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 Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 12:19 am
This is a private roleplay between Destati & Niall (Mahogany Sunset). Please do not post without permission to do so.  
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Posted: Sun Oct 06, 2013 4:50 am
Niall took long, sloping strides, brushing his hooves through the long grass. The dry, yellow fronds made a great contrast against the dark of his hooves and the white of his socks, but the strange slithering feeling that the plants made was what he was after. It had been a long time since he'd last focused on feeling something other than his emotions; the physical world, he discovered, was much more satisfying than his mental world. Looking up at the sky constantly made his neck muscles hurt, and Niall felt as though he was constantly battling his mane. If he had it his way, he'd tie the bunches of sky-blue strands around his antlers, if only to get them out of the way of his eyes. Not only did they hinder his sight, but they messed with his already poor balance, as well. Shaking the mass of hair out behind him, Niall broke into a run. That, surely, would keep the offending locks from interfering with his vision.
What the chocolate giant failed to account for was the distance he'd traveled in his long life - he'd spent the majority of his foalhood wandering the plains that were gradually coming to an end before him, as well as the entirety of his adulthood so far. He galloped further and further toward the unknown - the grass was getting shorter, short enough to see the holes that might catch his cloven hooves. But his hair was out of the way and the breeze was out of his face; this was a good feeling. Niall stopped just before he saw something up ahead that deeply disconcerted him. Behind him lay the grass of the home he had always known, but ahead... Ahead lay something else entirely.
Before the cloud-patterned stallion was a vast expanse of a sandy, yellow beach. To him, it looked like yard after yard of the bones of old grass, crushed to powder beneath the hooves of countless steps. But even farther beyond that lay something that Niall could not explain. It was, without question, the great green saltwater sea.
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Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 12:29 am
 Destati eyed the ground before her, looking for seaweed that was dry enough - and clean enough - to sample. The salty taste of the green, crackly stuff had made her curious for sometime; it was not like the scrubby grass that lay above the shore. She wasn't quite sure how to describe it, but it was certainly... well, curious. The sand that often clung to it was grainy and awful in her teeth, though, and she had to brush the grit off with the end of her nose before she could try anything. That process nearly always rubbed her nose until it was sore, so she tried to only look for good seaweed once in a while.
Picking up a hoof-sized piece in her lips, and gently so none of the sand rubbed her sensitive mouth raw, Destati set the piece down on a nearby rock. Rubbing her nose on her leg to get the rest of the sand off of her mouth, Destati looked up. She'd heard the thunder of hooves, but the footfalls were much heavier than any she had heard before. Craning her neck to see over the tall sedge and beach roses, Destati's eyes found the form of a large stallion, who was looking as shocked as a just-swatted fly. His eyes were on the ocean, however, and not her. Wondering what he was so astonished at - surely he had seen the sea before - Destati waited a moment to study him before calling out.
If he had not been so large and uniquely colored, Destati would have thought him a deer. The antlers, the grace, and what little she could see of his tail all matched her picture of a whitetail. His painted clouds and sky mane told her he was a soquili, though. If he was somehow related to the deer, or at least Destati's concept of them, wouldn't he be gentle and sweet? She had always loved deer... So dainty and fragile and careful.
"Hello up there!" she called, and she was unsure if her voice died on the wind blowing off of the sea. It had a habit of whisking her voice from her, after all. She often had to call after her father three times to get his attention.
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Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 3:06 am
He was reveling in the scent of the salt-spray when he heard a voice. Hello up there, it said, so Niall automatically looked down. There stood a mare, a beach maiden from the look of her, with a piece of seaweed set out on a rock before her like a dining table. Distantly, he wondered if she would eat it - but he'd heard tell of strange horses from the sea that had fish tails and ate clams and seaweed. Nearly snorting to himself at the idea (she obviously had four legs), Niall began to make his way down the beach. "Hello," he replied, and stumbled as he stepped onto the sand.
The ground had sunk.
Niall tried his best not to go to the place where he was rearing, eyes rolling, he really did. Instead of that, he backed up so fast that it felt as though the weight of his head and neck was supporting itself on its own, throwing him off balance. He landed back on solid ground, much to his relief, where dirt covered in sparse grass supported the suddenness of his collapse. "What's wrong with the ground?" he asked of her, still far away. Though panic might have been embarrassing to another, Niall was not known for his bashfulness. New things were a fact of life, and how he dealt with them was his own concern.
