion. It catches her eye, because it is the exact color of her eyes.
Immediately, she knows she wants it. And she will have it. “Let's go,” Charlie begins to move deeper into the crowd, drifting between the legs of equines gathered at tables, standing and talking to one another, walking the market themselves.
Her gaze lands, almost fatefully, upon a guy pushing a large crate with a dog inside it. No… a two-headed dog. It must be young, because it barely occupies half of the space inside the crate, and is practically bouncing off the walls. Charlie smiles and alters her course just slightly, brushing past the guy and his young, canine charge. With one glance to tell her where they are, she reaches out and slides open the latches on the crate.
The next time the beast lurches against the inside, the door pops open and it tumbles against the street. She’s already moved beyond them when she hears the man’s exclamation, and other people’s sounds of shock and surprise. The bumbling man chasing around a much more agile, much younger animal, draws the attention of most of the equines in the immediate area. Even the merchants. A few gracious passersby even take time out of their night to try and corner down the pup.
Charlie, however, slips through the stream of equines headed toward the noise and commotion, but her course is in the direction of the stand with the scarves. It’s almost within reach, almost… at the last moment she spreads her wings, grabs the scarf and tucks it underneath the wing closest to the table. Then she is practically running.
Indy is forced to take to the air, following closely behind her bondmate as Charlie rounds the next corner and takes to a quieter street. Her heart is beating wildly still, burning but with something else entirely now.
When my family left, no one understood why I chose to stay behind. They thought I was afraid, mostly. Of the sea or the war or the way my soft heart would surely be crushed by the weight of all those injustices. They were wrong.
Then again, sometimes I didn’t remember why I stayed behind. Especially sad lonely nights like the one I ran into Charlie. I felt like a ghost as I wandered the streets, hoping to get lost. I never did, of course. I knew them as well as I knew papa’s scars or the lines around mother’s eyes. The city was so empty without my parents, without Fable and Foras and most of all Avesta. I missed them so much, my bones hurt.
Without thinking I flowed from one back alley to another. Small, lithe, quiet as a mouse and twice as sneaky. When I turned a corner to see that young, familiar face, I think I even squeaked. “Oh! Hello Charlie. Hello Indy.” I smiled, because Charlie always made me smile. She was bright, and bold, and lively, and so many other things I wasn’t. But it also made me a little sad to see her. I was in that sour kind of mood where everything was a painful reminder of how bad I was feeling. Charlie was no exception. Charlie would never stay behind if her entire family sailed away to fight the evils of the world.
But I was not Charlie. I was not Avesta.
I was landlocked and river-souled and I had roots, didn’t anyone understand?
I might have been swept away entirely by my own sorrow and self-pity if it wasn’t for the look on Charlie’s face. It wasn't anything good or bad, as far as I could tell on first glance. She simply looked... different. “Are you all right?” I stepped forward, turned so we were side by side, and lightly bumped my shoulder to hers. Before Charlie could answer, in case she didn’t want to, I gave her the choice of pretending the question had never been asked. A change of subject. An escape, if she so desired. Even lost as I was in sorrow, I was considerate. “Where are you headed? I’ll walk with you.”
“What were you thinking?” comes the sharp voice of Indy from behind her.
The young pegasus continues to walk, keeping the scarf hidden until they are on the other side of the market, a quieter stretch, nothing between them and the scene they left behind but a few buildings and a side alley. “Charlie!”
She stops, pulling out the scarf and wrapping it around her neck. “It looks great on me, don’t you think?” she asks, looking at the Osprey. The ends of the scarf flutter in a breeze that cuts down the road and parts around her like a river. ”You could have gotten caught, don’t you realize that? You’re old enough now to know better.”
“Am I?” the girl asks harshly, suddenly, turning away from her bonded. The buzzing reaches a crescendo inside her, like there are wasps living in her veins, inside her brain. “Maybe I don’t know better, maybe I wasn’t raised to know better,” Charlie’s words cut between them like the sword she has always wanted, sharp and hard, “Maybe I haven’t been raised at all.”
