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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


    Can you find me soft asylum - any
    #1
    He had fallen
    (He had fallen long and hard through darkness and light; stars and firmaments; ice and fire. Fallen. Fallen. Fallen for days and weeks; midnights and dawns. He had tumbled through space – both the infinite blackness interrupted by the heat of constellations and the places of grass and air between worlds separated by a thin breath of forever – and time. So much time so quickly.)

    He had fought.
    (Clawed and scraped at the paper skin of his own bitterness. Released from those shackles the anger and fear... Oh, fear. Fear he had reached for through the blinding clarity, a hand wrapping around the handle of a knife. Fought. He had plunged that blade into the ribs of some unholy demon, twisted and let loose the blackened tracks within – blood and yards of foul digestion. Fought. He had brought hideous playthings to life to grind to dust the creations of those.. Others.)

    And he had won. Had woken up... remade, from man to demigod. Heavy-headed and light-footed. Split-toed. Unnatural – extraordinary. Inside his breast, a thing of malevolence gave him his power, jingling away like a choir of silver bells on reins…

    It hadn’t been her. She had given him nothing She had fastened on wings – carefully, cruelly, She had divorced one from the other, and broken the remaining appendage into something useless and dirty. (It had hurt as a baby, blooming with heat until settling at a low sear, until he got used to it and the nerves all died away.) 
    He had found his invisibility, from within, when She had given him naught but darkness and pig’s mud the night he was forced from between his mother’s legs.

    (Bitch.)

    He spat and bellowed
    —trees pulled from their roots and leaned…
    —the ground shook and splintered beneath his feet as he watched her circle him until she became a whirl of horsehair and hips.

    ----

    He wakes again, head resting on a pillow of hard limestone.
    He groans.

    He must have fallen.
    His head pounds.

    He can smell the sharpness of earth… remade. He blinks open his dark eyes and through the haze of disorient, he can see the mountain he sits atop like a golden star on a tree... fashioned from a million grains of dried out sand, a thousand pine needles, one hundred rocks stained by saltwater, and the ground bark of a felled redwood.
    He groans and moves his jaw, side to side, feeling the pull of his scar tissue, more rigid than his healthy skin.

    He creaks and he aches, but most of all he longs for trees. "Fuck," he rises, unsteady on his feet. Pollock scales the side of this newly formed goliath like a bird in air, nimble-toed and deft. 

    And then it falls, like snow. It falls so softly.
    He leaves it, and it plunges him below the surface.

    Everything is missing. His muscles – they are slow to respond, uncouth. He presses a hoof to the ground but it loses its purchase, and he slips down on dust and loose stones – they are single-toed and clumsy, made not for rock but for softer things with more give.
    He stumbles and heaves, like an injured bird he flaps wildly against the faces of stone and old Beqanna around him until he fingers the opening of his cage and runs. He roars, like a wild thing unhinged. He runs and hey fall from his head like a crown – so light. He runs until he meets the scent of earth and old blood and he skids, stumbles, scabs his knee and scrambles up. And falls still, breathing heavily.

    (He unfurls his wings, bright cream and over-large in their span.)
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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    #2
    The curl of his ram-horns loop in and out of her dreams;
    Goat-horses dance on their feet, invisible then visible.

    She dreams less and less of eyes bright and shiny, like gold coins, in a dragon’s hoard.
    (By now, those eyes are probably plucked clean out of his skull by the birds on the beach. His bones are nests for kelp and tides.)

    It starts as a tiny shake of leaves in the old boughs of the old trees;
    The grandfather redwoods begin to talk in a creaking language of bark and breeze.
    She lifts her head from grazing to listen to the things that are said in the sway of the trees, and then --

    Oblivion.
    Sinew has been here before, back in a familiar blackness that pushes her past the cold dead light of the stars. She can feel her immortality being sucked from her bones by a too-hungry mouth of anger and sharp teeth - it hurts, worse than even the time Tarnished bit a chunk from the left side of her neck and ate the tip of her left ear off. That shortened ear turns now, listening for a thread of sound that might be familiar in this black place but there is only the silence of loss as it echoes around her, rebounding back off the sides of something great and awful that cannot be seen - but she feels it! Mountainous and tall, she feels it but she does not rush up its steep rocky side to reclaim the very thing that is temporarily lost to her. Instead, she has but a thought spared to her daughter and her mammoth-pet, the latter that is sucked up in that same black space that Sinew dwells in but is unrecognizable - too horse, too far alien for her to seek out, and she moves on, because the last thing she remembers is ram-horns and palomino skin.

