Talking and Talking Some More

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The mists around the mountains clear to reveal in their center a ring of stones, an easy landmark for travelers to gather.

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Songhue
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Talking and Talking Some More

Post by Songhue »

OOC| This is for me. I need this. That's it.

BIC| Songhue sat on a medium stone that lined the fae circle she had come across, one knee pulled up to rest her chin upon it as her blue toned, nearly black skin nearly swallowed her up in shadows.

She was in her elven form - a face that had once, on another realm in another time, when it had been the only face she had dared to show, been dubbed Dorchadas. Most of her forms had names like that, for the same reasons. Not because of her culture, her people, her faces; because it was always that others of other realms would grant her a name, when she stayed long enough.

Even Songhue was merely an outsider's name, though the form of fae was still close to her. It was the form she had been born into, the first she had known and for many years, the only. Then she had reached the age of nine turnings; nine cycles of entire realms created and worn to an end again, and her second had been found, the equine with horn and wings. The one that had, on another realm in another time, been known as Gealach.

Neither of the two forms closest to her heart seemed appropriate in this land. The fae here were responsible for the desecration of the world, and the unisus would mimic the natives too closely to avoid being seen as mimicry or an insult. Her own bonded didn't mind, but it wasn't a risk she allowed while on any given outing.

Neither of those were in question at the moment, however. She was a dark elf, most frequently called a drow by those who came here, although her hair was a gleaming white and her eyes an unnaturally pale blue-gray. They were always that shade, always almond shaped and slightly tiled in her face, yet somehow the pointed ears of both this and her fae form seemed to highlight the feature.

One vibrantly pale dreadlock slipped out of the leather tie that held the mass away from her face as she pressed her forehead to her knee, gritting her teeth while the taste of bile crawled up her throat. Her heart felt darker than her skin, and twice as heavy as any shadow.

"You're thinking on it again," Kri'Kahli admonished as she approached, a smirk lighting her face as the dark-toned elf bit back a snarl. "The others were all busy, so I was sent instead. Although Flint almost left his honeymoon and dragged Sign over with him. The ripples you put out like this are not pleasant."

Silence stretched; Songhue - or Dorchadas or in all reality simply Shine as many of her old friends had named her, long before all had been lost - remained with her forehead on her knee, her fists pressed against the stone as every line stood taught. Kri'Kahli, the only mare that also knew what it was to be an outsider in these lands, stood watch over her. If that hard-headed critter thought a little bit of a silent treatment would be enough to get rid of her, she had another thing coming.

As it was, the mare was the first to break the tension. "You can't change it, you know."

Shine sighed. Of all the creatures to be found that could follow them back home again, they simply had to have stumbled over a storm mare. She had been thrilled to learn that at least one of the creatures from her home realm had survived, yet lately she could see why most gave the beasts their space.

Although she had to admit she had a point.

"It's gone," she murmured, finally answering Kri'Kahli as the mare swished her tail at a random gnat that had yet to realize it was too cold for such nuisances. "Everything is gone. The pain of that grows too great a burden sometimes."

"You found your mate, at least."

"Found him, yes. Have him, no."

"What do you mean?"

"He's damaged. I'm damaged, we're all damaged, the ones that made it out, because everything else is gone. It's not the same, not as it was."

"It will never be as it was, Star Shine."

"Don't you think I know that," the elf snapped, and there was such vehemence in her voice that the mare flattened her ears and took a half a step back. "I felt the land, the sky, the entire realm collapse when they attacked. I felt it being ripped out of me, piece by piece, the parts of my being that were tied into our home and the ancestors that had gone to rest within the trees and streams and winds. I still fill it."

Silence.

"My people," she whispered, and realized she had been clenching her teeth so hard that her jaw had begun to ache, "our culture, our history, our hope. All of it gone. All of it. When I die, where will I go? I have no land to meld my essence with, no place made from the backs and magics of ancestors where I can join them as part of the realm itself. I have a small corner created with what skill I have myself, labored over for years on end where there is naught but me and a few scatterings of such creatures as I could save from another dying land."

