This year had been the worst year in all of Maude’s life, and she was sure that it would be, for the rest of time.
The tears had never stopped falling from her cheeks; from the moment the shadow devoured her childhood home and chased she and her herd from the Moon’s wood, she had wept, and, even now, though her eyes had long since cried all the tears they could muster, she could still feel them burning, welling air, for that was all they had left to spare in memory of her home.
Even when she falls through the portal, the touch of someone pushing her still lingering upon her shoulder, the utter desolation which besieges her leaves the girl folded, and quietly shuddering with her sobs where she lands. She does not notice the horrible mist, or the strange glow, she does not even look up, her eyes merely clenched such, her knees folded, and her muzzle worrying the soft backs of her knees.
The garden, her beloved plant friends…
Zubari’s mother…
The fortune teller, with the frightening eyes…
Doctor… Doctor Sacre (his name no longer funny, not at all, only sad, so very sad), and his sweet foxes…
The memory of it all won’t leave her head. It plays on loop, and in between, she sees her father, and her mother. She sees Byron, and Jude, and Ultima, and Barty…
Everyone who had not been there.
Everyone who may not be here, now, ever, because Helovia was gone. How could they find her, now? How could they ever get to be a family again?
A low wail rises around her, one which she realizes comes from her, but even when she tries, she can’t make it stop. She can’t ease the trembling of her body or the shuddering of her soul as it shatters into fragments of glass, which grind into dust. She cannot quell the ache of her eyes that weep nothing, because all they had to cry was not enough.
“D-d-d-daddyyyyy!” mournfully wails the dove, her muzzle suddenly thrust to the peculiar sky, her heart reaching out for him in this strange, distant world. Afraid and hopeful for him all the same, the girl more quietly whimpers to herself: “I need you! I need you to…to c-c-ome…”
Home.
But she cannot muster it, this lie about a place that is nothing, now, and the sound of her voice is again quelled by piteous whimpers and sniffles, the maiden far too overwhelmed to carry on with any semblance of strength.
Magics:
{*]SAFE PLZ \n:: [ Magic: EarthxWind | Ability to summon leaf-laden winds that heal wounds. ] \n :: [ Restrictions | Larger wounds require more leaves/energy/focus. ]\n{*}DANGERZONE\n:: [ Magic: EarthxTime (P) | The tree marking on her leg gains/loses leaf markings to mimic seasonal changes. ] \n :: [ Restrictions | Of no use in battle. ]\n \nEnchanted items\n{*}SAFE PLZ :: [ Item: Custom Cloak | A green/seafoam layered chiffon cloak with large pockets of endless carrying capacity. ]\n :: [ Restrictions | Items still maintain their natural weight. ]\n{*}DANGERZONE (was told magical plants were enchanted items by Neo so putting dis here) :: [ Item: Flower Pots | Small, light blue glass flower pots. (3) ]\n{*}\n- Contains: Nightshade, Glow Wood Tree Sapling, and Windchime Roses\n \nRift-god / Kaos items\n{*}n.a\n \nAmulets : 2 total \n \nCompanion/s :\n[*}n.a
Species change (if applicable) : n.a
Requests: Please keep her healing magic. <3
Has these non-enchanted items from Helovia:
:: [ Item: Jewelry | String of pearls. ]
:: [ Item: Jewelry | A small length of green silk bound with a strand of pearls. ]
:: [ Item: Jewelry | A pearl studded horn decoration. ]
:: [ Item: Watering Can | A light blue glass watering can. ]
:: [ Item: Pouch | Small brown pouch with pearl drawstrings. ]
:: [ Item: Leg Guards | Defensive. 2/4 Rose gold leg guards with nature themed engravings. ]
:: [ Restrictions | Will break down with use. ]
The land is a lost and ravaged soul; it is hungry, it is vengeful, it is.. strangle mournful. It threads like fine veins of silver through its floor, the knowledge that it has lost things, in more ways than one. It has raw and gaping wounds. It has doubts and guilts and shames and treasures.
It feels the loss nearby—it runs toward it, the earth rippling.
It runs not to comfort, but to devour.
The grief is potent, and that is all it cares about, as the shadows twine around her legs, nearly tangible and velvet-soft.
