The disease that wiped the earth of mankind has returned, and it's starting to change its hosts somehow. Reports of unearthly powers are arising all over Toren while more and more become infected.
updates
< 11 JULY 2017 > The staff auditions and OTMs are officially OVER. I'd like to welcome our two new staffers - Lutheus and Crowenth! There will be some new events soon, as well as a big announcement - so watch this space.
< 20 JUNE 2017 > ATTENTION! Staff auditions are up and running. Please click here if you are interested in helping me run Clash.
< 06 JUNE 2017 > It hasn't been too long since we've opened - but we've already got a fresh new look. If you find any bugs in our new skin, please let me know so that I can fix it. Old members might have to update their avatar links and profile info! x
< 07 MAY 2017 > CLASH has officially been reopened and is ready for action! The plot, rules and canons have been revised - read more about it here.
All he needs right now is to breath. In, out. In, out. He wishes that his consciousness could expand outward to join the grey water, water that seems to stretch out to eternity itself. I am alone, he thinks, not at all unhappily, Adrift. The wind could take me anywhere. Anywhere at all!
Thorn loves the water like he would love a brother. The sight, sound and smell of the ocean makes him feel more at home than he ever felt in the land of his family herd, a place far west of where he stood now. A place that the ocean did not touch, save for through the fingers of rivers and lakes. He would like to settle here, on this beach, though he knows it is irrational. A beach is no place for a horse to thrive. Indeed, sometimes he feel like he is in fact the soul of a dolphin or whale, born into the wrong body. The ocean, he feels, treats him like the lover - the soul mate - that he is not quite sure he will ever find: gentle but passionate, all encompassing, beautiful, full of life, never tiresome or dull.
Rousing himself from his trance, he begins to trot, legs extending and pushing with no great effort. Grains of wet sand fly up and attach themselves to his stomach, but they don't bother him. It seems nothing could bother him today.
Except memories. He stops trotting, sighs heavily. Mere geographical distance cannot break the connection between him and his family - well, what remained of it. Thorn has the strong suspicion that, with his mother gone to the world of Spirits, his father and brothers will drift apart like leaves in the wind. The only thing that could have kept them together is him...and he is far away now, on a foreign shore. He wishes fervently, for a moment, that at least one of his foolish but admittedly lovable brothers had joined him. Though Thorn enjoys his solitude, there is nothing quite like the company of a brother to make you feel strong.
But regret is not something that Thorn likes to waste time with. He breaks into a canter, shaking his head to leave behind the wearisome thoughts. Perhaps he will meet others today, perhaps not. But whatever happens, his new life has begun. It has bloomed anew, and nothing can stop him from devouring it.
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It wasn't often that one contemplated the deeper meanings of life so early in the morning. Perhaps the sea air was getting to her head. It's salty tang surrounded her, laying a muggy haze over her senses. This is what caused her to retreat into the recesses of her mind, thinking of past events that she had promised herself never to remember. This expedition into her imagination was driven by some sort of morbid curiousity; after years of blocking out the negative memories of her past, she wanted to find out how much she could really remember. Something inside her brain was screaming at her to stop, but she found herself unable to do so - crippled by a burning desire to know more. The petite mare halted in her wander along the shoreline - not a consciouse decision, but simply a result of her intense focus on wading through the plethora of memories contained within her mind.
She realised that it had been a bad idea as soon as she began to remember. The memories broke through the floodgate. Was there even a reason to live if nobody cared for your existence? Her mother and father had hastily disassociated themselves from her at birth, but she had spent the first couple of years of her life with her grandmother - contented and safe. Of course, though, nobody lived forever; her dear grandmother had passed away quite suddenly last winter. That had left the young mare with very little time to adjust to the sudden diminshment of anyone in her life that cared about her. So was there a point to her existance? The palomino mare certainly wasn't the type of horse that drifts through life, complaining about how "unfair" life is; she was the type to grab life by the horns and live every day as if it was her last. But now that she thought about it, it did make her think. Nobody cared whether she lived or died - I mean, why would they? Why should they?
Without Halcyon realising, the tide had come in. It now washed against her knees, and the sudden chill of the water caused reality to kick in. She waded out of the icy water, and savoured the warmth that greeted her legs on the sand. A flawless sheen of beige lay ahead of her, save for the hoof-shaped imperfections that lay in a trail across the sand. Hoof shaped. Halcyon's ears flickered forward, now aware that she must not be alone. As if on queue, a shape appeared on the horizon, slightly blurred by the fine mist escaping from the ocean. Cee narrowed her eyes, lids sliding over the oddly coloured irises. Closer now, she could tell from the chiselled, sharp edges that she was keeping the company of a stallion. An involuntary whicker escaped her lips; a clear sign of the social deprivation she had recently been suffering from. Really, she should learn to be more careful - you never knew who was a psycho these days - but she knew in her mind that she never would.