It hurts to say it. To really think about it. Maybe she’s just spent her whole life trying not to think about it. Going wherever she pleased, doing whatever she wanted to do. At some point she got old enough to realize that other kids her age didn’t just explore the world without their parents.
She just ignored it.
When Aspara rounds the corner in front of them, Charlie’s eyes get a little sharper. Her lips curl up, a little too wickedly someone her age’s ought to. The young pegasus trots forward to greet her friend, “Aspara!” and tosses her head, throwing the ends of the vermilion scarf. “What do you think of my new scarf? Indy doesn’t like it, but I think it matches my eyes.”
Indy sends a little huff across their bond, and a sharp look the filly’s way. Charlie chooses to pretend not to notice. She’s not in the mood for another lecture, and the Osprey may be like a sister to her but that doesn’t make her bonded the girl’s superior.
“You can’t stay mad at me, Indy. We’re all each other’s known,” Charlie says through their bond, glancing toward her bonded and raising a brow. She can see the moment that the Osprey relents, coming to perch upon her bondmate’s shoulders. “I’m keeping the scarf, though.”
Aspara comes to stand beside the pegasus, their skin like shadows and light mingling as she bumps their shoulders together. Charlie debates telling her the truth, she knows she can, but she didn’t come to Denocte to talk about her problems. She came to escape them. “Anywhere,” she says instead and begins to walk. “Do you know anyplace interesting?”
"Speaking"
☸ | @Aspara mmm we could turn this into a landmark exp thread, maybe?
or they could just get into some trouble haha feel free to take the lead <3
I knew that smile. It carried the same essence Avesta could convey with a single sidelong glance. Seeing it on Charlie opened up the hole in my chest I tried so hard to keep closed. All I could do was put on a brave face, smile back at her the way I did at sister, time and time again. Like we were already complicit in something.
“It’s beautiful.” I said honestly. “Of course I like it.” I could not fathom why Indy wouldn’t. Not that I knew the bird very well, or at all really; the thought of her as a fashion critic, flying around and judging everyone’s accessories, made me smile to myself.
Oh, I knew all the interesting places. Still do. I also had an unconventional idea of what was “interesting.” Still do. I knew Charlie was probably not interested in the high water line from the tidal wave, or the strange crack in the ground near the market, or the single blue rose in the rose garden; a drop of blood in the noontime sea, except reversed. I knew other places of interest, too, onces with more intrigue and mystery and danger.
Me and danger had a curious relationship. We were always courting each other, but with the awkwardness of children, never in sync.
Regardless, I had found a particularly interesting place recently. A oblong, walled-off section near the Eastern gardens. The walls were tall and thickly covered in lush green ivy. As far as I could tell there was a single door in the structure. It was some kind of wood, its once-rich color faded to an ill-looking grey. When I first found it, it was so overgrown I had to cut down with my horn the thick green wall that covered it.
It was, naturally, locked, and I no longer had Avesta to whisper it open.
I walked toward it instinctively before even sharing our destination out loud.. “There is a place I’m curious about, but I’ve never been inside.” We ducked along alleyways and slipped across busy streets, hip to hip. Her wings brushed against me, soft and warm and full of the wind’s secrets. As we walked, the streets thinned. We passed the residential area and entered the citizen’s gardens. Rows and rows of public plots, many of them clearly tickled by Spring’s warm kiss. We moved past the heart of the gardens and through its outskirts, thick with trees, and suddenly we were before the walled off section that so irked me with its inaccessibility.
“Can you fly over, and unlock the door for me?” My voice was tense with excitement and there was an eager warmth to my smile. Like my parents, I dearly loved a secret.
Aspara compliments the scarf and the buzzing dampens down a little inside of Charlie, like the wasps have all been put inside of a box. Her eyes light like a fire, bright and gleaming, and her smile grows. “Yeah, thanks,” the pegasus filly says, remembering how it felt to slip past the stall and slip the scarf from the top of the pile like it had been no big deal.