Magic:
Healing: Ability to heal with leaf-laden winds.
Clarification that her second magic was lost to the dice gods.
Items:
Vanity: Green/seafoam layered chiffon cloak with large pockets of endless carrying capacity. Items retain their natural weight.
Vanity: Three small flower pots. They spontaneously get afflicted by the elements; catching fire, the flowers wilting, the pots freezing over, etc. Oh, and sometimes they bite.
Amulets: At first, all you hear is a small, barely perceptible *crack*, if you're not too lost in grief to hear even that. A few moments later, silver mist seep out of their fractured shells—it twists and twines, a soothing balm curling around your body. It travels from where the amulets were carried, finds its way along the spine, and down the tree-marked leg. Where the mist has passed, it *itches*. Before the season has turned to Freeze, shimmering, moon-pale scales will have grown along the path the mist traveled. They blaze with silver light whenever she is angry.
The normal items will transfer over without a fuss!
Everything is wet, drenched, more like. The brown dirt slips and slides beneath my feet as I stagger unceremoniously from the portals maw. Greenish blue grasses muffle the squelch of my knees as I drop down, seeking equilibrium after the infinite blackness stole it away. My ears twist and turn, pale eyes shifting suspiciously as the world seems to lag some. After several minutes my vision has focused and I shakily rise.
I am unsure as to what I was expecting, but it surely was not this. The very air seemed stifled, thick as if infected. The trees held a faint glow while the flora and fauna grew in the strangest shades. It was the complete opposite of ‘normal’ in any reasonable sense, however; what was normal for the spider, was chaos for the fly. I must be the fly, for my very core has been shaken, tumbled, and spat back out into the trembling mess that I am now. Images of Sialia race through my head, her last moments, the mare, Ki’irha… (why now? I thought I did not care?).
Drip-
Drip- moisture clings to every surface, and has already soaked through to the sensitive hairs and straight to my skin. A dull ache comes with the realization and I am yet reminded that despite my candor - for as long as it lasted - I am still hopelessly crippled, and the pain would only increase with such humidity as this. I breathe deeply and use my nose to scratch an itch on my leg, grateful for once as the sounds of shrieking and horrified cries rose up from around me. Some of them were obviously equine while others were distinctly not. Companions? What sort of fate awaited them? How would something like that even work? Any other time I might have been curious, but in this moment I wanted nothing more than to find a logical grip on the next course of action.
“D-d-d-daddyyyyy!”
The cry carries and I stop, chest becoming still as the breath seeps out through my flared nostrils. Whoever it is they are close, and I am immediately besieged with the need to find them. Life, there is life out there close enough to touch. There is no sense of desire, so much as a need to not be alone. It takes root at the base of my skull and blossoms like a web, erratic and wild into the darkest corners of my mind. Hearing the screams and the muted rustling of the unknown apparently did that to a person. Suddenly I was afraid as everything began to sink in.
With pain in my legs I moved. I leaned out to sniff at an opening through the trees, and finally stepped within. The darkness was everywhere. I had the impression of snakes, shadows slithering maliciously around my ankles as I traveled. Thankfully I was correct, even with the newness of this place working against me, it was simple enough to find the filly. She could not have been much younger than me, an adolescent at best. Her pale flesh was rife with sweat and she lied there moaning pitifully. It was more than possible that she lost a loved one in the slaughter, the thought was enough to give me brief pause. “Stay your tears child, can you hear them?”
My voice is small even to me, far more tremulous and quavering than I truly realized. The words dripped off my tongue like a secret, whispered against the fear that rose within. “Do you have a name? What herd are you from?” I do not recognize this creature nor any of her characteristics. Then again, I was not exactly the expert of remembering faces.
Somewhere in the thickets, an animal keens; it is a piercing, wailing song, wending between the trees and dripping foliage. The sound, both hauntingly familiar and strangely foreign, wraps itself around them. Perhaps it is another mourner, whose grief was awakened by the child's; perhaps it is a hunter, gathering its pack.
It is hard to know, in this strange, strange place. Even the air itself smells different, looks different, tastes different. It's charged, in an almost uncomfortable way.
And you can't shake the feeling that something knows you're there.