A light misty rain has begun to fall. Droplets of moisture collect on Thorn’s whiskers and he makes no move to shake them off, enjoying the feeling of his body being covered by damp. The sand beneath his hooves is hard packed, perfect for a good canter. The moment is so pleasant that he can almost, but not quite, quell the memory rising up in him….
He was young, much younger than today. Swimming in the pond, blowing silvery bubbles and enjoying being alone. Suddenly, he senses a presence behind him. He turns, and sees a specter. Its eyes are hollow and unseeing, its ribs gaunt. It is calling his name; but how? He doesn’t know who this is. And then it hits him: it’s his mother. She grows sicker by the day…
Thorn slows to a trot, snorting. He hates these memories. They seem dirty, wrong. His mother would not want to be remembered this way. “Forgive me, mother”, he murmurs, “But please, leave me alone. Stop making me remember you…I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember any of it. I don’t want to know what you made me...”
He cuts himself off. He does not want to go any farther with these thoughts. The past is the past. This beach, here and now, is his present. And now it seems, it is offering him a new point of interest: another of his kind.
She appears before him without warning: a mare, golden and shining in the faint, mist-shrouded sun. Thorn hesitates, unsure of whether he really wants an encounter with a member of the opposite sex right now, especially one that is clearly alone. In his experience, a lone mare is a desperate creature. He does not want desperation right now, does not want a new burden of responsibility placed on his shoulders.
Stop it, he commands himself, You're making assumptions. Sexist assumptions. You should know better than that. Be a man. Talk to her.
He returns her whicker but does not quicken his pace. He takes his time reaching her space, taking the opportunity to observe her more thoroughly. She is pleasing to the eye, certainly, with a soft, open look in her eyes that makes a lightness in his chest. He sees no reason to be a stranger so he speaks,
"Hello there, miss. I thought I was alone on this beach, but it appears I am not. My name is Thorn; I've traveled a long way from my home west of here. What is your name?"
[style=padding: 420px 20px 35px 20px; color: #ffffff; font-family:arial; font-size: 9px; overflow: auto;] This place was one of the few areas in which she felt herself. She wasn't entirely sure why; perhaps the sea air was an intoxicant, or perhaps the sound of the ocean ridded her of her inhibitions. Whatever it was, there was some sort of purity about Pacem Shore that relaxed and soothed her. A seemingly endless stretch of glistening taupe hued sand extended for as far as the eye could see, fringed one one side by the trees, and by the ocean on the other. Palm trees shuddered slightly with the breeze, their emerald fronds fluttering as the wind whisked beneath their almost translucent surface. Today, the ocean was a dirty shade of blue, caused by the torrents whisking up sand as they rode in to the shore. Other days, however, the water was crystalline; this was the time when the beach was most crowded, as the masses flooded to swim and hunt in the water. A seagull cried overhead, snapping Halcyon out of her revery. The palomino mare paused momentarily, casting an absent-minded scowl in its' direction. She watched as the gulls swooped down towards the ocean, skimming the surface with their talons only to sweep back upwards into the sky. They wheeled about in the sky, coming insanely close to crashing into one another but - at the same time - never even grazing their wings. Halcyon mused that she would much like to be as graceful as them.
Halcyon's attention was next drawn back to the stallion. His mouth formed words - entire sentences, in fact - but his speech was not directed toward her. She cocked her head to one side, bemusement clear in her expression. Over the crashing of the waves on the shore, she couldn't hear any of what he was saying; perhaps he was just talking to himself. The stallion had noticed her, yes - although he appeared slightly hesitant in approaching her. Inwardly, Cee acknowledged that she couldn't blame him; it was quite frequent that other horses you met in the wild had slightly questionable intentions. A small smile lingered around her lips, not quite forming, but enough to curl the edges of her mouth upwards. Her lavender eyes monitored him curiously, intently focused on his actions. His coat was largely black, but an assortment of small, white patches were littered across his right shoulder, as well as coating his legs and face. Halcyon had to stifle a chuckle as she wondered whether - with enough vigorous scrubbing - he would become entirely white.
The tawny mare allowed her muscles to relax slightly as he called back to her. Oddly, his voice reassured her a little; it was the kind of voice she imagined a respectable gentleman to have. She noted the way he refrained from approaching her too closely, an almost tentative gesture. It was a rare pleasure to find company that didn't immediately break the personal space boundary within the first few minutes of meeting them. As he spoke, Cee's suspicions of him being quite the gentleman were confirmed. It felt odd to be addressed as "Miss", and the mare found herself quite liking this new respect. "Hello, Thorn. Sorry to have disturbed you; it isn't often you find others out here on a day like this," Halcyon cast a wary glance to the sky, her lilac eyes trained on the clouds. "I'm called Halcyon. It seems we've found our first similarity; I, too, am a long way from home." An almost wistful hint crept in to her voice. It had been a long time since she had wished for home, and she didn't intend to start now. Halcyon banished these ridiculous thoughts to the back of her mind, and occupied herself with watching Thorn carefully.
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