Closed First Impressions All Over Again

[Khida]

oocSorry for the delay, I didn't expect to take so long... The man paused before the tent, and spoke an apology, slightly downcast. Khida blinked at him -- Things? Who cared about things? -- and shook her head, mostly in bemusement. "What else would you need?" she countered, with the blunt indifference of one accustomed to a complete lack of things. Water, food, shelter, and her bonded. Those were surely the only things the Kelvic needed, and concerned herself with... though humans needed more, she knew; their time together had made that abundantly clear. "...Do you need other things?" she asked in an altogether different tone, those considerations casting the issue in very different light from her first opinion. While these thoughts played themselves out, the hunter set about rearranging the contents of his tent in much the way he had that time before. He set aside a space for Khida to occupy, and directed her to it when his preparations were ready; she nodded in assent, though the gathering gloom likely made it difficult to see. That the woman promptly set her burdens aside and folded herself into a sitting position on the bedroll was more evident by far. In the dim confines of the tent, his presence was distinctly palpable in the heat his body gave off, the displacement of air; that presence pricked at her awareness through more than sight alone. Through more than sense alone, the Kelvic slowly came to recognize, as that empty space within began to fill with something more concrete than mere promise. She wasn't sure what to make of it yet, unable to tease free anything more than presence -- but that gradually coalescing presence was more welcome than she had words to express. Words, speaking; this reminded Khida of her waiting question, which she now had opportunity to ask. "There is a... a word," she said, not quite sure what to call the gestures the Drykas used in their communications. "I do not know what it is, but maybe you can say..." But it was hard to see even her own hands as she sketched the unfamiliar sign, and Khida couldn't tell if he saw it at all. She reached out for his hands then, finding them by deduction, draping his fingers over her own so that he might feel the slowly-drawn gesture and perhaps recognize it in that way. The sign she repeated was a close cousin to together, but with stronger connotations: oneness, inseparable, indivisible.

[Colt]

She seemed completely unconcerned with his lack of things to offer, instead fixing him with an inquisitive stare and asking if he needed more. He shook his head. No, sheepish, relief.

The space inside the tent became suddenly thicker when she followed him and took a seat upon the sleeping pad. Around them was heat and the sheer force of presence that was almost tangible, but, as before, the space between was a vacuum that pulled at him without mercy. It had changed, gaining an absoluteness that Shahar could only vaguely make sense of. No longer was it the potential of what could be; it was slowly, every so slowly becoming the potential of what would be.

It was in the silence of what would be that Khida spoke, words unsure. She took his hands in inquiry, sending electric tingles up his arms and drawing a shiver. The sign was known to him, and he thought he knew what she was implying.

He turned their hands over, repeating the same sign against her palm and leaning close so as to utter the word aloud.

“Whole?” He did not know if that was one of her Pavi words, but it seemed the only one that really fit her signs. Was that ‘bondmate,’ too? Wholeness?

Even as he thought it, he felt the same jarring of thoughts. Something was not quite there, stalling ‘bondmate’ with its absence. What did it mean? What were they missing?

He huffed and pulled away; the puzzle of Khida was not complete. And he knew deep down that to bondmate without it being complete was impossible.

Confusion, he said to her hands. What is it? I do not understand.

“Khida…” It was almost a sentence in itself, the way he sighed it into the coalescing darkness. He handled it with care, with a gentleness that he had never before put to a word. “Khida…” this time it was stronger, marking it as the beginning of something to be said, something important.

“… who are you?”