The animal's haunting song wraps itself around you, settles against you—sinks into you. Your flesh tingles as the blue accents on your body turn to pulsing sapphires, the gemstones embedded deep in your skin. They are but tiny nubs now, but in by the end of the season, they'll have grown out fully.
The smoke curling towards her goes unnoticed, at least until it touches her. Looking up with a querulous and sniffling, “huh?,” she looks down at her ankles, wondering who could be so gentle, and small. Recoiling with fear as she realizes what it is, her head bolts up, her chest lifts, and her hind legs flounder wildly for purchase, sending her abruptly to her hooves, and spinning back into a tree, sides heaving with terror, a scream shrilly piercing through the steady, ceaseless drone of the rain.
It doesn’t stop the horror, however: with a tinkling, heart breaking sound, her pretty amulets marked with images of the moon shatter into dust. Bright, silvery light whorls over her, and curls along her back, and then down her hind leg. Everywhere that shining, sparkling light touched suddenly began to itch, like mad, like she’d run through poison oak (which she wouldn’t have, because she knew what those things were), and though she wants to blame the plants she’d been laying in, it seems more logical that her pendants had done this to her.
Occasionally reaching back to scratch at her now profusely itching back and rubbing her leg against the other to alleviate the terrible desire to scratch at it, Maude actually sees the world she had been deposited into for the first time, not blinded by tears and self pity, stalking smoke, or exploding amulets.
Suddenly aware she is not in Kansas anymore, her tear-blurred and weary eyes cast about the dark, glowing wood with terror blooming with each millimeter further they travel. The rain pours in sheets that blurs out all but that within ten feet of her, and the writhing, terrible smoke dances, and has eyes.
“Ooooh n-n-n-ooo,” she querulously moans, shaking her muzzle to and fro, as if she might simply will this world to not be. Screaming again with terror as someone appears through the trees, her rump (her protective cloak cast aside, dangling down one shoulder into the mud) digs into the damp, slick bark behind her, and she recoils from that slimy sensation. Suspended now with a hammering heart and red rimmed eyes between the most disgusting tree in all the universe and a strange young woman, the yearling tucks her nose down fearfully, her ears falling back even before the pretty woman absconds her for her foolish loudness.
“I…” almost proudly begins the girl, because how could she be so callous, obviously she was upset! But as she begins to unfurl her frustration on this poor, hapless woman, the ginger and cream maiden realizes she could hear them. Swallowing down a wad of what Maude mentally describes as, “emotional throat glue,” she looks down at her hooves in shame. “I’m sorry.”
Setting to righting her cloak, which she realizes is half tossed off in a wild manner as she’d watched one hoof aimlessly trudge at the earth, she looks back from her task at the stranger with lifted ears, and a weak smile.
“Everyone has a name, even that terribly slimy tree back there,” Maude answers, bobbing her muzzle, finding that naming herself is easy, but talking about home is much less so, “but I’m Maude. We… I live in the World’s Edge.”
Suddenly overwhelmed by being in a strange place, again, she sighs, her eyes wide and hopeful as she more eagerly asks this stranger:
“Do you know where we are?” though, even as she asks it, the girl doubts she does.
It only takes a moment and we are besieged. As soon as the words leave my mouth there is a filmy grey essence (for lack of a better word) that seems to seep out of the land itself. It takes the filly first, and I stumble back a few steps in surprise. Amulets that she had been wearing are torn apart by the atom, dematerializing into a glittering dust. The opalescent shimmer appears to have a life of its own, and with wide eyes I watch as it slides across the child’s heaving body; over her chest, traversing the plane of her sides to wander down her back leg before dissipating into nothingness. I stand utterly still as the girl is sent into a fit of terror, whirling and thrashing about like a right lunatic. It is a strange expression to see on the face of one so young.
(Watch out-) Something wails in the underbrush, and I whip around to face the lower foliage. It translates into the sharp crescendo of a grief-stricken shriek, yet I am unconvinced that it is anything familiar crying. The noise reminds me of the distant screams, someone, something is mourning close by, too close for comfort. Whatever it is, the longer it keens, the more I am sure it is wholly not equine. I inhale sharply, deep, and the air coils thickly in my lungs. The very atmosphere pulsed once, twice, and if I had not been borne to a world where magick ran amok; I might have missed the biting stench of electricity on the under-current.
