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 Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 7:54 pm
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 7:55 pm
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No no no. This was a no good, very bad day.
She kept on being shoved into a basket and expected to do very particular things. Before midday tomorrow!
"Don't they know nobody puts Mahdi in a basket?!" She huffed, a stomp of her feet punctuation for how vexed, upset, and generally frustrated she was. Her hooves did muffled but oddly rhythmic thuds against the packed, dry earth. "I'm not some performer!"
Agitated, she swept her wings back and forth, losing some feathers in the process with the faint chime of trinkets in her mane and tail stirring the air from her restless shifting. Dust billowed upwards. It was unseasonably bare this winter. No snow at all. No magic. No creativity, not with her being bundled up in a basket.
This was suffering at its finest. The very epitome of nonsense. It stressed her out. It was stressing her out. But she still had to do it. Be confined to the basket, to expectations.
Nothing was as it should be. She was having a lovely dream - not hers, mind you - but now that she was awake - she thought - nothing was right and she was in the basket. She gave a most unladylike squeal of outrage and a back hoof snapped out, ripping through her luxurious tail.
Nobody puts Mahdi in a basket! Nobody!
To make matters worse she wasn't sure where she was now that she was awake. Dry grasses whispered their distaste for the way she trod on them, branches snap, crackle, and popping as she made her way through the underbrush. She had to get out. She had to get out of this basket and just get through it. Twigs scratched at her sides and she couldn't unfurl her wings. She hated being confined. Jump through hoops to be given a prize! Absurd! The dark mare felt like she might never get out, and that was worrying.
There was no joy while the basket was around her, shutting her in and closing the world out.
She let out another squeal, temper getting the better of her.
This sucked.
words: 350
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 8:27 pm
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This time of year was usually something Qismat looked forward to.
It was always nice to settle down and watch as the seasons bled together, colliding in some strange mishmash of frost on flowers or snow that melted into rain before hitting the ground. It was all so liminal, a time in between the rest of time, where anything could happen until finally the new season well and properly settled and you could say with certainty that it was spring or autumn or what-have-you.
This time it did not feel like that at all.
There was no dreamy in between of frosted green grass or precipitation that couldn't decide whether to be rain or snow. No foggy mornings where you could barely see your nose in front of your face. No chilly nights after a warm day, where you found yourself eager to curl up with a loved one to share the warmth.
It was just rain. And warm days. And mud. And then mud drying out into packed earth and grass so dry it became brittle. A barren landscape that held none of the life he could find even in the dead of winter. Tiny pawprints in snow and occasional a set of hoofprints when someone else was in the area. Maybe even the weird two-legged stride of the upright walkers he knew to be in the lands, with their strange babble and structures. It was grating on him, he knew.
But he suspected he was not the only one bothered by the terrible start to the season. In fact, it was his concern that had drawn him this way, towards an area he was often able to find his mother in. He was worried, and given the sharp squeal that pierced the air not long after he touched down from his long flight, he suspected he'd been right to be worried.
It was a small mercy that Mahdi was relatively easy to find - the destruction to the underbrush her lashing out had caused was easy enough to follow. Still, the state he found her in had Qismat's ears pinning back, head ducking low as he sheepishly crept towards her.
"Mother?"
There was no guarantee she would even recognize him in this state, he knew. Sometimes she didn't, so lost in someone else's dream that he may as well be a stranger to her. He didn't mind. Even when her eyes didn't quite light up with knowing, he knew she loved him.
Word Count: 413
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 9:32 pm
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If there were ever a time for reality and dreams to collide, it seemed this was it. The keepers of both were just out to muck with her. Maybe she'd been drifting too long, too caught up in the feeling of endings and the earth losing its own grip on time and space and life. She ached for the blooms and fragrance of it rather than the stale wasteland the skeletal thicket had become.
Much ado about nothing at all.
It was like she was listlessly waiting for the sun to rise, biding her time with nonsense just to fill the spaces in between. There was a chill in the air that not even the winter sun could warm away despite the fact this winter was not like the others. Was the earth dying all around her? Where would she go?
More sticks snapped underfoot, so much like the crackle of rattle of bones. As though the land were agreeing with her assessment, with the feeling of loss all around her. Loss of light, of warmth, of space to do and be and breathe. The trunks and branches closed in, weaving together until it seemed all light was shrouded and the darkness grew closer.
And with it there seemed to be a feeling. Expectations for her to wither just like the ground beneath her hooves. Sweat shone on her flanks, and not even the occasional distressed flap of her wings would ease it. She was warm. Too warm and worked up, and she wasn't meant to be the sun. She was made for the night and for dreams, but it felt like all the dreams were sucked dry, too. And always she felt like she was trapped within the weaves of a basket.
She heard something from just beyond the bramble. What, and who, she wasn't sure. All she knew was that she'd never felt more claustrophobic than she had at this moment. They wanted to bend her to their will and stifle her creativity that was brewing just out of reach, now. Would she ever reach it again? Ever see another dream? Even if it was someone else's dream instead of her own, at least give her that. Just do not force her to be captive to something that hardly mattered because they had nothing but ease and control on their minds.
There was a resounding crack as her rear hoof struck deadfall, the shower of dry and brittle bark pattering to the ground. It wasn't the sharp crack that she heard, but the softer whispers of the fall, and Mahdi turned her head as the thicket around her seemed to - at long last - ease.
And there, like a light shining through to burn away the darkness, was someone that wasn't immediately known to her. But as the weave retreated and she could breathe again, so too came recognition as her eyes cleared.
"...Qismat." One of the greatest loves in her heart, radiant as the aurora she could oft see at night.
She heaved a breath, knowing she'd made it through without being consciously aware of it, and gratitude edged out all else at long last.
words: 527
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 9:47 pm
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It took a moment. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it took longer - days, weeks, months even. The gaze that met him at first was not one of recognition, but he could see as the fog lifted. He'd known his mother all his life, after all, and he knew the sight of her slowly waking from a dream, all the scattered pieces of herself slowly slotting back into place like broken pottery shards under the watchful eye of a craftsman making them whole again. Recognition, and then his name on her breath.
Qismat's head lifted, his ears turning back forward as his hesitance fled. There was no reason to approach her with caution when she knew who he was. Even covered in a sheen of sweat and still ruffled from a dream, he knew the slide of his neck against hers, the tuck of his chin around her shoulders, the press of his cheek against her flank would be welcome. A greeting. A show of relief.
"It's alright, Mother."
He couldn't put to words what was alright. It felt like nothing was, but it felt just a little bit less like the world was ending with his wings unfurling to curl around in a mockery of the embraces he'd sometimes seen the two-leggers give one another. And perhaps that was enough, to be able to angle his wings to shade her from the sun. To grant her a mockery of the night she felt so much more at ease under. The days may have been growing shorter, but the season didn't truly feel changed and even only just seeing her, Qismat could tell Mahdi felt it as much as he.
He could not say for certain if he was made for anything, but he had been born to dreams. Born to winter, with the echo of a snowy day in his eyes and eventually finely crafted and eternal snowflakes woven into his tail. And he felt ill-at-ease with the unnatural start to this season as well, so of course it had sent his mother into a spiral.
"Tell me, what dream upset you so?"
Word Count: 352
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 9:57 pm
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Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 10:01 pm
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