[Main Courtyard] Pounding Earth (Open)

[Liriel]

The body you wear already knows how to dance. Inside it is wild and confined and chafing at being so. It is the caged bird that just wants its door open so it can fly free of its gilded prison. It will not hesitate if it gets a chance because it knows deep inside how to fly.

The woman’s words were like poetry, like the words to a song spoken out loud. Liriel didn’t fully understand them, but on some deep level she felt them. More than the words, however, it was the joy in the woman’s eyes that resonated with her. That joy was infectious, making Liriel grin and relax and causing her thoughts and even the never-ending hiss in her mind to fade away.

She let the woman pull her into the dancing crowd, before letting her hand go and beginning to dance again. Liriel watched her for a moment, watched the way her dance showed all her joy and energy, and understood something. This dance was as expression, a reflection of the woman’s inner state and nature. Like when Liriel played her lyre alone in the desert, when she did not conform to the songs she knew but let the music come forth as it would, though her lack of skill did not let it sound the way she wanted. Still, it had never mattered what it sounded like. Perhaps this dancing was the same—perhaps it did not matter what she did, only that she did.

She began to sway to the music, letting her mind go back to the times her mother had taught her to dance. Drawing inspiration from those movements, Liriel began to dance more completely. It was a tight, focused dance, not wild like many of the others, but it was also not stiff. Gradually Liriel withdrew into her own mind, letting the music follow, and barely noticed anymore what she was doing.

It was like running, after all, or perhaps like an impromptu performance. Liriel let the dance loosen her body and free her tension and travel weariness. Though she could not, as the woman had suggested, stop thinking entirely, she let her mind come as close to a state of meditation as it could surrounded by so much noise and movement. Her eyes, while not closed, saw little of what was around her. But the energy coming from every side helped her movements become freer and looser, though her dance remained a quiet, meditative act.

[Fia Eaven]

The women were raising arms heavenward, swaying like trees in a field. They threshed the air for the energy creation breathed and the stars burned off, drawing it into themselves before gifting it back.
The first men that felt Mizahar under their feet danced upon it just as they did now. There was no barrier or knowledge that kept the ancient peoples from this natural exultation. It comforted Fia to be connected in a grand sense when she had no immediate bonds. The dance had brought them all into fellowship.

Zaira opened her full mouth and sang her accented common. Fia felt the Benshira's pale eyes on her. She was trying to explain the word "love" her hand pressed possessively over her heart. A soothing gesture, like it had been wounded. Without knowing, Fia mirrored her.

That exquisite pain, it blew in from the past. Her fingers hummed, remembering. He would always take it, just because it was her palm and near enough to touch. She pressed her hand harder over her heart, hoping the pressure would heal both.

"Love," Fia exhaled through a fragile smile. Her barely courageous mask said hers had been lost.

Where was her determination? She had been so resolute and steady in all things, thus far. Why could she not keep her thoughts on only the good they had known?

He would drown them both if she could not unwind her fingers.

[Nya Winters]

Nya let the music swell up all around her, filling her heart until there was nothing there but the pounding rhythm and subtle accompaniment of the strings and voices that swirled around them. She let her feet move, her hands move, and her head move all attached to her body as if she lived more fully in the eternalness of her form. Forms were fleeting though, just like the dance was, changing and ever evolving into something else, something more, and sometimes something less. Nya decided she liked the drums best of all, the rhythm that set the beat that everyone's hearts and feet moved too.

She'd never actually heard drums, but she'd heard them described time and time again, in books and songs and even in stories. Drums signified many things in her mind, and now that she heard them, she understood why they had come to form those patterns in her awareness. People went to fight to the beat of drums. Hooves sounded like drums. Heartbeats were also drumbeats. Nya's mind whirled as her body did, thinking of how her respiration increased as she hunted, and how she could hunt even now as a human using her form and the evil that lurked in the hearts of some of the people within the city. Leo had been a good lesson for that. Even Atrophus had been a good lesson for that. Everyone she met, touched, spoke with, or even laid eyes on held meaning and importance and somehow as she danced, her mind whirled and interlaced them all together in a whirl of thoughts and emotions until she had to push them back into her heart, into her mind, and take her own advice and dance like she suggested Liriel dance... by simply feeling it.

She smiled at her new friend Liriel, then danced onwards, and around Fia, nudging the girl at the tortured look that momentarily crossed the pale cream features, and kept moving into the crowd. Even the girl at the head of them all, the one who had started dancing first, came clearly into focus as she recognized Zaira as being the one with the spiderling... the one either too ignorant or too oblivious to leave his presence even when Nya had tried to convince her with a good series of shoves. At least he hadn't ate the girl, though she did wonder if her fire toys had ever been totally lost.

She danced onwards.

It was amazing how the dance freed up Nyas thoughts, unlocked her suppressed feelings, and made her heart sing. Being human, perhaps, wasn't all that bad. She had a lot to be thankful for, a lot of joy building in her heart. She had the best bondmate in the world - a find strong man with a strong heart full of faith and discipline - one worthy of her safeguarding. It had made the trip to Syliras, the banishment north, all the more worthwhile. And so she danced through the crowd, her technique no technique at all, just a wildness of being something wild and not caring if anyone cared or not... until she managed to make it back to Liriel's side, breathless, where she settled into watch the story the girl was telling with her body - an unfolding of the senses and a journey that somehow the other stranger was one.

[Zaira]

Freedom. Joy, as well as sorrow rode the wave the moving bodies created; the movements said more than well thought words, the expression were more honest than any other. Here was liberation, here was a chance to be part of something, to not be alone, to not be untouched by those who were near to you although never before had you see their face. Or ever before have their name upon your tongue.

Her muscles burned and her skin shone, and in this music, in this dance, she was not a lone, none of them were, and this realization, was another strike upon her beating heart. A familiar bonding of home, taken for granted, now made sense, now the importance could be seen by young eyes, understood in fleeting thoughts. Friends were made, wounds lay bare, and resolves gathered, all here on the crowded cobbled streets.

“Love.”

Zaira repeated the word Fia gave to herm her fingers mirrored the woman’s, pressing upon her heart, but pain, even that was cherished with the word she received. One did not need to speak the same tongue, to sleep under the same skies to recognize the joy in some faces, and the pain in others, and this pain Zaira knew well.

Nya danced with abandon, embracing the music, or it embraced her and moved the creature through the crowd, yet even she stopped in time to touch the pained one. Liriel grew as the music played on, blossoming in her dance from seed to flower, uncertainty melting away. She longed to bridge this gap, where her words could not reach. She had no hopefully words, for her own heart still pained her, and seasons had changed, over and over, but the pain had lessened. With each passing sun rise, and she could dance, and she could sing once again. She still felt the ache of loneliness, the longing for familiar smiles that would never be again.

But still… the memories, with their pain, brought her happiness. “Where there is…love,” Zaira smiled softly her hands upon her chest, almost as if to cradle the organ unseen, “there is life. A new chance to smile.”