Now that the markets are behind her, she finally feels the exhilaration, the adrenaline. It rushes through her veins, and she practically prances down the streets at Aspara’s side. There is a definite skip to Charlie’s step that hadn’t been there a moment before, something less dark and stormy. She lets the thrill and the joy of reward brush away all the sinking feelings. They roll away to a shadowy corner of her thoughts, for the time being.
The roan girl follows her unicorn friend without thinking about it, turning when she turns, pausing when she pauses, as if they are in some sort of dance. The brush of her wing against Aspara’s side is all she needs to feel where the other girl is going.
When Aspara mentions a place she’s never been inside, Charlie perks up. There’s nothing she likes more than a challenge, nothing she enjoys more than going places never before discovered. It will be fun to do it with a friend, she hopes. In truth, she’s never really explored with anyone other than Indy before, so it’s almost strange to have a partner in crime as it were.
Charlie isn’t expecting the dull colored door, with high walls covered in dense green ivy. The pair stop before it and she glances at Aspara, almost with a look of incredulity. It just seems like an old forgotten garden or something, but the excitement in the unicorn’s voice, the twinkle in her eyes, makes Charlie smile.
She flexes her wings and stretches out a back leg almost theatrically. “Not a problem,” the filly remarks. If Aspara is this eager then she certainly wants to see what is on the other side of that door. She pushes off the ground and is over the wall with a mere few flaps of her wings. The girl remembers when even these sorts of exercises didn’t come easy to her.
Landing on the other side of the door, Charlie takes a moment to inspect the lock. It’s large and rusted, and embossed with swirling vine-like designs across its surface. Towering greenery pushes in against her sides, stretching up over her head and clinging to the surface of the door.
Charlie pushes the lock—with a little bit of effort, clearly it has been rusted closed for a long time—and begins to pull on the door. It’s heavier than it looks, solid wood, and it scrapes across a worn stepping stone pathway just barely visible through the overgrown grass. As it moves and she sees the flash of Aspara’s bright coat on the other side, Charlie grins, “One secret unlocked,” and steps back to reveal what they have uncovered.
I was thinking of my sister. I thought of her often, but especially when I was in the presence of others. I tried to look at them through her eyes, to pinpoint what she’d think of them, how’d she act, what she would say. But often I was too shy or gentle to say or do what she would. Then I would typically start to compare my company to her. It wasn’t fair-- I held my sister in the highest regard (far higher than the gods, whom I had been taught to mistrust) and no one could ever match her-- so of course I kept my thoughts private where they would not offend.
Charlie was a lot like Avesta, but she was also like me. Mostly she was her own person, which I appreciated.
As soon as Charlie was out of sight, I became irrationally anxious. What if I had sent her into danger? What if behind those doors slept a monster that would put the entire court in danger? But this anxiety was counterbalanced by that ease with which I moved through life. I had never really ever been worried for my safety, or the safety of the ones I loved. I just felt like everything would be okay in the end, all while realizing I had no logical reason to feel this. In fact, I had a lot of evidence that suggested the opposite.
But I had sent Charlie over the wall. I had chosen my actions. I could worry about it, but what was the point? Worrying wouldn’t change the outcome of what would happen.
And, as I had (a bit anxiously) expected, there was no disaster. After a minute of silence came the creak of the heavy wooden door dragging across the stone walkway, and I Charlie on the other side with her wide grin. “Thank you, Charlie,” I grinned right back at her. And then I stepped in slowly, eyes carefully scanning the secret place.
It was clearly a garden. There was such a dense diversity of plants, many of them exotic (or so I assumed, for I had never seen them before in all my Denoctian wanderings) and all interspersed in such a way I could not imagine how they had come to be there, if not deliberately placed. But whoever had once tended to the garden clearly did so no longer. There hung in the air the slow, heavy ease of a place forgotten. That was when I realized there was a freedom to it-- to being forgotten.
We began to walk down the cobbled path, which was thick with plants jostling for precious space and light. Butterflies and hummingbirds flapped (one lazily, the other frenetic) in the filtered rays of sun. I noticed the outline of statues, but they were so thickly covered by moss and ivy that I could not tell what they were of. The scents were varied and too numerous to list. Suffice to say it was spring, and the natural world was putting on a brilliant show of color and smell.