    She opens her black eyes; there are still trees - not the redwoods, but some kind of trees in every possible tree-species. Firs, with their needling fingers, brush at her cheeks and hair as she goes by them; they beg her to stay - linger, in their dark green midst, but she cannot. Sinew is driven to find him, goat-god-horse-thing but his smell is absent. She is not terrified, even then, she has never been more brave than fearful and she is like a thing possessed in her hunt - she will find him, he is the last remnant from Before. Even changed, recognition dawns the moment his palomino skin gleams dusty but in reach of her black eyes.

    He had not the breadth of those beautiful wings before!
    Can she then claim her immortality?
    (Yes, go to the Mountain, something whispers to her.)

    She ignores it - for now;
    His heavy breathing is a cadence for her ears that she steps along in time to; she finds herself facing him, staring in that too-knowing manner that Sinew has always had. “Pollock,” is all that she can manage to bring herself to say, because he is just a stallion and that, is almost disappointing - almost, because Sinew still knows him, respects him, and merely says - “What now?”
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    #3
    He hugs them against his belly, glossy and bright as if newborn (new-made, at least, without a drop of dirt or the tickle of a wing mite, biting at the quills). 
    He reaches them out wide, brushing the middling boughs of trees bearing their fleshy, spring fruit. He swishes the new appendages, jarring the harvest loose and watching it fall to the ground around him. (Worm’s meat.) The test of their heft and their power... – oh yes, they are glorious things. He watches light play off the barbs and down, each vane neatly lined up in tight, aerodynamic rows.

    Yes. Long ago, he would have coveted them on another’s body. He would have wrung sweaty palms together, devising a way to take them from slender shoulders, sew them to his own.

    Complete. A pièce de résistance.

    He flexes the muscles of the arms, anchoring all those long flight feathers, bringing them around in front of his face. He remembers the smell, even now, as he draws the right close to his quavering nostrils – a sick kind of sweetness, sweat and skin and oil. (His own, limp and useless – bones so destroyed beneath the mangy skin that it might as well have been boneless, entirely. Alone – it’s twin severed during cellular division.
    Her’s. Two, jutting sadly from her shoulder blades, scrawny and stained. He cannot remember, thinking back, his mother ever flying. She chose, instead, to pursue earthly pleasures tirelessly, letting them grow weak. And filthy. And disused.
    The wasteful, thirsting sow – somewhere, wasting away in a drink of saltwater.)
    But these… (foul) parting gifts, are odorless.

    Clean. So, so clean.

    He draws them away from his dark eyes, folding them back against his ribs. They feel like strangers on his body, uninvited and peculiar, with their virgin softness. They have been found wanting – insufficient substitutes for that which has been taken from him, by larcenous and resentful hooks. She figures herself gracious, the motherland. The earth and wind and womb, from which bastards and brides poured like juices and blood... until she felt used

    Then She took.

    And when She took... She took all.
    (That which was hers, given willing.
    That which was not, exacted sourly.
    A woman scorned.)

    She comes, as he hopes she might. (She, and others, he waits for with the quiet confidence of planets stuck in shared and mirrored gravities. They’ll come to him, all.) She comes – hips and horsehair – and he can look at her, now, like he had not gotten the chance to before the Rapture. She had been young when they first met – now her curves begged for impulses, and he maps out in his mind which would come first and then, thereafter… “Sinew.”
    Once, he had praised her boldness, when her innocents was there to guard against his rancor.
    But times, and horses, change. He has… softened his stance on somethings.
    To a degree.

    He reaches out his wingtips, towards her and each other, closing like a crescent moon around his front body. The longest of his primaries search to brush the scarred places of indulgence – the arch of her neck, the tough leather of her ear. (If he could have known she had entertained disappointment, he would have ran her through… crown or no crown, she is naked and he is still savage.) 

    now we take back what is rightfully mine.
    now we hunt and imbibe and screw. And forget – always we forget.
    now we make castles out of teeth and bones to lord from.

    “Now, we build.” It is what he is good at. 
    Rome wasn't built in a day – nor had a god-monster been. But they had both been... glorious

    “What has been taken from you?”
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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    #4
    She watches him, always from a distance. Sometimes she can control her image and disappear from his sight completely, but for the most part she is simply a shadow lurking in the background. Watching, waiting, looking on as he makes decisions, lives his life, makes friends, and loses them. She could not leave; he could not rid himself of her. They are caught together in a web of putrid bile rotting away as each day passed, still even when her bones are nothing but sand, she stays. Why? Her mind haunts itself, it haunts him, she had stopped nagging at him long ago. She simply stood there watching, waiting for the day that her memory would waste away, the day that nothing would be left and she would simply vanish. Yet that day never comes, no she is stuck watching him, learning everything about him, there are days that she wonders. Are you just lonely? But the thought is quick to disperse itself. Then another moment another look in his eye and her curiosity is peeked once more, Maybe you are simply afraid. This seems the most logical to her, but then again the flame of sympathy is snuffed out before it even exists. One hard look from his eyes and she remembers. Her mangled face is proof enough of this.

