i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: OOC (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=24) +--- Forum: Archive (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=81) +---- Forum: Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=98) +----- Forum: Loess (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=88) +----- Thread: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia (/showthread.php?tid=25574) |
i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Pteron - 11-16-2019 ----------------kiss me until i can't speak Travel to Loess has become more complicated in the last six months. Before, Pteron had moved freely between the two lands: a soldier with two homes. Now he is cautious, wary, as likely to be invisible as not. He still patrols the Loessian border, but it is in the dark of night when the residents are asleep; daylight is for Taiga. This furtive plan has been, for the most part, effective. There are times he has slipped up, of course, when he has been found out and hunted down. Reia seems to have some sort of supernatural ability to track him down, and the burn he’d received for trying to go invisible the first time she’d caught him has taught him the error of his ways. Now, when he catches the smoke-sweet smell of the golden mare, he knows to stay still. There is no use in running, not from a dragon. Pteron is walking a narrow trail when he catches the scent, penned in on either side by tall standstone bluffs. She’s probably been waiting for him, the pegasus realizes; he’s let his patrol become too routine. Backing up is not an option. She would know that he was trying to avoid her, and she is never pleased with that. The ghost of the burn on his shoulder – and the bite on his neck and the scrape on his jaw – twinges, and he resumes his walk, knowing she is ahead. The moonlight, blocked by the high stone around Pteron, shines down as he rounds a bend in the cliff, illuminating the woman that waits for him. She is as beautiful as a wildfire, and he is just as reluctant to touch her. It seems counterintuitive, that the closer they are the less likely he is to be burned, but Reia has made her demands clear. Pteron had told her ‘never again’ that night in the Taigan woods, and she has made him a liar at nearly every encounter since. The dragoness has a plethora of weapons to use against him and no hesitance in doing so. Threats of violence, actual violence, reminders of the obeisance he owes her as Princess, the flick of her tail beneath his chin as she twines against him; she uses these and many more, and the months have worn him down. It has been at least two months since she’d last found him, and there is something different. Pteron cannot lay a hoof on it, yet as he comes closer, a black dread rises in his chest. He had been too polite (too frightened?) to mention her winter weight gain at their last encounter. If anyone would be vain about their appearance it would be Reia, and he has no desire to add to the scars she has already given him. So he’d said nothing, and been grateful when she let him leave after a shorter rendezvous than she usually demanded. But that…that is not winter weight. “Is that mine?” He asks from a few yards away, his olive eyes fixed firmly on Reia’s pregnant belly. Pteron can already feel the iron bars closing around him, the shackles of responsibility somehow heavier even than those of being dragon-claimed. This is perhaps the very worst thing that he can imagine. @[Reia] -- pteron -- RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Reia - 11-20-2019 no one really knows what the ocean hides
It thrills her to make him into a liar, to mold him into something he never was. and I'll be next to you when the lights go out Reia @[Pteron] RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Pteron - 11-20-2019 ----------------kiss me until i can't speak She says his name, and an icy finger slides down his spine. Pteron shivers; he hates the way his name sounds on her perfect golden lips. When he stops, she continues to come nearer. Too close for comfort, he thinks; on the other side of Beqanna would still be too close for comfort. It has not always been this way between them; Pteron had once considered her a friend. But then, the bright-eyed pegasus has considered everyone a friend – or at least a potential friend. It had been easy to overlook her cruelty, her possessive nature, her inexplicable rages. Children forgive easily, and a close friendship with the young princess of Loess was encouraged by every important adult in young Pteron’s life. So he considered her a friend, in the way that a burning flame might be a friend – safe, so long as it stayed within the walls of the lantern. But there are no walls that can contain dragonfire, and that Reia burnt them down should have come as no surprise. Should have, but Pteron is optimistic to a fault. And now, he is well and truly burnt. Of course it’s yours, Reia tells him, torching the potential escape that another father might have given him. It was too much to hope that there had been others for her, too much to hope that she might have snared another fool as easily as she has snared Pteron. The snarl makes him flinch, but he knows better than to pull away. Reia does not like when he pulls away. Instead he waits, praying that her anger will fade, praying for a miracle. Looking away from her is usually folly (she likes to strike when his attention is elsewhere) but he risks the fire and the teeth to look at the wide golden belly. Her scales are stretched wide across it already, shielding the unborn child. He imagines he sees a ripple just there, like something within her feels his scrutiny. His child, he thinks, his child and Reia’s. If ever there is a woman who should not be a mother, he thinks it might be the golden dragoness. A feral flame cannot raise a child. She’ll kill it, he thinks. He visibly blanches at the relief that idea elicits, disgusted by the fact he’d even consider it. He can’t let her kill it. It should not exist, but he cannot leave it alone in her care. She reminds him, satisfaction think in her honey-sweet voice, that it is his, that she is. And he knows it. When his olive gaze meet her gaze, there is acknowledgment there. This child is his responsibility, and its mother by extension. That is the world they have been raised in, where a child binds a man and woman in marriage as surely as an exchange of vows. And yet… Pteron’s head begins to shake, slowly at first, and then more firmly. “No.” He says, taking a step away. “No.” She’s scorched him for that simple word before, burnt the feathers from his wings and made him apologize for disobeying. But he says it anyway, because there are some things that are worth standing up for. “That might be our child,” he shouldn’t have said might be, Pteron realizes, but it is too late to change that now, “But I am not yours. There is no us. What we have – what we did – is nothing. Mistakes, things I regret. I do not love you.” @[Reia] -- pteron -- RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Reia - 11-20-2019 no one really knows what the ocean hides
