Name: Rainband.
Gender: Mare.
Species: Painted Arabian.
Personality:
Soft and quiet, Rainband sticks
mainly to herself. She does not have any close friends; she is a
complete loner to the popular society she was destined to be in.
Having
been thrown out of her original herd, she does not understand nor will
for any sort of herd members. She does not trust easily; it is almost
painful for her to try and cultivate friendships for the many times she
has been hurt.
Because the paint that is smeared across her white fur
is removeable [and must be refreshed every night], she has a certain
trend of hydrophobia; fear of water. She has such low self confidence
that if for some reason she could not find enough material to coat
herself, or if it got washed off, she would hide and sulk until she
found some way to replace it.
She has no children, and doesn't have
much of a will to have one. The proud bloodline of purebred Painted
Arabians stretches back behind her, but she does not assume that she has
a responsibility to try for foals. She has been told many times that
sometimes the markings skip a generation; but Rainband could never forgive herself if she had a tiny, naive colt or filly that was as innocently white as she.
Her
main goal in life is to avoid the pain that follows her insistently.
Her horrible past has left her mind-scarred, and there is only one
exception to the rule of who can get close to him. He is a stallion
named Blunt Trauma, an immortal who serves under the dictation of a god.
He seems to understand more then she understands herself... Perhaps
there is an uncoiling sense of love in both of them. She does not know,
and she is too timid to try and ask.
Plagued by nightmares every
night she drifts asleep, she has slowly grown accustomed to the lack of
rest. She is not nearly as bright-eyed as some of the mares who get to
sleep in twelve hour shifts, and occasionally, this absence of sleep has
caused her some serious energy troubles. She is currently working on a
way to get through the night without waking up screaming.
History:
The night was calm, but I was not.
I
stumbled to my tarnished mahogany hooves in fright, flaring my nostrils
open and expanding my narrow chest to its fullest reach. My heartbeat
hammered in the hollow of my throat, tucked beneath my chin, and made
swallowing difficult as I fought to ignore the scare.
The faintest
drizzle of frigid raindrops began plodding along the ground, and as I
hesitantly began to calm, the weather picked up in intensity. Within a
few minutes, I was soaked.
My nightmares chased at my heels, and one
particularly stubborn one clung to the edge of my mind and grasped me
tight in its icy grip. Immediately the memories began to live in my head
again, unwinding time and time again. I snorted and shook, trying to
shoo it away, but by the time I opened my eyes I was lost.
I remember that the stallion seemed infinitely large.
He
stood before me, his muscled figure coated in a velvet pelt of pure
black fur. Intricate designs of cerulean blue laid across his flanks and
shoulders, and the color present there matched the shade of his eyes.
He glared at me, eyes sharpened into flints of gemstone.
My mother
stood just inches away from my side, literally shaking in fear. The
docile and submissive mare had done the customary; left the herd to
bring her foal into the world and brought us both back a single month
later. She had not counted on the unusual shade that ruined everything.
The lead stallion finally glanced at my dam with a tight frown pulling his muzzle down. "I do not want her in my herd. Banish her."She
stifled a scream, the panicked sound lodging in her clamped mouth. Her
eyes were wild and she looked at me. I remember that it was a priceless
glance; apology, guilt, terror, and... forgiveness lingering.
She
turned her back to me and walked off, following the procession the
stallion left behind him. The other herd members, whether they disagreed
or not, were forced to leave me.
I was confused. The acrid taste of
puzzlement burned in my tiny, unweaned mouth. I bayed after my mother,
the enormous sound rocking my delicate body, but nobody turned. Nobody
even glanced back. As their shadows dwindled into the horizon and pulled
into impossible shapes, I stood still, pale blue eyes, so like my
father's, peering after them.
I was a single month old at the time, and I was born pure white.
I
sucked in a harsh breath and blew it out into the winter air, a cold
sweat decorating my craned neck. I could barely breathe past the horror
infiltrating my mind, and I tipped my head back, looking up into the
night sky to look silently at the star-pricked black fabric above. It
brought my mind off of the current epidemic of memories seizing me; and
it gave me something prettier to look at then the history that plagued
me so horrifically.
[MAJOR WIP.]
Name: Tourniquet.
Gender: Mare.
Species: Immortal.
Personality:
Time has left me but a shell of what I once was.
Memories are hazy. Names are difficult to recall. Emotions... ah. I can barely even remember feeling something.
There
are grounding things still that help me keep my balance while walking
the ragged edge of my sanity. My two foals...they, after all these
words, worlds, and centuries, retain enough to fight to call me back to
humanity.
Blunt Trauma, my eldest, the sharp-minded colt who gave his mortal life for his forged dam.
Straitjacket, my youngest, a silly, foolish filly who followed her brother into eternity.
I
serve under the burden of a devil. My career is to collect the passed
souls that linger on the plane of the In Between, to retrieve them for
my sadistic master.
Some of them are silent when I scoop them up and
carry them onward. Some will struggle and yell at me, too weak after a
few hours out of physical life to do anything. Some, the desperate ones,
will even beg for mercy.
...some mornings I cannot even remember what mercy was.
The passage of time no longer effects me. I cannot keep track of the years after so long.
I
have seen civilizations rise into epic power and slide back into
vanished generations and culture. Politics do not hamper me. The angels
that prod at me don't matter. All that I focus on are my children. When
all else leaves my ravaged mind and body, I will never forget them.
Perhaps it is these, the small duty of mortality I preformed while
alive, that allow me to keep speech even now.
Or perhaps it is merely my will to share my story.