"I don't know where you'll go," the mare said flatly, her voice cold and practical, "or what you may pass to your young, or which lessons and bits of history will be retained even should you teach them. What I do know is that for everything you've lost, more was found. It's not the same, it doesn't replace what was ripped away to create this wound in you, but you wouldn't have had the same existence if not for this tragedy you currently bemoan."

"I could live quite happily without having the darklings trying to devour me and the last of my kindred around each corner. Even you are in danger. You were contenting yourself to chase the lightning in another realm as long as you stayed over areas of sheer desolation when we found you. You can't tell me you don't know the danger, if not the pain of having nothing left. Of starting again, without hope for aid or a true future."

"I don't have the skies of our realm to claim as my own domain any more, and the path to here has been... Rough," Kri'Kahli conceded with the cautious air of one choosing their words, "but I have the skies of the realm you created. I have the companions you have salvaged from these very lands. They can't run within the storms as thunder and lightning and wind as my blood once did and I still do, but they accept me and I am safe, for you keep us well hidden."

"And that is good enough?"

"Of course not! None of it is good enough, you dark-hearted fool. They broke my leg, same as they broke yours when the land that was once a part of us was destroyed in the attack. We are all damaged, all tainted, all without the ties to the past or strength to create a future. We can't even dare to send out cosmic threads, for the fear that those that have hunted us will find us instead of long-lost-kin which may have a realm of their own to combine with ours. We are scattered and alone and thus we shall die and fade into nothing."

"Even when we do find kin, the old ties are weakened regardless," Shine grumbled, closing her eyes as she ground her teeth once again. "And so few remember. So few, when we do stumble over another, and rarely do they wish to combine strengths for a new beginning. They are healing, still. We are all healing, after so much time we are weak and hiding, licking our wounds."

"Even if they would combine, it would not be of great help. Over the past dozen ages, the time to create a galaxy and have it die out of it's own causes again and again, you've found perhaps eight others, including those of your own clan. And many of your clan do not keep to the old ways of the old ties. They discard their own forms to enter the meat-sack of one of those that share whichever current land they rest in, an extra energy hovering in the corner of the creature's essence until their flesh grows strong enough for them to awaken and take command. They are parasites now, and when that body of that realm ages and dies they find another, for they dare not remain still."

"Once, it was not so."

"Once, you were unaware of such a form as you hold now. You didn't know your heart could grow so hard and cold and practical as to leave you a cruel leader."

"Once I was also happy."

"And no more, then? With the loss of your home, your people and memories, you can no longer know what joy is? What of your mate then, does he bring you no peace, though he is as damaged as you yourself?"

"He did, once. What seems long ago now."

"But no more."

"I can not feel while in this state. Thus, I can not say."

"There is still joy to be had, Shine. There are still things left for you. Dwell not on the hurts of the past, for they are past, and it is beyond the reckoning of your kind to meddle with what has once been."

"All I can see for a future is to hunt those that hunt us. To destroy them, and gain the chance to heal. But it is not a war I feel we will win. They have dealt us the critical blow; we are crippled."

"And you will never be happy to drift from one realm to another, life to life, hiding in obscure corners of the universes and skipping from realm to realm."

"It is not our way. It is a bastard life, to be forced upon us in such a way."

"Many have adapted well. Most even drift through the lifespan of their meat-sack without fully awakening. They become a part of their host."

"I refuse such a prospect. We had pride, once."

"You had reason for it once as well. What have you now?"

Silence.

"Bend or be broken, Strangeling. Make peace with this life that you find yourself in, and with the life you had taken, the future you hoped for and will never again have. Adjust and adapt, or it will do more than cripple and damage you, this blow that was dealt."

Silence.

"Release the bitterness. It is only a mask for the pain."

