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 Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 1:17 am
This is a private roleplay between Adarael (Mahogany Sunset) & Zatarra (Nyx Queen of Darkness).  
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Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 1:36 am
Adarael wandered the forest near her home. She knew the paths between these trees better than anyone; her sister, her brother, her parents - all of them had guided her through them a hundred times, until she could know where she was at all times. For Adarael, day and night did not matter; she could find her way home again no matter whether it was dark or light, because she never knew which it was. The only way she told them apart was by the sounds: daytime sounded much different from night. During the day, everything was alive and chattering. The squirrels chittered angrily from their posts in the trees whenever anyone entered their territory, the woodpeckers drilled holes in deadwood, rabbits and mice scurried along in the underbrush.
Night was entirely different. At night, the world became a secret place, when the hooting of owls and the barking of coyotes were the only noises, seldom heard but telling all the same. Though she could walk during the day and during the night, she rarely left home after dark - there were creatures out there that she would not hear until they were upon her, shredding her back, her wings, her life. Daytime was safer, at least because her family would be awake to hear her calling, should it come to that.
Eventually, Adarael stepped over the root that meant the forest had ended. She had never been beyond it, could never go beyond it, not without a guide; her parents claimed that out there, all there was was a great sea of grass for as far as their eyes could see, and blank, flat ground. If she stepped off her map without a guide, she would be lost, and she might never find her way home again.
Head raised in the direction of those grasslands, whatever they looked like, Adarael breathed in their clean, green smell. The wind blew in her hair, against her feathers, ruffled her fur, even in the places where her parents said it disappeared from sight. They had talked to her since before she had been placed in her basket; her first memory was their voices and the darkness. Adarael had never seen light, but she had heard their voices, and she had never spoken so that she might hear everything around her. It was survival; if she missed something because she had spoken, she put herself and her perception of her world at risk.
So she stayed quiet, but listened to every word and every meaning, memorizing them in her mind if she ever gained vision or allowed herself to speak. Her wings, her hooves, the gestures she made - all did the talking for her, and that was all she needed as she stood at the edge of the great grass sea.
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 2:05 am
Zatarra stood in the middle of sea of grass and let himself be blown with the subtle winds. He had had to take a break from back home. His mother was having one of her bad days--where memories of the fire tormented her. She had not often spoke of it--but his step-father had told him.
She'd lost three siblings in a fire, the fourth might have escaped but had been last seen near the swamps. And that was all there was to it. Fire terrified her and when the Great Kawani one had come, she had been unable to move for days.
He gave her the time alone that she needed to grieve and took the opportunity to stretch his wings. He was just preparing to take off when he saw her--her body was pale her eyes closed and wing outstretched like an angel.
Overcoming his desire for solitude, he called out softly. "Hello. Isn't the grass sea amazing?"
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Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 2:21 am
Though Adarael thought she heard the whuffling of feathers in the breeze, she could not be sure until a voice spoke to her; it was a stallion's, and even though he spoke softly, she still jumped. It had surprised her, for one moment, her thoughts had been on the sound in the wind, and the next, they had been on the voice in the wind. It took her a moment to process his words. If only I could see it, she said to herself. In her head, her voice was the same as her sister's, growing and changing as she did. Adarael fluttered her wings to let him know that she had heard him, as it sounded like he was off to her right. Straining her ears, she listened for either hoof- or wingbeat, and waited for him to wonder why she did not speak.
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2015 2:32 am
Zatarra made his way carefully to her, the grass swaying beneath his feet. She had fluttered her wings at him but had not opened her eyes. "Do you..."He tried to think of a more delicate way to say it. "Do you not speak?" He assessed her as he grew closer. Her skin was a soft white almost translucent. Her body was alert and tensed at his approach.
"I won't hurt you," he said softly in the soothing voice he'd used when his mother had panicked at the great fire. "Doesn't the grass just feel wonderful? It goes on and on for miles, like a great sea of water but with grass. And the smell, isn't it divine?" He found himself speaking more than he had in days to this strange mare.
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Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2015 12:37 pm
Adarael paused before answering his question with a shake of her head. Those were the hardest kinds of questions for her to answer - the ones with strange negatives. Either a yes or no could work; it depended whether he wanted the layman's answer or the technically correct one. And sometimes, she wasn't sure which was which.
His footsteps grew nearer, but Adarael didn't take a step back; she heard the gentleness in his voice and wondered why it was there. She could not assume to know, but there were some likely guesses; he thought she was a spirit, or a child out of her caretakers' grasp. Curious, though, she nodded to his questions about the grass. It did smell wonderful, and the sensation of it was strange: prickling and tickling at once.
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:08 pm
She did not or could not speak. He looked at her fluttering wings, the slight shake of her head. "My mother loves the grass sea, the way it shimmers and sways. It smells alive. It's touch is soft as a feather." His voice falters.
He didn't know why, but suddenly he wanted to talk about things with this mare who seemed not to judge him. "Her forest burned as a child. Only she escaped, or so she thought. She's terrified of fire. Sometimes in the middle of the grass seas she panicks about what would happen if it burned. I've barely seen fire and I'm terrified of it. I don't want to be, but it's a part of me...." He shrugged his shoulders.