Toward the center of the walled off space there was a heavy-limbed wisteria tree and a shallow pool built of hammered bronze. Decorative lines of copper and gold extended from the pool, suggestive of rays of sun. The water was very still and very-- what I would call dirty, although it was not dirt but algae and moss, decomposing leaves and the roots of lilly pads. And probably a lot of fish poo, for there was a very large, very vibrantly orange-gold-white fish who drifted aimlessly like a fat little king with no one to lord over.
“Who made this place?” I wondered out loud. I found that my heart was beating quickly and my magic was itching. It pooled out beneath me and spread invisible fingers over the rocks, the roots, the leaves. I wanted very dearly to be alone there. I was sensitive to Charlie not enjoying it as much as I did, and it distracted me from my own pleasure. I wanted to share the magic of it with her, but I also feared that it would not leave the same impression it did on me.
I immediately thought of the garden a sacred, reverent space. Reverent to what or whom, I was not sure of yet. “And where do you think they went?” I puzzled over a statue, nosing aside the leaves that covered it. I could have used my telekinesis but it seemed important to touch it with the flesh. My question, played back in my head, struck me as quite stupid. Whoever made this place had most certainly died.
And if the door had been locked from the inside, it was very possible they had never left.
Charlie turns to follow Aspara and get her first good look at the secret behind the (no longer) locked door. She thinks that she recognizes a few of the plants, from the swamps in Terrastella, and wondered if whoever this garden had belonged to was some sort of a plant collector. Most of the flora is foreign to her, however.
The extent at which everything is overgrown tells her this place has been forgotten about for a long time now. And the vines growing up the walls are so full and thick it’s almost impossible to hear any sound from outside the garden. It’s almost like the pair of fillies has entered another world. Part of her wonders what it used to look like, before. But the way it is now makes it seem more mystical. And also a little eerie.
Charlie wanders closer to the pool and the tree, whose branches and blooms tickle her spine. “I wonder if,” she almost says your mom would know, but under the circumstances decides not to. Even if Isra would know, Apsara can’t ask her, “Anyone in the court would know,” the pegasus girl finishes instead. Surely there must be some record of this place, somewhere.
It almost sees better to keep the mystery.
The roan filly glances at her friend when she asks where the equine went who likely used to manage this garden. The most logical answer is they either abandoned it or died, but truthfully neither answer is satisfying. Not when she looks around and tries to imagine this place through Aspara’s eyes. Not when she herself used to refuse to sleep at night without first hearing a fantastical story.
“I bet they were a time mage, with a true love of plants. They used their magic to keep all the flowers at perfect bloom, all the vines super green.” Charlie tries to imagine someone who loved this place so much they kept it in a time loop to preserve it all year round. “Maybe they accidentally opened a tear, and disappeared. The entire court spent months looking for them, but there was no sign of their disappearance.”
She stops in the middle of the garden and watches Aspara nose the vines away from the overgrown statue. “They left everything the way it was to honor them, but forgot about it,” nobody ever came back to tend to the garden, regardless of who this place used to belong to or what the real story was behind it. Hers was a good one, but certainly not true.
Charlie was younger than me, but in her I sensed the kind of protectiveness of an older sister. I had a lot of older mares who seemed intent on protecting me, but it was strange to have someone younger take this role. I found it endearing… although to be honest I was tired of everyone thinking I needed protecting or coddling or a light touch-- what was it about me that made me seem so soft? So in need of protecting?
I suddenly thought of my twin sister, and in that moment I forgave everyone for their overbearing protectiveness. For I was always on the edge of bursting, and I appreciated their care-- however misguided. What I really needed was some tough love, maybe some anger. I needed to know that when pushed I would not shatter. I guess... I needed my mom.
But Isra was not there. Charlie was, and I listened to her story with rapt attention and a faraway smile. “The time mage’s garden...” It was as good a story as any. Better, in fact, for the garden had a sense of timelessness that contrasted beautifully with the idea of it once being caught in time. And I knew, from stories I had heard of Miss Florentine, that some people really could travel through time. "I like it."