    Still she walks by his side, she watches as he grows older, maybe when he dies she will be free? More thoughts, more looks, no life, no love, no one to hear her voice. No as she died, so did her family, the world was forgetting the love for the land, the love for the past, the need to hold on to their roots, and she couldn’t do anything about it. Her memory wafted smaller and smaller until even her son had forgotten. My son She says it one day lost in thoughts that were neither important, nor fully existent. But still the words come out, and she drifts into slumber. The slumber is sleepless, no dreamings, no darkness, no emotions, there is nothing, nothing at all, not blackness not light, no sounds, no silence. And just as before her last thought is, so this is death. Then she blinks, life is back, fog folds and blankets around her. She can feel it, she can smell it, she looks around slightly puzzled, but shrugs it off as a weird dream. He is there, and she sighs nudging at his cheek, attempting to wake him. When he groans out his complaints she rolls her eyes, proceeding down the craggy mountain trail. Come on lazy bones, she can hear steps, she can feel the rocks, she frowns in wonder at these things. What a bizarre dream, she grumbles to herself, thinking that it was really his steps she was hearing, and that her mind was playing tricks on her.

    He cries and screams and she shoots him a glare, grow up will you? She sighs her exasperation, this had been the most she had said to him since that day she had been tied to him. They walk, and move towards the meadow. She does not look back, not after leaving the fog, her half face, the blood mangled thing that hung from her neck was healed. Yet she knew not of this, not yet anyways. She still believes it to be the festering rot that she had come to know so well. But the fog goes and she finds that she is heavy, not with fat, or child, just anchored to the ground, a lightness, a connection is gone. It takes work to move, it takes breathes to live, it’s a phenomenon that she cannot comprehend. Then another comes up to them, a mare, one that appears to be clingy.
    She listens as they call each other’s names, she waits while they fear for their lives. Her eyes catch his wings, they see the lack of horns, the normality of hooves, she puzzles on it for a moment. Then he shows concern, and Hestia can’t control her mouth this time. What has been taken from you? the words grate her, Her irritated mood, and unpleasant experience has her itching to rankle him. What’s this? Your newest slut? Or is she your next victim? Her words ooze with bitterness, they reach to climb under his skin and scratch away at the creature he is. She smirks at him, I wish I had lost something, She pointedly narrows her eyes on him, You.
    @[Pollock]
    @[sinew]
    [Image: 345k45w.jpg]
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    #5
    She had gone. (Or he thought, she had gone – unimportant. It had been the same to him. The same quiet. The same solitude.)
    He had not mourned her.

    Not the first time. Not the second time.

    Whether it had been that she had decided to slink in the shadows like a rat or had been pulled back across that thin in-between she had occupied like an insurgent, clinging, as if she could evade the inevitable…
    But it had never been inevitable.
    Pollock had learned that, once and for all, when Hestia’s bones had become nothing but a shrine to the fickleness of the lifecycle. What had once been the hard and sun-baked place where they had second met (him and her – yes, he’ll still have to finger that mystery loose), a favoured landmark, had become a fixation. 
    (Indigo.
    Had become ruination, twice-over – Hestia’s body, completely stripped of all moisture and flesh, just teeth and bones and then… like a glossy ornament. Her, replete with colour (indigo) and plumpness...; those old remains had been two tombs entwined. Or should have been.

    Should have been.

    And then? Descecration. He had come back, frothy and panting, and she had been... gone. And he had forgotten about that black ghost, the green, the stars, the teal, the old gold, and all that was left was indigo. Because Hestia had returned, this is true. His first taste of unfinished business. (He couldn't say it had been sweet, but compared to what had come, it had been a minor sting.) She had not come back fully. At least he could have the smug satisfaction that he had condemned her twice over. First to death and then to a non-life cuffed to him.
    But her – name unknown (though his name always sounds so honeyed on her tongue, the way he hears it, it hardly seems fair) – she had come back. Not as a shade of herself, but as everything she was before he had damaged her spine and left her dumb and, as it had turned out, pregnant, in bone bindings. She had come back – beautiful, but had looked better painted sanguinary red and asymmetric – and he had been bested. Jilted. Disrespected.