History:
I
have gone through so many names over my lifetime that it is difficult
to remember quite where I began. I trace through my centuries and years
with the remembrance of which name paired with what and I first remember
that, in the wee beginning, I was borne with the name Tourniquet.
My
story started out as many do. You see, I was first born mortal, due to
two mortal parents, the sweet filly of a dam and sire madly in love.
My
mother’s name…ah, it escapes me. Her voice captivated me as a small
foal, and she spun wild stories of exaggerated bold fights between
brave-hearted stallions and the woodland predators who dared to defy
them. Her favorite hobby was that of passing down the generations of
tall tales she had been given, and I remember clearly that my father
would always look on in proud joy.
We were a small herd, merely the
tiny family of us. I was my parent’s first foal together, and they
wanted the best life for me that it was possible to have. My mother
always encouraged me to dream as big as I could and that someday, if I
believed enough, I would achieve all that I willed to happen.
There
is a hazy block here of a childhood occurrence that I sought to forget.
My mother, grazing on a knoll painted the color of spilled emeralds,
was accidentally murdered by local hunters. The beautiful mahogany shade
of her warm coat had mistaken them into thinking she was a deer. She
stood no chance to the heavy blow of the bullet, and died long before my
father could reach her.
I remember, out of all of these months, the
contrast of shades between the delicate, jagged green of the grass she
died on and the dashing scarlet color of the life draining out of her
shattered form.
The blow was heavy on my sire. Being as young as I
was, I did not fully understand the loss of my dam. For days afterward I
played and frolicked, constantly prodding my father and begging him to
tell me where my mother was, that I missed my bedtime stories and
make-believe play dates. He had no way to tell me she was gone forever,
and with a heavy heart, he succumbed to a great depression.
Independence was
bred into me from my mother’s side, and with the staggering blow of
both of my parents missing, I learned to fend for myself. I was barely
old enough to feed on the brush underfoot but I honed my mind and did it
anyway, dragging scruffs of good eating back to the shell of my father.
He turned into a recluse, and although I provoked him into eating a
good meal every few days, eventually his muscles gave out to the wear
and tear of sedentary life and he passed away. My father had lost the
will to live once his sole heart had died in the beautiful form of my
mother. There was no saving my sire from himself once he settled into
dying and rediscovering her in death.
My first birthday hit me
like a freight train; that I remember. Standing on the same hill of
where my mother had been shot and killed, I watched the sun go down and
silently celebrated the survival of my first year.
It was then that I
forced myself to move, and I walked away from where the graves of my
parents grew wild. I traveled far and wide, always watching the sky to
remember my place, forever imprinting the two stars in my mind that I
called my parents. I was sure that they had gone to a better place once
they had left me, and as that was all I had to comfort myself, I clung
onto it desperately.
When I uncovered another herd living in the
mountains, I resided amidst their ranks. I changed my name to something
more proper and usual that a curious stranger would find in these lands,
so I settled on merely becoming a simple-minded, pale gold-brown mare
called Sunrise. I figured the name was so overly easy that none would investigate further on where I even came from.
For
three years I lived in complete peace in this herd. I was technically a
mere mare there, and I normally lived on the very boundaries, escaping
the tyrant king they bore yet reaping the benefits of an over all
protection factor.
The seasons and days passed in tranquility. For
the first time since my parents’ untimely deaths, I felt as though I
could relax.Sunrise became a part of me, and for a while, I repressed enough memories to even forget about the figment foal of Tourniquet.
The
spring of my fourth year hit the herd with a flurry. I had been
introduced into the herd along with another large group of yearling
fillies, and this was their first year where they could find mates to
live out the rest of their lives with. As always, I retained my poignant
area and stayed away from the arrogant stallions who flaunted all of
their nice genes to try and attract anything their way.
I spent the
hours grazing, watching out of the corner of my honey eyes as they
bucked against once another and threw wild skirmishes to try and get the
girls to giggle. I ignored it, sometimes even turning my flank to the
sounds and sights when I got too tired of watching them earn “hard-won
battle scars” from a planned game.
I remained untouched and unmated
that year, and I watched without a pregnancy myself as most of the mares
in their prime in the herd grew big with foal. At first, I merely
concealed my disappointment. I watched as more and more tiny fillies and
colts were born, planting the herd’s fields with miniature neighs and
whinnies as they called to one another and their scattered dams.
The
morning I decided I would next season have a foal was an unusual one for
me. I stirred in the early hours as always, stretching out my limber
limbs and trotting off to my usual secluded area, bowing my head to the
dew-covered, tender spring shoots. I fed peacefully for a while until
the herd began waking, and as always, it grew noisier then. The birds
that had kept me company in the tall oak tree next to my spot flocked
away as hoof beats drummed in my general direction, and puzzled, I
glanced up to see the visitor. I rarely was annoyed any time by members
of the herd, but after a minute, I realized the figure approaching me
was small. Cocking my head, I blinked as the brave colt staggered into
the sunlight and my view, heaving his breath as he completed his gallop.
Silently
turning away and back to eating, I ignored him for a few minutes. He
peered away, catching sight of me, and instantly nickered. “I’m sorry!”
He squeaked at intruding, and I couldn’t help the warm laugh that
bounced back. I straightened, shooting him a pleasant grin. “Go back to
your dam, little one.” I advised him, and as quick as he had arrived,
the foal took off with a kick.
As I watched him dwindle and disappear
back into the crowd of the herd, I realized for a painstaking moment
that I wanted a child myself. I had stranded myself in isolation for
much too long; perhaps a foal would give me the family that had
originally been snatched from me so early on.
[WIP]
