Merevaika
The Benshira had seen a farm boy. She had lived as a farm boy. She had experienced his memories. So Merevaika wasn't the only one. The tight feeling in her heart loosened, and she let out a sigh of relief, glad she wasn't the only one touched by this strange magic. Venthris was different to the farm boy, a horse not a human. But were they real, or just figments of someone's imagination? Were those real skeletons turned crystal, or real crystal turned to skeletons? Did it make a difference?
"I saw a strider," she said simply, trying to keep to Merevaika and block Venthris, however noble the mare was. At the moment, she had to be human. Perhaps later, she would let the emotions and memories sweep over her, learn about the wild strider way of life, but not now. Now the other woman was gesturing wildly, flinging her arms around with mocking tones in her voice.
She was angry, confused, scared and violated, and exclaimed several more things, shouting and moving away with confused movements, the events clearly disturbing her more than they had Merevaika.
But Merevaika was always calm. Not calm, just unnerved by things around her. The Sea of Grass, after all, was a pretty dangerous, strange and ever changing place. Things happened there that bothered others, but the drykas had build up a shell to it, a layer of protection against feelings.
And it wasn't just that. "Calm because this is normal. Calm because similar things happened." Normal? In what world was this normal? Merevaika had never experienced things like this before, despite experiencing weird things. This was one step further, one step more supernatural or divine or whatever the magic was. But recently, it did feel like normal. Her hand traced down to where, imprinted on her thigh, lay a pair of gilded antlers, marking her gift out from the rest. The gift of transformation, the gift of an elk's body to assume. That day was the first of the weird days. She had been thrown into a world of Alvinas and elks and hunters, a world she didn't know, a world so divine.
And Alcor, it must have been, had given her this strange but amazing gift through it, through death itself. She was marked by the gilded antlers.
And then, after that, was the water, red like blood but tasteless, changing her form to one of a man's. That was even worse. As an a elk, she could survive, knowing there ways. But men were more foreign to her than the rarest of race. She had been changing and shifted, her life turned upside down twice, and this, this was nothing. More memories wasn't bad, considering that she believed that she would have had to spend her life as either elk or a man. This was nothing.
"We aren't mad. Riverfall is," she replied to the final statement, "Not noticed strange things? Very strange - less than this."
She hoped the woman would calm down. It wasn't good for her to act like this. Her suggestion had been a better way to act; tea calmed troubled souls, she knew that. Better to sit and drink tea than think she'd gone mad. That all of them had gone mad. Because they hadn't.
"Pavi"
Grassland sign
"Common"