[EXP] only be me

[Ciaran]

With the sky cloaked by the night, stars shining bright and sparkling in a vast array of colours, the sunset faint as the bright light had not yet vanished from the horizon where the bright star had sunk beneath the mountains. She remembered a story that her father her told her about the sun, and how it had vanished during the dark winter, the smouldering fire put out by the wrath of the winter god. Ciaran had never thought much of the mythological stories he’d told, and as she has grown it had been illogical to her. Even now, she didn’t understand the presence of such figures as well, but she also knew it brought comfort to many.

For her, her own path was forged by what was present in her world, and what was tangible. To live and continue on, she’d learned from her companion, Karsi, how to track. She’d taught him how to leave fewer prints behind him when they needed to be evasive. Ciaran was sly, agile and nimble. She’d been an aspiring warrior as a child, but as time wore on it had been life that had taught her she was no warrior.

Her father had never understood her need to educate herself in the ways of violence, as he’d called it. Their kind were not fighters.

The outcome had been that she’d been taught, and she was capable but not strong. Her speed, her strength, were her allies and she’d needed them over the years.

Their walk along the shoreline was slow, the pace ambling. Ciaran walked in the swelling waters, enjoying the feeling of the water’s cooling touch in the heat. Karsi, while warm, did not touch the water. Not cold enough for him, Ciaran thought with a grin as she looked to her companion.

He just grumbled in response, and Ciaran laughed.

@Ipomoea <3

[Ipomoea]

there are always flowers
for those who want to see them

R

hoeas had never seen the sea before. He had only ever seen the forest, and occasionally a meadow so great, so vulnerable, he had never dared to cross it. For much of his life, he had never wondered what lay beyond the flowers that came each spring.

But then he had died, and when he had been brought back his life was no longer his own, not fully. So when his bonded had read to him a poem of the ocean, and when Rhoeas had asked what the sea was like - Ipomoea had found it easier to show him than to tell him.

They stand side by side along the beach, moss and flowers and other forest things still clinging to their skin as if the trees, too, had wanted to see the other side of the world. On a moonless night the stars testify as their only witness, as the waves tease their ankles with a kiss and retreat shyly back into the waters. Back and forth, an endless cycle of swelling, rising, falling, crashing - Ipomoea stands patiently as his bonded soaks it all in like a sapling that can never get enough sunlight. A smile plays in the corners of his lips.

The stag paws at the waves the next time they draw near, and through their bond Ipomoea can feel a question being pressed into him. But as it was with the creature, there were no words with which he asked - only a shared ache, and his feelings pressed into his soul like an imprint of a thought. When you first saw the sea, what was it like? he can feel him asking.

“I saw it from a mountaintop,” he answers, and his voice is quiet - quiet enough to not disturb the waves, creeping back towards them. “I had never known anything but the desert to be so endless until then.” 

His bonded lowers his head to the water as it approaches, lets the sea foam stain his muzzle. His lip curls, and Ipomoea laughs at the impression that flits between them - sour water, ocean salt, bad taste.

And from down the beach, another laugh echoes his.

Stallion and stag look up together, their eyes turning as one pair down the stretch of sand. In the starlight they can see two others walking side by side, one the color of the sea on a sunny day, the other the color of the moon. Ipomoea can feel his bonded’s longing, aching heart, beating in time to his. And so he follows him without question, as the deer steps from the water and towards the strangers without hesitation. The distance between them closes slowly, lazily, and Po raises his head in greeting as they draw near.

“Hello,” he says, in a voice that has almost forgotten how to be anything but sad, to be less suspicious of strangers walking the dark (forgetting too, that he is a stranger walking in the dark, in a land he does not own.) “I am Ipomoea.”

His bonded shakes his antlers and says, in a broken, rumbling voice, ”Am Rhoeas.” The first words he had learned to speak, since becoming half-alive.

@Ciaran "speaks" <3

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