Hoping that she would come closer so that they could talk, Niall got to his feet and studied the sand before him. The entire beach seemed to be made up of the material, which was some kind of grainy substance. Could it be an ocean of pounded wheat, with an ocean of salt water beyond? Somehow, Niall thought that it was doubtful.
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Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 4:39 am
Destati's eyes widened in surprise as the stallion struggled to get away from the soft sand at the top of the beach, culminating in his fall. "Are you alright?" she asked as he stood. "It's sand - haven't you ever seen it before? It runs all the way up the coastline, from here and forever." Tilting her head, Destati thought that she might have misjudged his grace, as the fall was certainly not graceful. He still looked like a deer to her, however, and his panic at the sand made her think of a deer sprinting from danger.
Looking back down at her seaweed, Destati sighed mentally. With this stranger about, it'd probably look odd if she started munching on it. She decided to come back to it later, and strode over to him. "My name's Destati, by the way. Who're you?" The golden tone in his yellow eyes as she met them was almost overpowering as she met them - the bewilderment and confusion there made her want to comfort the poor stallion. She resisted, however... She had learned that not everyone took kindly to pity. Or sympathy.
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Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 4:51 am
"Fine," he replied, looking down at the sand. Slowly, he reached out to scrape at it with a hoof. It spread out over his cloven hoof, running like tiny ants... almost like very, very loose soil. Perhaps that was what it was, only a strange gray-yellow color. "I've never seen it before. I didn't know there was such a thing. What is it?" he asked, for he truly had never seen sand before. The grasslands he'd lived upon for years were his home, and he must have finally reached the end of the earth.
Meeting the eyes of the mare before him, he found them to be a peculiar, clear blue, just a bit lighter than his own mane. When she shifted to move toward him, however, something else caught his attention - her wings. His words of introduction stuck in his throat. She has wings, he thought. Craning his neck to get a closer look and all qualms about sand nearly forgotten, Niall realized that she did not, in fact have wings - hers were markings. They were beautiful markings, however: a mix between the wing of a butterfly and a bird, stunning in their craftsmanship. He wondered if, perhaps, a native had tattooed them on her bright hide, or if her parents' wings had transferred into markings, rather than manifesting. Whatever the case, the markings were magnificent, and Niall's struggle to introduce himself was made that much worse by his speechlessness. "I'm Niall, a child of the plains," he said clumsily as he tried to get the words out. Though he had never really been one for pleasantries, he said them anyway. "It is a pleasure to meet you."
He meant it. He really, really, truly did. Perhaps she would tell him more about her markings. Perhaps he could learn their origin. Perhaps they could be friends. There were so many possibilities and, for once, Niall was excited by all of them.
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Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 5:02 am
Smiling at his ignorance - it was kind of endearing, actually - Destati moved closer, just on the other side of him, where sand met solid ground. "Each grain was once a piece of a rock," she replied, "until the sea wore them down into nothing. One day, they will all be melted into new rocks, and the sea will begin its work again." She gave him the same explanation that her father had given her when she had asked why hard ground was so different from normal ground, which was, in her case, sand. Where Niall had grown up on the grass-covered fields and plains, Destati had grown up on the beach; she had become accustomed to walking on sand before she had even set foot on the solid ground above the beach.
"Well, Niall, Child of the Plains," she said, like it was a title, "It is a pleasure to meet you as well." For some reason, it seemed that the stallion was having trouble speaking - pauses formed in the space between his words as he said them. Then she noticed that his eyes had left hers and traveled to her back. Instinctively turning her back to see if she had missed a dusty spot when bathing, Destati followed his gaze. There was nothing there, but he was giving her almost the same look that he had given the sand mere moments ago. Was it her markings? They were the only thing of remark on her back. Or perhaps her tail? Maybe he was unaccustomed to seeing a tail so unlike his. Hers had been carefully braided when she was young, and from there it had grown out, getting braided again every so often to keep up with the length and tangles. For that, she owed the Kawani people much. "Do you see something curious?" she asked, turning her pale blue gaze back to him.
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Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2013 5:16 am
Clearing his throat and smiling back at Destati, Niall removed his gaze from her back and met her eyes again. They looked like the pools he had sometimes found, the blue of the sky sometimes reflected upon them in the glare of the sun. "So that is how it works," he said, nodding. Now she was closer to him, close enough that he would have been able to reach out and touch her, if he had so desired.
