like breaking diamonds with your hands
Mauja had begun to hate portals.
There had only been one good portal in his life, and that was the one that had taken him back in time. There, centuries in the past, he had been given an egg, but we'll get back to that.
The rest? One placed him in timestreams, a long, harrowing experience before his return (he was not foolish enough to think of it as an 'escape', as it had been entirely by accident on his part). Another he was forced through after witnessing a destructive god-entity slaughter anyone who refused. And this last one, well...
He was an unkempt, disheveled creature back in the Bloodmountains, two-thirds of a whole: just Mauja and Diego, two lost souls. Being immortal had made him careless, though it wasn't one of his deaths just yet. He was just underfed and demoralized, until the missing piece had begun to show up on his event horizon.
Just a little light—
Like an itch you can't scratch; like a sudden scent reminding you of a heart-wrenching memory, perhaps because who you loved is now dead, or it's a place you can't return to.
Something that swelled, and swelled, and swelled, until you were overflowing, and ready to explode: something that grew so bright and brilliant and radiant, eclipsing all else—
The rush of complete, utter euphoria in your veins.
Like the fool he was he had probably shrieked her name and jumped off whatever he had been standing on; risky business in mountains, and especially when your immortality only kept you from dying, not from being horribly injured.
But that's where the portal came into the equation.
He only remembered the feeling of leaping, of nothing but air beneath his hooves, the sight of those white-and-blue wings beating in the sky, the feeling of her in his heart, the sensation of her mind drifting across his: the lovelovelovelovelove beating in three hearts, joining them as they fell.
And...fell, for longer than they should've.
At some point physics stopped mattering, and the euphoria stopped mattering, and there was just the reflection that something was very, very wrong.
The closest thing he could describe it to was what Sarazheha, his younger brother, did when transporting others: he became the gale, the storm, and he blew them like tumbleweeds across the earth.
But Sarazheha was nowhere near, and this wasn't his doing: this was pure light and weightlessness, not the wind in his veins.
Then he fell in a rain of possessions and owls; his shoulder hit the snowy slope and gracelessly he tumbled head over heels until jealous gravity let him slide to a stop. The owls circled above him, feeling his body just as he did: feeling the angular jut of his hips and the narrowness of his waist, the thinness of his otherwise so regal neck, the wholeness of every bone and organ. He felt more offended and confused than battered, though he was lying with his back facing the downslope. Inelegantly, the white horse struggled for a moment before managing to roll over, striped hooves digging into the loose, powdery snow and sending off a shower as he got up and shook himself vigorously.
Now the question was: where the fuck was he?
(Because for one painful moment the mountains looked like familiar mountains—the Heimasborg the Rift had stolen, perhaps, or the Aurora Basin, and it hurt so badly but they were not his mountains. They were just mountains, sharp and cold and unforgiving.)
[ please keep in mind that he does not currently have his horn. ]
There had only been one good portal in his life, and that was the one that had taken him back in time. There, centuries in the past, he had been given an egg, but we'll get back to that.
The rest? One placed him in timestreams, a long, harrowing experience before his return (he was not foolish enough to think of it as an 'escape', as it had been entirely by accident on his part). Another he was forced through after witnessing a destructive god-entity slaughter anyone who refused. And this last one, well...
He was an unkempt, disheveled creature back in the Bloodmountains, two-thirds of a whole: just Mauja and Diego, two lost souls. Being immortal had made him careless, though it wasn't one of his deaths just yet. He was just underfed and demoralized, until the missing piece had begun to show up on his event horizon.
Just a little light—
Like an itch you can't scratch; like a sudden scent reminding you of a heart-wrenching memory, perhaps because who you loved is now dead, or it's a place you can't return to.
Something that swelled, and swelled, and swelled, until you were overflowing, and ready to explode: something that grew so bright and brilliant and radiant, eclipsing all else—
The rush of complete, utter euphoria in your veins.
Like the fool he was he had probably shrieked her name and jumped off whatever he had been standing on; risky business in mountains, and especially when your immortality only kept you from dying, not from being horribly injured.
But that's where the portal came into the equation.
He only remembered the feeling of leaping, of nothing but air beneath his hooves, the sight of those white-and-blue wings beating in the sky, the feeling of her in his heart, the sensation of her mind drifting across his: the lovelovelovelovelove beating in three hearts, joining them as they fell.
And...fell, for longer than they should've.
At some point physics stopped mattering, and the euphoria stopped mattering, and there was just the reflection that something was very, very wrong.
The closest thing he could describe it to was what Sarazheha, his younger brother, did when transporting others: he became the gale, the storm, and he blew them like tumbleweeds across the earth.
But Sarazheha was nowhere near, and this wasn't his doing: this was pure light and weightlessness, not the wind in his veins.
Then he fell in a rain of possessions and owls; his shoulder hit the snowy slope and gracelessly he tumbled head over heels until jealous gravity let him slide to a stop. The owls circled above him, feeling his body just as he did: feeling the angular jut of his hips and the narrowness of his waist, the thinness of his otherwise so regal neck, the wholeness of every bone and organ. He felt more offended and confused than battered, though he was lying with his back facing the downslope. Inelegantly, the white horse struggled for a moment before managing to roll over, striped hooves digging into the loose, powdery snow and sending off a shower as he got up and shook himself vigorously.
Now the question was: where the fuck was he?
(Because for one painful moment the mountains looked like familiar mountains—the Heimasborg the Rift had stolen, perhaps, or the Aurora Basin, and it hurt so badly but they were not his mountains. They were just mountains, sharp and cold and unforgiving.)
[ please keep in mind that he does not currently have his horn. ]
