"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
The earth churned underneath him and he lied in wait until it settled before rising. If he had been destined to die, to be eliminated without having truly experienced life, then it would have happened despite his attempts to run from it. Beqanna was angry, a distressed woman with a spiteful edge, and it actually amused Victarian how his peers reacted. From the treeline he has watched as mares, stallions, and foals alike scrambled for their chance at a home and leadership. They wanted to flee from the frightening wrath of the gods, disregarding all other sanity and common sense. They fled like birds blindly into the night.
He waited and his patience paid him. When he opens his eyes – the fact that he can, that he is alive, is reassurance in itself – he sees everything so differently. This Beqanna is a virgin to the trials and tribulations the last had endured. This one has healed its scars and begun anew, but it has punished those who have trampled on its generosity. His ears swivel and he listens to the bantering of his peers. They’re naked, they say, they lack the powers they had before. Everything has been stripped from them and Victarian cannot help but laugh. The ones whom thought themselves almighty have now fallen; they are all the same, all scrambling for survival all over again. Nothing is established. The kingdoms have been abolished, but civilization will rise again as it always does.
Victarian hardly moves, finding comfort in the open field where so many others have gathered. There are territories that are being recruited for (he can hear the names spoken on the wind) and he wonders how much of this land has already been overcome by those hungry for power. Is there space for more big-headed leaders? Or is it not just a matter of populating these new lands? With so many without their power Victarian watches them struggle to adapt – to live – with parts of their souls ripped away. Unscathed by the angry land Victarian continues to wait as he had prior, knowing that patience is always rewarded in the end.
Victarian
just because we check the guns at the door doesn't mean our brains will change from hand grenades
[willing to either join people or start something up. I recall it being mentioned having a group of horses that enjoy non-magicness... He'd probably be into that lol]
The importance of being one step ahead of your enemy is that you never truly have to defeat him. He can exist without problem as long as you remain on top and as long as your next move remains hidden. The best way (and Hellbane knows this because he’s witnessed it) to defeat an enemy is to know them, perhaps even better than themselves. But what does one do when their enemy is invisible, or has no touch, taste, or sound? No sense could detect magic, so how could someone so plain defend themselves against it?
This is what troubles Hellbane. It’s troubled him since he was a boy, watching his mother change her coat color to disappear into thin air. “How does one kill the unknown?” He’d asked himself, time and time again. The answer, though he doubts it was the true meaning of the lesson, was given to him by a character who’d only just begun to fade from his memory. His dam’s brother - an odd sort of horse who could shapeshift. Hellbane only met him once or twice but he remembered having nightmares of the creature for months on end afterwards. “Every gift has a flaw.” His uncle has whispered as they hunted for his mother while she hid, “Dacia may be unable to be seen, but I can smell her … I can almost hear her heart beating because I know the sound so well.”
They’d found her, of course.
Hellbane snaps back to present just in time to see he’s come across an individual not quite unlike himself. The stallion is black, from what he can tell, which is not so unusual a color, except for the striking red diamonds that link in a chain across his coat. The large bay can sympathize: his own regular color is touched by green. “Are you waiting around for something incredible to happen?” He calls out, trudging ahead so that he can close the distance between them. “Hellbane.” He breathes out in way of greeting once he’s stopped. His eyes dart out across the Field in hopes to catch some measure of activity, but to his surprise, nothing seems out of the ordinary.
Something incredible to happen? Has that not already taken place? Their world ate its own heart and shit out this new place. The fact that Beqanna came to live and destroyed itself was incredible enough and yet Hellbane proceeds to ask. Victarian blinks slowly and regards the stallion. ”I think plenty has happened to satisfy anyone,” his voice is raspy from neglect and much deeper than he remembers. It almost startles him, but he masks it well enough behind stone. His eyes, a deep red, are flames reaching out for Hellbane when their gazes meet. They crackle in intrigue as his head tilts just barely. ”Victarian.”
It has been years since he has introduced himself (has he actually had any social interaction?). The sensation of his name on his tongue is unusual, but exhilarating. Victarian, he muses, and he remembers when mother said it for the first time with the sweetest smile on her face. When he blinks he sees her emerald eyes peering down at him and drinking in the sight of him. They were beautiful together while it lasted, but then she saw father again and suddenly everything changed. Victarian became nothing to her, but he never tried to force himself back into her life. What happened to her, he isn’t sure, but it made him wary of magic.
Perhaps that’s why this new Beqanna – The After – amuses him so much. Those who had gloated about their powers have been reduced to nothing. They are mortal, they are normal. They can’t possess anyone and they can’t overcome them unfairly. Suddenly, with this new world set before them they are on equal playing grounds.