Resistance. and I'll be next to you when the lights go out Reia @[Pteron] RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Pteron - 11-20-2019 ----------------kiss me until i can't speak There is not an immediate eruption, not of words or teeth or fire. Rather than put him at ease, the stillness serves only to heighten her wariness. Reia is not a creature of long pauses. She has a temper as quick as her wit, and for her to not react is a bad sign – perhaps the very worst. Pteron’s breathing slows, each inhale increasingly likely to be his last, and then she finally moves. That is slow too, she slides forward like the honey that drips from her tongue. Sticky, he thinks, impossible to get out of his hair. Her words are as sweet as her touch, and Pteron is stiff beneath them. Reia is tenderizing the meat, he thinks, waiting for him to let his guard down so that she might strike just as he relaxes. This close, he can smell the ash of her, the heat that smells of blurred horizons and her burning skin. Her shoulder slides against his, and he swallows tightly. He is weak, he remembers, and it would be easy to give in, to give her what she wants. Take her back to Taiga, like her father had commanded. A cold slip of dread suddenly falls into his belly – is this why her presence in the woods had been a condition of his mother’s departure. Does Castile know that Pteron is responsible for his daughter’s widening belly? He must, Pteron imagines; and Reia’s demands have a sudden and unexpected weight to them. Do not leave me alone with our child, she tells him, and Pteron nearly protests. But that would be a foolish thing to do. He wouldn’t leave the child. No, he will take it instead, and leave Reia. He does not have any idea how to raise a baby, but he will figure it out. Even his bumbling efforts will be better than a life with Reia, and he is trying to formulate this into an argument that will leave him with all his body parts when she inches nearer. Every thought leaves him mind as she does. Who are they, she demands, just when Pteron is certain that there can be no worse turn to this conversation. He knows what will happen if he denies her, but better she rip him apart than touch a hair on that white head. “No. What I do is none of your business.” That’s not enough, he thinks, she is a dragon with a bone; she will not let this drop. Not unless he gives her something else, something to distract her. For a moment he thinks of kissing her, of luring her to complacency in a manner that his saved his wings a time or too. But the idea of touching her makes him nauseous, and it would not even be enough. Not unless… Pteron reaches forward, stepping toward when she scoffs it him, and brushes his lips against her cheek. “They don’t really matter to you, do they?” he asks, moving forward to kiss the place beside her jaw that always makes her quiver. “Just like you don’t matter to them. You’re just a broodmare, after all, nothing important.” A last ditch effort, he knows, but perhaps if she expends her rage destroying him she will lose interest in pursuing them. @[Reia] -- pteron -- RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Reia - 12-05-2019 no one really knows what the ocean hides
All of this could be so easy, if only Pteron would accept what has become of them. With every fiber in his being, he resists what they are. It’s the hollowness of his eyes and the diversions he counters that indicate how little he truly cares for her (for their child). Fire flirts with the edges of her lips when her eyes level on him, searching desperately for the answers that he holds secret. Her body quivers as though from the cold, but it is her disappointment and suppressed anger that rattles through her core. Her eyes flash beneath the moonlight and the blue flames blaze to greater life, even if for a few seconds before dimming. She doesn’t want to be interrupted yet, not by father or anyone else. and I'll be next to you when the lights go out Reia @[Pteron] RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Pteron - 12-09-2019 ----------------kiss me until i can't speak He will take them, and do so willingly, if it means that she will leave everyone else out of it, if it means she will focus her rage solely on him. That would be worth it, Pteron thinks, and it keeps him still even as she rebuts his naming of her as a broodmare. If only it could be that simple, if only the child she carries were his alone. Pteron has no idea how to be a father, but he doesn’t need to, at least not to know that he will be a far better parent than the golden monster who threatens to destroy his life. Reia lunges, her sharp teeth ripping through the soft hide of his neck. The coppery smell of blood blossoms around them and Pteron grunts, pulling away as bet he can without moving his feet. Doing that would only makes her angrier. She calls them distractions, worms, as though Aegean is not worth ten thousand of her, as though his heart does not beat faster for Aquaria than it ever has for the dragon that snarls in front of him. Pteron knows that showing his own anger is dangerous, but there are some things worth the fire that he knows is coming. The muscle in his neck has already begun to knit together, but it still stings as he takes a step forward, raises his head so he can look down at her, his pale wings half-flared in a threat. “If you harm a single hair, you will regret it.” The stallion breathes against her cheek, knowing that she will take the words for acquiescence as much as the threat they are. Let her think that he would be as possessive a husband as she means to be a wife. If that keeps her from burning them alive, that will be enough. It won’t though, that he knows all the way to his core. If he denies her now, she will hunt them down. If he denies her in the future, she will hunt them down. She might even hunt them down just as a precaution to ensure he doesn’t deny her. “You will never be a good wife,” he tells her, even with the furnace of her breath against his chest. “But you will be my wife, and neither of us will touch another.” He’d meant the words to sound firm, a command from a husband to his wife. And they do – he prays she’ll listen to that even if not to reason – yet what he has promised weighs far heavier than he’d expected. Pteron knows he will keep his word. He breathes in the acrid smoke smell of the mare in front of him, and sighs. -- pteron -- @[Reia] Okay time for babies !!! RE: i've never fallen from quite this high; Reia - Reia - 12-09-2019 no one really knows what the ocean hides
No one but Pteron has seen her like this, seen her at the near peak of her rage. Already, so soon in their lives, he sees her at her best and worst. This is meant to be, obviously, Reia reconciles to herself. A lover’s quarrel is normal. In fact, it will make them stronger in the end, an undefeatable force. If they manage a fight between themselves then surely all other opposition will be a simple feat. and I'll be next to you when the lights go out Reia @[Pteron] |