TORIELLE
It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams
It had not occurred to the dappled mare that the soft sky colour of the silk she had proffered to her friend was similar to the veil she had tucked into her own hair. The way her flight feathers lifted the delicate fabric to inspect it made the woman’s heart flutter, the gentle starfall glittering underneath the sheer cover rather more complimentary than Torielle had first expected. A smile graced her lips as she nodded, watching Veil underneath a fringe of lashes, grateful that her own flush was well hidden beneath the dark soot colour of her features.
“Yes, I suppose we could,” she said softly. “We’d be a great matching pair, wouldn’t we?” The mare’s blue orbs twinkled at the thought, the way her lyrics formed suggesting more than sharing similar scarves in their hair. She swallowed down the songbirds in her chest as Veil meekly asked her how to wear the tail decoration. It shouldn’t have surprised her that the star woman would ask her help with this, too, and perhaps it didn’t and that is why she had led her towards the flowing trains.
“Well, um…” the woman flushed again and she was sure that this time the colour would radiate through the darkness of her coat and beam steadily like a beacon that declared her feelings loudly to anyone passing by. Though, she supposed to anyone else watching the two women it would have been clear they were dancing around the obvious. There were plenty of mares in attendance that were assisting each other in dressing for the festivities, but they did not cast longing looks or caress each other with a timidness that came with the fear of rejection. They did not reveal glimpses of stuttering hearts and uncertainty.
Not like Torielle did.
“It depends,” she said, clearing her throat of birds with minimal success. She held up the simple silk she had shown her friend. “This one, I think rests at the dock, either held in place by ties or with additional berets.” She turned to show Veil her own tail jewelry.
“You see how I have some hair braided around the base here? My coins are pinned into that braid and that is what holds it in place.” Her banner flicked lightly, causing the silver to shiver against the deep auburn locks they rested upon, trying not to linger too much on the fact that she had effectively shoved her rump into Veil’s face for inspection.
The mare turned around to face her friend once more, ears pinned back in nervous embarrassment as she averted her gaze. “So I think we would need to find some pins for this one, or a longer train that can come up over your hips and be held by weighted chains of some kind, as this one is admittedly rather short for your beautiful endowments.”
Her gaze caressed the curve of the star’s backside, the gentle slope of the woman’s hips and down the length of curling tresses that ended in a shower of galaxy dust. The mare tried to steady her heart, knowing that soon she would be asked to help place the train upon her friend and adjust it to perfection. She hadn’t quite recovered from the headspin braiding Veil’s mane had caused and the impure thoughts of someone who was most certainly not a celibate scholar raced through her mind. She fluttered her lashes, trying to banish them, lest the star somehow sense her thoughts and abandon the whole thing.
Torielle was a good friend, and she would quash these feelings if she had to in order to protect her friendship. Veil was too precious to her to let these romantic and lustful inclinations take that from her. She had many years of practice afterall, with Lorelei, the delicate pegasus she had left behind when Gaia had brought her to Novus. Perhaps that is part of what attracted her to Veil Nebula- they had similar traits after all. A deep devotion to their faith, a gentle way of being, far too trusting and loving and pure. In the same way that scholar had found comfort in her friend among the temple walls she called home for several lifetimes, she found serenity at Veil’s side. Perhaps that was the mare’s curse.
She loved too deeply, too freely. It had always been a topic of discussion among The Sages, her earthly attachments to those she cared for, her boundless pool of emotion that ruled her thinking. They had called her flighty, foolish, a renegade, disruptive. Yet, they did little to stop her other than admonishment- after all, she’d always held a proclivity for other women and when she had taken her oaths as every Sage before her, she had been made barren. There was no risk of her breaking her divine promise to Gaia and sullying her devotion in the eyes of her mentors.
And so Torielle was left to love whom she chose, unrequited. She would have been no stranger to rejection and would have happily swallowed any grief if it meant she could continue to walk in step with the souls who fascinated her. Veil fascinated her, enraptured her, stole her heart and made it sing in ways she had thought impossible, simply by being. No, she would not allow these errant thoughts to put her friendship in danger. She would behave herself, even if it meant the muscle would hammer against her ribcage until it bruised.
art by the-day-of-shadow character by scapeh table by sunny