    (She had become a queen, too, of that ancestral pinewood. He never did learn that little tidbit before the cataclysm – their reunion had been something… something unfinished. As, perhaps, everything between them would always be.)

    He could thank Hestia for one thing, though. The softening leftovers of her rib cage and vertebrae had certainly played their part in the indigo mare’s death very well. The sound, ah – something to behold.

    He is taking a step forward, to bridge the gap and inspect, with eye and lip, Sinew's soft, gnawed-at flesh up close, when he scents her on the air. And he feels no appreciation or kindness, just some bile bubbling on his lip, between his teeth – not this bitch again. He turns – though if he had been left in peace to consider the nature and curves of Sinew, no longer a girl at all, he would have been perfectly content – his black-brown eyes fixing on her, always their flat and inscrutable selves. “Hestia,” he drones, his lip curling – displeasure. 

    Slowly, as he watches her and remembers the skew of her face when it had been better, it occurs to him that her scent is meaty and so… 
    —“fuck off then, woman. If you wish to be free of me – I think I’ve made it no secret how I feel –… or has it been so long that life feels that foreign to you, now?” He takes some steps toward her, and there can be no doubt.

    But it has lost its weight. She is not the first to come back.

    “I don’t know how you bartered for your life returned, Hestia, but here we are. You stink – though,” he shrugs and dips his head, “it has been worse. So, be gone. Or do you need me to prove it to you?” He remembers the strange, ice-water sensation of her body passing through his. Not so, anymore. “And, you’d have to ask her that,” he does not move to motion to Sinew, only stares ahead, but he wears his wry, crocodilian grin, “I’ve not had time enough alone to figure that out myself. I do have my predilections, but I also have plenty enough of those. You know me.” 

    Time will tell.


    @[Kristin] is up next with @[sinew]
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
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    #6
    There is fruit at their feet - ripe and rotting, like hearts spilled from cracked cages of ribs.
    She sniffs at one such fruit that spills juice and seed on the earth in a tumble of brightness and blight; it is like both of them, him and her --

    Her eyes come up, as her neck slants and the head rolls atop it to the side to regard him.
    He is different, she thinks. Changed even, and not.
    His differences are scant but enough to give her pause after she has asked him, what now?

    She heard her name;
    She stands bold beneath the horrid benediction of it that tumbles from his lips.
    Felt the touch of primary feathers to the scarred places of her neck and ear; he did not ask how she came about them, and she did not offer to tell him. He asks instead what has been taken from her, and Sinew bristles at this -
    “My immortality.”
    It is all she had, it emboldened her more than she has been. She is naked now, mortal even and it sickens her.

    Sinew clings to nothing; she is not moss on a rock.
    Sinew is not afraid; has never feared a thing in her life.
    Not Tarnished. Not Pollock. Not the mysterious, mad Mountain itself.

    There is a black mare beside them, bitter and barking her unhappiness at him. She is taken aback, only by the fact that she is called a name she has never heard before - slut, she had no comprehension of this. It sounds vile though, and Sinew - mad, brave, foolish Sinew - is quick to become rankled herself. Her ears flatten against her head in pure distaste for this upstart of a mare who has invaded their time together, Pollock and hers’. Sinew does not share, not very much and she does not play well with others. She has kept to herself, until now, fattening up her pregnant mammoth-pet (it would pain her to learn the mare is ordinary now, and so are the foals in her belly) in hopes of two grotesqueries of horse and mammoth. She kept to herself until the goat-god walked among them again, and then - only then, did Sinew herself, reappear.

    She festers;
    Is on the brink of a reply but he stays this by his own displeasure made evident.
    Sinew, still bristling, can only look between the two. He had come to her once; painted in the flecks of old dry blood, drunk on the very fear he could induce and she had been completely resistant, unafraid. She knows now, that the blood came from this one. Can only image how she would look split open again, run through, broken… Pollock and Sinew standing above her, as Sinew reads his fortune in her entrails, glistening and bloodied. Sinew could sing his praises from the psalms of cracked bones left open for her to read, and she nearly throws her head back, savage from the pleasure of her own sick dreams.

    For all that this Hestia smells of meat and life, she still stinks of the grave.
    Sinew wrinkles her nostrils; lends an ear to the things that Pollock has to say and can barely keep the sly smile off her lips - it is foxish and familiar, as is the scorpion’s barb in her voice; “Neither. Think of me as more of an accomplice, of sorts.” Her black eyes look askance to him, considering - she has never been the victim, even as she was made a feast of flesh for something akin to him, terrible and powerful. She had been willing then, as she is willing now, and Sinew longs to dance amongst the bones begging to be strewn at their feet - Hestia’s bones, to be exact.
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