The longer I looked around me, the more I noticed. At the edge of the path were tiles, covered in mud and fallen leaves but sticking out in places. I wanted to ask the statues what had happened here. But it was not as simple as that, my magic was not so strong. A rug or a candlestick, stories fell from these things like rain from the sky. Swords, freshly forged, were almost annoyingly talkative. But stone and marble? Things very old and still (and not used to being heard, to boot!) took their time with the telling. I pressed my cheek to the statue and felt a kind of shifting, very slow and far away, and I smiled. I would have to come back here and sit in the overgrown garden with the statues and the tile-lined path, and if I was very still and patient their words would one day come to me.
I looked forward to it.
“Well it’s our garden now. Charspara’s Garden. Or Asparlie?” I laughed, stepping beneath a ridiculously large banana leaf and looking at Charlie with a grin. “Promise you won’t tell anyone else about this place?” My voice had quickly grown earnest, my grin a shade more serious. There was nothing as sacred to me as a secret.
- - -
@Charlotte At first I was going to close it here but then I started writing and I just didn't want to. Maybe next time <3
Charlie watches as Aspara explores the garden, eyes taking in every new discovery with a simple kind of pleasure—an easy kind of joy. Suddenly, she feels a sort of sadness, witnessing this, almost as though she can’t remember what it was like to find such happiness in something. She tries to remember what it was like to discover a secret, but memories of better times have all been washed in a greyness, lost in the buzzing.
When Aspara smiles, resting her cheek against the statue, she pegasus filly almost feels as though she’s intruding on something. Sometimes, she imagines what it would be like to have magic of her own. Perhaps, in that way too, she is more like her dad than her mom. Maybe that is why her mom seems not to want her.
The thought hurts, more than she expects.
It’s Aspara’s laughter that rises above the humming inside her, drowning it out. Charlie looks at her big, gem-bright eyes sparkling and smiles back at that contagious grin. She thinks, if only she could stay here forever and share in her friend’s delight, maybe everything will be okay. “Asparlie, definitely. You found it, so your name should come first,” the filly responds.
Charlie only takes her eyes off of Aspara for a moment, to watch a hummingbird flit by quickly, but her vermilion eyes are nothing but honest and serious when she turns back. Her voice a little lower, “I promise, I won't tell anyone,” but what she doesn’t say is that she has nobody to tell, anyway.
I don’t know if I ever told Charlie how much I envied her wings, but if I knew her thoughts that day, I would have. See, I would trade my magic in a heartbeat to be able to fly- if pressed to it, I might even give up my horn, even though unicorn defined me in ways girl or woman, sister or princess never would. I envied her wings for all the obvious reasons: the freedom, the ease of travel, the primal longing to spread our wings (feel not just each and every feather stretched out but the delicate space between them) and feel the wind beneath us. But more than that I wanted a better sense of perspective. I wanted to rise up and see the court fall away between me, the plains and forests and mountains growing smaller and smaller with each moment. I wanted to see, really see, how everything I knew and loved was in the grand scheme of things as tiny and insignificant as a single grain of sand on the beach.
It’s probably some sickness that that is why I wanted to fly.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t bring it up.
“Okay then, Asparlie’s garden it is.” I grinned, it was such a silly sounding name.
I had already said my thanks, but I felt the need to thank her again. For opening the door, for promising to keep this place a secret. For being a friend, even though we didn’t get to see each other often. “Thanks Charlie. You’re a good friend.” I pressed my muzzle to her cheek in a kiss, and gently readjusted her pretty new scarf. “Want to get something to eat? I’m starving.” I did not particularly want to leave our garden, which was still full of secrets waiting to be uncovered. But I had come to learn that if I let myself get caught up in something interesting, I would let hours and hours pass without food or water, emerging from a manic haze with an empty stomach and groggy, sleep-deprived brain.
So I would allow myself time to eat, and drink, and maybe even take a nap. But I would return to our garden again and again, until it had emptied all its stories into me.
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