[Khida]

"Whole," she echoed after he said it, as he repeated the sign beneath her hovering fingers. But the syllables her lips shaped were foreign to the woman, and patently so: sound without meaning, for all that she knew it meant something. Khida was graced with a Pavi sign and a Pavi word, but not an answer -- she still didn't know what the gesture was. She huffed, and he huffed in what seemed a startling echo; surprised out of her momentary frustration, Khida tipped her head and blinked in the man's direction. Beneath her hands, his danced another singular motion, one that she could not catch in full by feel... but what she did catch was tantalizingly familiar. Khida sat back a bit, her hands sketching the same motion she'd felt. It was... If she adjusted so, added this, it became a gesture she knew well and had even used herself. Who are you, he asked next, clarifying the nature of his confusion -- and Khida could only stare into the dim silence afterwards, stunned and bewildered. Belatedly, the Kelvic shaped confusion in return, though did not think to ensure contact between them as she did so. To him, it was likely just a vague smear of pale skin in the gloom. "I don't understand..." she said, drawing back further. For all that he had said in the beginning that he didn't know her, their later accord had chased it entirely from Khida's mind. This new question brought it home again, and deepened her concern besides. That he asked... "I am Khida," she answered by rote, because that was usually what humans wanted from such a query... but it didn't feel like the correct answer here. Only... she couldn't find the right one, for all that she tried. "...Who else would I be?" He was the lodestone by which her existence was oriented; he had become to her as constant, as certain as sunrise. Yet now... His words unnerved, even frightened the Kelvic. He, of all the people in the world, shouldn't need to ask... If her own bondmate didn't even know who she was... All at once, much seemed cast into doubt, and Khida found no possible solace in words. She didn't know how to deal with the unanswerable question, the eerie ambiguity it seemed to raise. So she took refuge in familiarity instead. Light rose against the night's shadows, gone as soon as it came, the rapid, rasping flutter of wings -- once, twice, thrice -- loud in the seemingly deeper darkness which followed. The falcon did not fly, not in the confines of the tent, but made an extended hop to a corner behind where she'd sat, talons finding purchase in some bundle of human gear. There, feathers fluffed, Khida preened at her feathers furiously and yet half-heartedly, finding no true comfort in the action.

[Colt]

She pulled back, uncertain in the wake of his question. He, in turn, felt guilt pull at his gut—he didn’t want her to be uncertain; on such confident shoulders, it seemed wrong. He wanted to take the question back, to do something, anything to take away the strange tension that now filled the darkness.

Her answer was hesitant, for both of them knew that the answer he needed would not come so easily as a simple name. He hated the question, hated what it did to her, though he was still not quite sure of the extent to which it reached. Khida pulled back farther, wrapping the darkness around her like a cloak, and he wanted to reach out and pull her back, and…

His thoughts trailed off. He was a perceptive creature, enough to see a tree by daylight, but… the darkness into which Khida sank changed, enfolding her like mist and congealing into something different entirely. Shahar shifted uncomfortably, suddenly nervous. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, and it incited no small bit of worry, even fear—for both the woman it had claimed and for himself. But he could still feel her in the tent with him, and there were no cries of fright or pain, but... what was happening?

The answer came in a sudden flash of bright light. There was mist, there was shadow, the sudden momentary silhouette of a woman—a silhouette that, in an instant became something else.

Then, as instantaneously as it had come, the light was gone, so quickly that he might have missed it with a blink. But in the darkness, in the place of Khida there was now a shocking familiarity. The ruffle of feathers filled the shelter like drumbeats, like the throbbing of his own heart. Great Caiyha, it couldn’t be…

She tugged at the cloth in her passage as she moved away from him. Taking up a stance in a corner, she began to attend to risen feathers with motions he’d seen a hundred times before, such that he didn't need to see to know every movement of her head, every bending feather.

She…

The falcon…

Khida…

Understanding swept through him like a tide on the ocean, washing away the confusion and filling every part of his body with a feeling he couldn’t describe. Every hunt, every sign, every lesson learned either of them had ever taught one another… because it was her, as surely as the sky was blue—a knowledge that had always been laying in wait just beneath his awareness, but had never reared its head. He knew her.

Khida.