I did not.
A voice rises then, humming in baritone. It is a haunting tune that sets the hair along my spine on edge. They were singing, whoever they were. The sound was beautiful if I was being honest, however the fear I felt did a fine job of over-ruling any such sentiments. Whereas the filly’s transformation was physically obvious (in a sense), the sensations that scurried across my hide were entirely invisible. I jump in shock as my flesh begins to tingle lightly all over, there is no way to pin-point where it originates, only that it strengthens with every flutter of my heart. Then it is gone, and the jungle land around us holds its breath.
“Hush little baby…” I whisper, more to myself than anything. I blink slowly before turning ever so slowly back to face the filly. She has stopped her tirade now, and has backed herself into a tree. She regards me with suspicion, momentary derision as she probably tries to determine the level of threat I pose. (Good girl). She opens her mouth, nostrils trembling, eyes searching; only to close it again after losing her train of thought.
She apologizes, and I blink again.
Then she is talking, for real, honest to Gods (or should I say Kaos?) conversation that nearly makes my heart sing. But I am spooked, almost as much as she is. My body is slick with sweat, condensation clings to my coat like a protective shell. My legs are aching now, they hurt so bad. My tail sweeps against the wet floor, dragging mud and grass along with it. Maude, her name is Maude, she is from the Worlds Edge.
“I-” Tremors wrack my figure as I search for the words I want to say, the ones that will convey my feelings without frightening her away. ““I am Bathsheba. I called the Basin home once, but that was a long time ago.” A gentle breeze coaxes the leaves of the trees into disrupted chatter, one ear flickers back to listen. “If… if Kaos spoke truth, then I believe we have been transported to the place called ‘the Rift‘. My mother never spoke of it, I don‘t know much about it other than it is a place no horse wants to be.” My voice tapers off, “so here we are."
The woodland continues to give her the willies, especially when it seems to make the stranger before her warp and change before her very eyes. Shrilly shrieking a cry into the deluge, she scampers backwards, her sodden cloak cleaving to her side and otherwise lamely flopping as she again finds herself with rump pressed to the horrible tree. Another forward leap of disgust accompanied with a shout of, “Yeuck!” leaves her with splayed legs and white rimmed eyes, peering up fretfully at the painted stranger.
She looks the same, but so did Maude, for now. Aside from the itching, which had creepily faded away, all that had happened seemed to be what had just happened to the mare, albeit slightly different. Weird, magic stuff: Maude didn’t know what to call it.
At least the other woman is afraid, too. She hears it in her voice, and it helps the ginger and cream maiden feel a little less cowardly to be frightened herself. The dark wood around them seems to whisper and croon, to such a degree that she has to focus her attention on the woman as she speaks, so as to hear her words, and not the forests.
It could not be expressed how ready Maude was to leave this place.
“I’ve been to the Basin before, twice,” she cheerfully begins, a smile blooming on her lips and her brows raising in eagerness to talk about how pretty the festivals had been, to remember them: but for some reason, the memories are no longer all that happy. They make her heart fill up with a cold sadness, accompanied with the thought that I will never get to go there, again.
She’s awfully glad when Bathsheba keeps talking.
“The… the Rift?” Maude says, looking around with her dislike of this place writ all across it, “I wonder if everywhere is this… creepy. You wanna see if we can… oh!”
Suddenly remembering all of her things, she quickly tosses her cloak open to allow her access to her pockets, pulling out her potted plants one by one, and righting their rather bent by travel stems. Proceeding to remove plentiful dirt from the pockets, as well, and tamping it back down into the pots, she occasionally makes tuttering noises of disapproval or worry, looking up at Bathsheba with an apologetic smile.
“I’m sorry, I just remembered my plants,” she proudly explains, stepping back to gesture at them with a fore hoof, as if to say, ta-da! as she often did when presenting them. Wilted, pocket beaten, and obviously worse for wear, the plants are not as beautiful as they’d been when she’d hurriedly placed them inside her magically spacious pockets. “I had to bring them in a hurry, so they look a bit pitiful, but I’m sure they’ll be just perfect once I find us all a home.”
The Portal
