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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    break these bones until they're better; leliana
    #1

    She does not remember being born. Not that first gasp of air or the way her lungs had felt when they first expanded, when life flooded her veins and her eyes fluttered open to find Mother for the very first time. Se does not remember the sun on her skin or the way she had cooled when the clouds rolled out to watch her first steps, or how strangely exhilarating it had been when her legs wobbled forward and her delicate body stayed aloft.

    She knows they happened, all those beautiful moments that Leliana can probably still picture against her eyelids when she finds time to close her eyes and rest. But they are not memories for Linnea, not things she can look back on and feel emotion stir in her chest as it must have all those years ago. Instead they are factual, bits of knowledge, things she knows must have happened because they happen to everyone.

    But years from now, when she looks back on this moment, this rebirth, there will not be a single moment she cannot replay against the black of her eyes each time she tries to close them.

    She wakes, but it is not violent. There is no gasp of suddenness, no thrumming beat in her chest as she searches her mind for the memories she held last. There is no beat at all, she realizes, and while once this thought might have been echoed by the frenzy of a pulse throbbing like the whoosh of waves in her ears, there is only silence now. She wonders at the silence, because as her head lifts from where she lays and her eyes trace the shapes and colors of a world so familiar, she knows she is not dead. Surely if an afterlife exists, it would not look like Tephra?

    With a soft groan she tries to stand, but it is at that point that she realizes she no longer understands her body. She feels awkward and heavy, unsteady like a newborn foal, and when she slides back down to settle into the grass she catches a glimpse in her lower periphery that does not make sense.

    Where her legs should be, long and slender and as dark as a charcoal sky, there are limbs like thick branches, dark gray and gnarled with flecks of pale tawny in shallow notches throughout. She reaches down to explore them, surprised when she can feel it - not the branch beneath her nose, but rather her nose as it sweeps across skin she cannot see.

    Maybe it is just the strangeness of it all, or the haze of not-sleep that still clings like mist in the dark quiet of her thoughts, but understanding is slow to come. She remembers dying as though it is a dream, remembers beautiful Nikolaus and the clash of unwanted war - remembers the fire and how, in a dream, it had come to welcome her into the painful dark.

    She does not remember burning yet.
    Not the fear as it consumed her body or the pain of blistered flesh drawing so tight over muscles that melted and snapped until she could not even struggle anymore.
    With luck, she never will.

    Her delicate head lifts and pale pink flowers the size of apples sway heavily across her neck and over her brow in a waterfall of color that makes it almost hard to see past. She does not understand why they are in the way, or why there are bits of waxy emerald green leaves poking out around the edges - but when she reaches for logic to soothe her curiosity, it whispers that she must be like her mother now, with those beautiful blossoms in her hair.

    linnea

    these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape



    Messages In This Thread
    break these bones until they're better; leliana - by linnea - 08-15-2019, 07:45 PM



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