He felt it thrum within his chest, something that had been waiting for a very, very long time. As if his soul was a fleece, and the threads were moving of their own accord—dancing, twirling together, reaching towards the angled form before him. It startled him for a moment, but then it was over, done, as quick as a passing greeting to a srtanger, and then there was something else. Something had happened, something that he couldn’t see but that he felt, deep in the places where thoughts fell asleep until they grew into reality, where the mind kept secrets from itself and swam in rivers of ever-changing emotion.

“Khida…” It was a word of sheer wonder, of clarity and of watching her so many times as she floated upon the sky like a ship on the sea, or when they’d shared and understood even when words were but memories in the wind. Amazement, because she had been two amazing creatures and was now one and the same as both, and never before had it made so much sense.

Khida was a woman.

Khida was a falcon.

But, above all, and now more than any time before, Khida was his family.

[Khida]

Silence, the rasp of feathers against beak seeming loud to her ears in the still darkness. Silence which seemed to hang over them with its own weight, thick and dark -- not the darkness of storm, but the darkness of natural night. Perhaps oddly, that stillness did more to soothe the falcon than her own preening, speaking subliminally of peace and sleep to the deep recesses somewhere below thought. After a few moments, her motions eased; she ceased to preen, and stood still, talons fidgeting against whatever it was in the bundle she huddled upon. Beneath a layer of cloth, she felt something thin and stiff -- reminiscent of nothing so much as snake. Rope, then, tucked away in loops for storage; it certainly wasn't an actual snake. Silence stretched around them, its timbre seeming to shift in a way which drew Khida's attention from her corner and back to him. It became something which spoke to her heart not of night, but of dawn -- of amber light cresting the horizon, painting the world in vivid color, bringing to it the clarity of day. The blackness within the tent failed to lift, of course, true dawn being in fact long bells away -- but something changed, one thing settling into place even as another, greater weight lifted. She could never have said just what changed, could not apply words to whatever had just happened in the depths of being... ...but she knew, without hint of uncertainty, that he knew. That question vanished, doubt erased, and what remained was... ...them. Together, as they had been, as they would be, now and always. He spoke into the silence, giving voice to her name in a way that did not break the quiet. Two syllables floated on feathery breath, warm and appreciative and welcoming. She stared into the darkness towards where the speaker sat; if she had been still human, Khida would have smiled. Falcon that she was, she responded with a whistle, low and soft and content. Yes.

[Praetorian]

Khida

Rhetoric	+4 XP
Observation	+2 XP
Animal Husbandry	+1 XP

• Akaidras: An Unlikely Friend
• The Pull
• The Weight of Words: A Barrier of Common Tongue
• Pavi Word, Deeper Meaning: Whole
• The Bond: A New Dawn

Shahar

Observation	+4 XP
Interrogation	+2 XP

• An Unfamiliar Figure
• The Melody of Our Song
• The Spoken Unknown: A Barrier of Common Tongue
• Khida: Known, Unknown, and All Those Thoughts Between
• Similarities In Silence
• The Bond: Woven Souls

Items Gained :

1 Horse Care Kit

Notes :

Ohmygodsohmygodsohmygods!!! I cannot adequately express my happiness with this thread. This is how a bond is supposed to work and happen. I just- ugh. Wonderful descriptions, both of you.

|Khida gained a perk!| The Bond - Khida finally feels satisfied with her life, complete and whole as both herself and as a bonded Kelvic. Though she now shares Sharar's wants and wishes and even some flickers of emotion, she developed enough before the bond to be distinguishable as her own entity. She finds comfort in Shahar's presence and is likely to feel ill at ease when he is away; when alone in her falcon form, she is likely to preen incessantly and unconsciously.

|Shahar gained a perk!| The Bond - After so long being alone, Shahar has a true sense of home and of family. Khida's presence brings him comfort, courage, and confidence. When away from Khida, Shahar develops a habit of looking upwards, searching unconsciously for his bondmate.


Have any questions, comments, or concerns? Think I missed something? Feel free to message me.