"It is an effective mask. If I will die regardless, would that I die in a coat of protective anger rather than suffer such pains."

Kri'Kahli heaved a sigh with this declaration, tossing her mane as she stepped closer and lowered her head to shove the obstinate creature off her perch. Ignoring the warning snarl - or what poor excuse such a humanoid form could pass off as a snarl - she turned just enough to capture the elf in the eye as she attempted to stand once again.

"They were right; you can not be reasoned with. For those that you have no answer to, you hold your tongue. For all else you bring an argument. Know this, then, if the weight of your loss presses so darkly upon you while others revel in what treasures they still hold; though you have abandoned hope for a future for your own kind, should it be any other than what had always been promised, none who share the weak realm you created with you shall ever abandon such hope for you. You are loved, even by the mate that is not the mate he once was or would have been. And you know better than any it was love and only love, the powers of this greatest and most base of energies from which all things are created, which allowed even so much as what has escaped to continue to exist. Even they are not more powerful, in all their terrible might."

Rubbing her sore backside, Shine glared at the mare for a moment before turning away and walking to the center of the ring. After a moment a fire had started; with the merry popping for background music she finally faced her companion once again, and now there were chips of tears glittering on her lashes.

"It hurts. To have lost so much - to have lost everything for a time, before my mate was found again - it hurts. The ways he's disappointed me as no Strangeling ever would have before, that hurts. The life that awaits my young, that hurts as well, for once they would have had so much better. And I can not give them that, or a home that shall be their own whence I pass, or the memories and lessons of our very culture, for one Strangeling can do but so much. How do I do this, my friend? How do I leave everything behind and fashion a new beginning?"

"With love."

"It hurts."

"It will."

Sighing, the elf stretched where she stood, standing on her tip toes and walking back to her previous perch a little stiffly. The ache was more than in her heart; it was a physical blight upon her body, in any form within any realm. It ate at her health, constantly, both physically and spiritually. The worse the wound the greater the damage to counter; she had grown to be so much weaker than she once had been. It was a continuous blow to the pride.

The only blessing in that regard came in the fact that she had been young, only of nineteen rotations. Had she grown older, her ties to the realm would have been greater; and her wounds all the more severe for it. Those that were too young, too weak, were just as damaged as those that were too old and a part of their homeland and history. It was more than likely sheer luck that she and her two young cubs, already growing to age three turns within the single cycle for cubs grow so much faster than those that are older, could have ever hoped to survive. That the protective wards which helped to save them had been placed - the right ones to counter the right damage - and that they had moved fast enough, gathered them close enough, that anything had happened in such a way as to allow any of them to escape had been pure luck. It was by the grace of the Gods alone that she had both her young ones, much less her mate to stand beside her.

Yet for there to be any hope for the two younglings they had together, there would need to be some sort of den for them to grow in; a home, one which was steady and safe and could be the first step in laying down a future for them to hope for once again. They would need that safety and security, else they lose the ability to call themselves Strangelings as they grew for they would not be a Strangeling as there ever had been should they grow within such a life as could currently be found. It would entirely remake them.

"To be brave enough; to be strong enough to bear the pain in order to allow the pleasures that are also granted to come, that is the test I must go through. At times it is... It is too much. I can not always hold a brave face and remain strong, for it does hurt. My family... My home, my ancestors, the living part of me which was the realm itself. All of it destroyed. Cast into dust while we were scattered, hardly even broken remnants of what we once were, dying more than we were alive wherever we found ourselves. How can I not defend against such?"

"Because you can forget how to feel, should you shield yourself too frequently with anger, and you would become no better than they that stole all we once had and held so dear."

Silence.

"It hurts."

"I know. But I am here. You are not alone in your suffering. Take comfort in that, as I do."

"It is good to have someone understand. Fully understand... To care, as you do. It helps."

"But it still hurts."

"Yes. It still hurts."
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