"Your markings..." he began, "they are curious. Not in a bad way," he hastily added, hoping that Destati wouldn't take offense. He didn't want to scare her off now. Although if he tripped and speared her with an antler on accident, that would probably do it... Clearing his mind again, Niall found his train of thought. "I have never seen wing-markings before. I am somewhat obsessed with wings, you see," he said, in way of explanation. It might have been blunt or fanatical-sounding, but it was true. He had been in love with the idea of soaring through the sky since he had come out of his basket under the night sky in a deserted field. It was the first thing he had seen - that, and an owl flying high and almighty above him. "Where did you get them? Are they tattoos?" The village people he had met had often tattooed themselves, though he could not imagine a soquili allowing themselves to be stuck with a bone needle for one, at least, unless they really wanted it. He'd also seen them stained with berries, but he'd never heard of a white dye. While pink and black were common enough, he could not think of anything he'd ever seen that caused something else to be white, aside from the bleaching of the sun. Perhaps it was a paint spot outlined in black? Something in the back of his mind still told him that it was a hereditary marking, though.
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Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 4:50 pm
"Yes, that is how it works," she replied, smiling at the stranger before her.
As he stuttered to address her wings and asked her some absurd questions, Destati fielded all of his inquiries with ease. She might have expected such fervor from one of her nephews, desperate to know more about her side of the family... But she had never met them. Or perhaps they were here cousins. The family line was to extensive for her to keep track of anymore. Instead, she stayed within her bubble on the beach, asking passing strangers the name of their parents, if they had met them. Those who were related to her usually shared some kind of marking with her, but her adoptive family she had come to recognize by the spiral patterns that persisted even into the much younger generations. "I was born with my markings," she said. "They are not tattoos - that sounds like it would be quite a painful venture, to have this much of my back stylized. I received these from my mother. I doubt you will meet her... But she, also has butterfly markings upon her back. Hers are fully butterfly-like markings, where mine are sectioned; my father has feathered wing markings on his ankles."
It was a lengthy explanation for such a simple thing as her heritage... But then again, Destati's heritage was not simple. Her family spanned nearly ten generations sometimes, so vast were they. Her adopted family - her Aunt Maui - was descended from a mare named Paris, who had borne six children to three different stallions. That family line was even more extensive, and Destati still counted them among her blood, despite the fact that they were not biologically related.
"What of your markings, Niall?" she asked. "Where do they come from? They remind me of a paint, but also of the sky."
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Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 5:08 pm
Niall nodded along as Destati explained her wing markings to him. So she had inherited the feathers from her father, and the butterfly wings from her mother, then. A curious thing, her heritage. "Is there butterfly blood amongst your ancestors?" he asked, not meaning to pry, but she was being fairly open about her family. Perhaps she would share their story, how the bloodline had been so diluted that now, it was left only with the impression of the wings that had once graced their shoulders.
Niall cleared his throat. If there was any butterfly blood in her family at all, that was - he was getting ahead of himself. "I imagine it would be painful, yes," he replied in response to her comment about the tattoos... He could not imagine getting earrings, let alone having his hide pierced over and over again by tiny needles, all for the sake of decoration. How the humans could take it was a mystery to him, but he knew that in some places, tattoos were given as rites of passage... Perhaps it was the same with some soquili somewhere, but the idea baffled him.
Shaking his head as he struggled to return to his train of thought, Niall smiled when Destati asked her own question of him. His markings... Well, that was a tale to tell. "I do not know much about my markings," he said. "I like to think that they were formed and blessed by the sky, so that I could one day fly among the real clouds up there. But alas, I doubt anyone could make wings large enough for me." He grinned sheepishly. "In truth, I am an orphan. What part of my marking are my own and which parts are my mother and father... That, I will never know." Shifting slightly in the sand, Niall watched the mare before him. It did not sting to inform her of her past; he had long since come to terms with it. Facts of life, or so he had told himself, over and over again. "I raised myself on the plains, carrying my basket around with me, but I eventually lost it to time," he said. "I emerged from it alone among the long green grasslands, nothing but the sky above me."
It was almost a fantastical tale if he told it in that voice - he almost didn't notice it, but he found himself mimicking the way she spoke. His own speech was strange sometimes: he had taught himself a language of his own, and it had taken some time for a Kawani soquili to stumble upon him and teach him the Common Tongue. His vowels and R's still rolled strangely off his tongue, his S's somewhat muted. Aside from that accent, his mentor had taught him quite well. The older soquili had even tried to shake the accent from Niall's vocal patterns, but it would not fade, no matter how many times he had Niall do tongue twisters and exercises. It was stuck on his palette like a mark, a reflection of his strange heritage. He had taught himself to talk, taught himself to walk, and taught himself that one cannot fly without wings. While all were valuable lessons, the last was the one that had made the most impact on his life.
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