Welcome to Gaia! ::

Eclipse has never claimed to have a green hoof. If anything, she jokes (quietly, to herself) that hers are more ash-gray than green, but that doesn’t mean she keeps no relationship with the land. Her connection simply looks different from the tidy rows and orderly plots some soquili pride themselves on.

She lives on the borderlands where forest gives way to open stone flats, a place that once burned badly years ago. The soil there is stubborn, thin, and scarred, still remembering fire even after the flames are long gone. Most soquili pass through without stopping. Eclipse stayed.

At first, it wasn’t intentional. She had chosen the place for its solitude, high cliffs for flying, caves that held cool shadows, winds that carried no gossip. Food came easily enough through foraging: wild grasses in the valleys, mineral-rich moss near the stone faces, the occasional fallen fruit carried downriver from greener lands. She didn’t hunt, not truly. The idea sat wrong with her. She preferred what the land offered freely, what could be taken without teeth or blood.

Gardening, though? That came later. Slowly. Reluctantly.

The first plants she ever tried to keep alive died spectacularly.

She remembers staring down at a wilted cluster of greens she’d transplanted from the forest edge, their leaves yellowing within days. She’d watered them too much, then too little. She’d chosen a patch that looked promising but held hidden salt in the soil. Eclipse had stood over them, wings half-spread, simmering with frustration.

“Figures,” she muttered at the time. “Even the plants know better than to trust me.”

For a while after that, she didn’t try again.

But Eclipse is nothing if not stubborn, and the land she lived on kept pulling at her attention. Every spring, tiny signs of recovery appeared - ferns unfurling from cracks, fireweed pushing up defiantly through blackened earth, pale flowers blooming where nothing had bloomed before. The land wasn’t healed, not yet, but it was trying. Watching it stirred something in her chest she didn’t have a name for.

So she started small. Painfully small.

Instead of planting food, she planted support.

Eclipse began by encouraging what already wanted to grow. She cleared stones gently rather than ripping them free, letting water flow into shallow channels during spring melt. She used her wings not to tear but to shade, blocking the harshest sun during peak hours. She gathered fallen leaves from the forest and layered them carefully over bare soil, letting them break down naturally instead of forcing growth.

Her first real success came in the form of herbs.

Hardy ones. The kind that refused to die just because the world was unkind.

She planted yarrow and chamomile in shallow terraces along the canyon wall, where rainwater pooled briefly before draining away. Mint crept in on its own, aggressive and unstoppable, and she let it - its scent calming her on restless nights. Sage took longer, sulking in the dirt until she stopped hovering and simply… left it alone.

That was Eclipse’s first real lesson in gardening: control was not the same as care.

She tended her garden alone, for the most part. No herd worked beside her, no family passed down techniques or traditions. She had no familiar in the traditional sense, though small creatures often lingered nearby - lizards sunning on warm rocks, birds nesting in the scrubby trees she refused to cut down. She spoke to them sometimes, quietly, more thinking aloud than expecting answers.

Still, she wasn’t completely isolated.

On occasion, traveling soquili with true green hooves stopped by. Some were farmers, others healers, a few simply curious. Eclipse listened more than she spoke, storing advice away like precious seeds. She never asked directly for help - pride made that difficult - but she learned by watching, by observing how others touched the land with confidence instead of suspicion.

She learned composting from a mare who laughed easily and smelled of soil.
She learned crop rotation from an old stallion who farmed grains and warned her about exhausting the earth.
She learned patience from all of them.

Eventually, Eclipse added food plants to her growing space. Not fields - never fields - but pockets.

Root vegetables thrived where leafy greens failed. Tubers and hardy bulbs grew well beneath the surface, protected from sun and wind alike. She planted wild onions, turnips, and a stubborn variety of squash that sprawled wherever it pleased. She let it climb rocks, creep into cracks, and she learned not to fight it.

Her harvests were modest. Enough to supplement her foraging, enough to share when travelers passed through, enough to feel like the land and she were finally speaking the same language.

Much of her gardening, though, remained medicinal.

Eclipse grew herbs for poultices and teas, storing them carefully in the dry caves near her home. Some she used herself - calming blends for restless nights, bitter tonics for exhaustion after long flights. Others she traded or gifted. She never charged for medicine. That felt wrong. Healing, like land, was something meant to circulate.

What mattered most to her, though, wasn’t the yield.

It was restoration.

Each season, her plot looked a little less broken. The soil darkened. Insects returned. Birds nested where none had before. Eclipse took quiet pride in those changes, though she would never brag about them. She measured success not in abundance, but in resilience.

There were days she still failed. Plants died. Storms tore through terraces she’d spent weeks shaping. Some years, drought stole more than it gave back. On those days, old frustrations threatened to resurface - the same anger, the same feeling of pushing against a world that resisted her at every turn.

But gardening taught Eclipse something rage never could.

You cannot force life to grow faster because you need it to.
You cannot punish the land into healing.
You can only show up. Again. And again. And again.

On evenings near harvest time, Eclipse often stands at the edge of her garden, wings folded loosely, watching the sun sink low. Her hooves are dusted with soil, her mane tangled with bits of leaf and stem. She feels tired, but it’s a good tired - earned, honest.

She doesn’t call herself a farmer.

She doesn’t even always call herself a gardener.

She thinks of herself as a steward, maybe. Or simply a witness, someone who stayed long enough to see damaged ground try to become whole again.

And in tending that land, season by season, Eclipse has found something unexpected: a quiet proof that not everything touched by darkness stays broken forever.