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Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:20 pm
Frowning at his words, his fears, Adarael held out a wing to him, keeping it low to try to avoid a miscommunication that she wanted him to leave. She was really trying to beckon him closer, closer to where she could touch his shoulder in comfort, if he wanted. Fire was no thing to take lightly; when she had been born, the air had still smelled scorched, though months had passed since it had been extinguished. It was dangerous and volatile and one of her own fears; if she ran out of forest that she knew, she could be lost from home forever.
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:56 pm
She stretched out her wing to him, and it seemed to beckon him closer. He moved nearer her. The feel of her soft feathers touching him gently held compassion, all the more real because it was felt rather than professed. He hadn't 'ever talked to anyone about his fear of fire. He couldn't not with his mother, she'd think that she had failed and made him more scared. He didn't want her to think that. She was the best mother he could have asked for. No matter how lost she felt, she always did what she had to for him and his siblings.
"What should I call you?" He didn't know how he could learn her name unless he met someone who already knew somehow. Can I call you Compassion?" His voice was soft. "Would that be okay or too presumptuous? You just seem so nice and kind. I've never talked to anyone like this before."
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Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 5:22 pm
Adarael smiled softly at the weight of his skin against her feathers, and pressed lightly back. At his words, though, she felt heat rise to her cheeks, and she ducked her head. She had been called many different things by many different people, but the name her family had given her was always the one she had known herself by. Still, Compassion seemed so... It made her stomach flutter. It seemed so familiar. Usually, she didn't especially need to be called anything - she could tell when another was speaking to her. Their tone of voice changed, whether they realized it or not. She shuffled her feet a bit, unsure. After a moment, she reached out with her other wing tip, feathers fluttering to find the space just under his chin. She tilted her head in a question. What are you called?
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 5:41 pm
Though he'd never communicated like this, it came easily. Her wing fluttered beneath his touch. It was a soft question that was echoed in the tilt of her head. "My name is Zatarra. It means driftwood." He smiled, hoping that the the warmth of it reached into his voice. "My mother's siblings were all named after trees. She wanted to carry on the tradition, but it was also too painful to bear. So she named driftwood when she saw me. The first time I opened my eyes, she said she saw the wanderlust in them. The urge to go and do things, to feel and experience the larger world. And so, sometimes, I do drift. But the waves always carry me home." As my aunt and uncles never did.
His name carried with it a silent promise, that no matter how far he drifted he would be bourne back to her. The tides of fate would bring him home, and all that.
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Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 5:54 pm
Adarael's eyelids fluttered a little bit, but did not open; had she been able to open them and see him, her gaze would have softened on his face as it traced over his features. She could feel a heaviness in his words, carrying with them some meaning that she could not understand without an explanation, but perhaps he did not know it, either. She smiled at him again, brushing her wing over his shoulder soothingly. The ends of her feathers, which faded almost into some kind of ether, collided with something. Her brows rose almost without her knowledge as she felt the ribs of feathers beneath her touch. He was also winged, it seemed - which would be the feathers on the wind she had heard before.
Shifting her other wing from beneath his chin, she brushed her pinions under his wing joints, slowly and carefully, in case he asked her to stop.
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 6:21 pm
He came back to her with a start, not realizing that for a moment he had lost himself to memory. "My wings?" He asked with a smile, it was easy to smile around her. "They're not as nice as yours, they're heavier."
Zatarra stretches his wings out for her, feeling a lot more akward than he had a right to be with wings. "I always had a problem learning how to fly. It was never easy for me. My siblings didn't have wings, nor my mother. It was as though that kind of weighed me down."
He gazed at her wings carefully, "Yours are like the wind made tangible. It makes me think of clouds. I wonder if that's how a cloud feels? Do you know?" His feathers brushed hers gently.
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Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2015 9:25 pm
Warmth spread over the bones in Adarael's wings as she extended her own with Zatarra's. They were almost of a size, though hers were perhaps a bit larger - but that was her father's angeni blood. His wings might be heavier than hers, but she knew she was a delicate creature, and the fact that parts of her looked to fade away made her appear even more of one than she was already.
As he spoke of his problem with learning to fly, Adarael lifted his wings slightly with her own, and then let them lower back down. While gliding was the most important part, getting off the ground meant flapping, and that was important, too. If he could guide her back here... It might be that she could show him how. She only needed to find a way to convey it.
At his question, Adarael shook her head. She'd never flown among the clouds. They were too high for her. Her father could, and maybe her sister would build the ability with time, but Adarael could never stray that far. Without a guide, she would never be able to come down safely. She could not come down safely even three feet from the ground.
She took his wings out from beneath his, head tilting curiously in his direction. How to go about this? Hoping simple would do it, she used her wing to point first at herself, then at him, and then at the large plain beyond them. Then she flapped her wings, just as she would were she getting ready to take off. Hoping that would get the point across, Adarael waited for his acknowledgment of understanding before launching into the second part of the question.
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Nyx Queen of Darkness Crew
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Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2015 9:41 pm
Her wings hovered over his, light and delicate as warm summer air. She pushed his wings up, and then down in a slow flapping motion. He watched her with interest as she moved with practiced precision.
She shook her head at him. So she had never flown in the clouds, he wondered idly if she wanted to but was afraid to or couldn't? He wondered if he could even reach that high?
Zatarra watched her moved her wings out from him and tilt her head gently. She pointed to herself then the vast open grasslands ahead of them. Her wings fluttered beautifully and then she paused as though waiting.
"You want to show me how to fly better over there?" He asked gently, wondering how graceful she was when she flew.
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