And so Victarian doesn’t wonder how powerful (or how weak) Hellbane is. They are equals; they are comrades in this bland but new world where the magic has been harvested on a mountain peak. ”I suppose there is still something interesting to watch,” his eyes flash toward the field again and a grim smile plays across his lips, ”The former magics scrambling in their mortality.”
Victarian
just because we check the guns at the door doesn't mean our brains will change from hand grenades
For starters, Hellbane rather enjoyed other horses. He liked their company, their individual natures that shone through even when they weren’t aware, how brutally honest and open they could be by saying nothing at all. So it’s never been an issue for him whether or not a specific horse was deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Magic too has never been an issue, until Beqanna ate it all in a ravenous hunger and left them with a good slap on the wrist. But that’s how the world works, that’s how it's always worked. There can never be too much of one without the other. Cycles - the world is full of them. That’s why Hellbane seems to think that now is the most important time to even out the scales.
“Is that so?” Hellbane asks him when a name is given. There’s a twinkle of humor in the bay’s eyes as the two stare down one another, and then then the moment is gone while Victarian condemns the masses to their (obvious) fate. Hellbane follows his motion and sees the same horses Victarian sees, but cast in a much different light. With the tilt of his shaggy head Hellbane asks, “Do you think it’s because they realize that now they only have a finite amount of time to try and make life worth living?”
The answer doesn’t matter. “I feel sorry for them, you know.” Hellbane says with the slightest of frowns upon his mouth. “They’ve only just begun to understand the touch of death, while we’ve known it all along.” He murmurs, amber eyes flashing with intrigue. “They have a lot to learn from us, but they’re too stubborn to see it.” They always have been. They always will be. Yet … it’s why Hellbane likes them so much. He’d never understood it before, but his being “normal” was his calling.
“This new world needs someone to keep reminding them, and I intend to see that through.” He tells Victarian, eyes shifting back to look the black stallion in the face. “What about you? Will you keep standing around, waiting for something incredible to happen?” The draft questions, all traces of humor gone from his eyes, “Or will you choose differently?”
He flinches underneath the forcible question; it’s a call to action that Victarian wouldn’t hesitate to claim. Their world has been condemned by the magics for so long and so finally their world lashed out in response. This is when the normals should take flight and ascend to their own power and prove how strong they are without additives. The only hesitation is that they have all been stripped and so they are left wondering who is what and what is who. Is that a shifter prowling the treeline? Is that a telepath standing in the midst of a group? It’s a matter of weeding them out, but the challenge lies in that alone.
Who is ‘them’?
They are the horses who are horrified when they stare across the field. They are the ones wailing as their souls are ripped in half. Victarian sifts through and finds some that are trying to grasp for a chance at this new life. A lopsided expression of amusement softens the ridges of his face although his eyes remain hardened and unyielding. ”I don’t,” why would he pity them? They didn’t take into consideration their powerless counterparts before this happened; they oppressed and sat above the normal on their thrones of magic and arrogance. ”They deserve what they get,” he adds with distaste, his mouth curling into a frown now. ”They thought themselves better than us,” he assumes that Hellbane lacks any magic and that it is only his color that derives his uniqueness, ”but now we are equal.”
The call to action bangs at the forefront of his mind now, offering him an opportunity to elude further oppression and to be something greater than the fallen magics. Victarian’s ruby eyes find Hellbane again, drifting away from the scrambling of the field. ”What is it you have in mind?” A land with no magics, where they can prove their strength on their normalcy; that’s what he wants, what his body craves.
Victarian
just because we check the guns at the door doesn't mean our brains will change from hand grenades
Despite what you may think, Hellbane believes that strong expression and unyielding opinions are a virtue. They balance the soft-speakers and the quiet thinkers. “Perhaps they do.” Hellbane replies in a solemn voice. “But then that makes us just as guilty for letting it happen.” He speaks. The rights, the wrongs, when do they all add up? How could you tally hundreds of years of war? The bay thinks that even if he did compare and contrast, both sides would come out even. You can point a finger any which way you liked, but the fact that three other fingers would always point back to you remains the same. In judging them, Victarian toys with fire.
“I want there to always be a place where Magic has no power.” Hellbane tells him, “A place that reminds Beqanna’s inhabitants where they came from and reminds them never to lose themselves again.” He says. It’s a big dream, even for a big horse like himself, and it needed nurturing to see itself to fruition. It was also a task that (for any one horse) seemed impossible. Hellbane, however, has firm belief that the impossible could become reality. All it took was opening one’s eyes to see that the fictional had become reality.
If Beqanna could knock the gifted ones down a peg, then so could he. “There’s a few of us already banded together - and by few I mean four horses and a colt.” He chuckles, “We’re headed out to find a place that suits our needs and we could certainly use a fifth.” He offers, head turning back to look at Victarian. “Join us?”
The door is always open, but it would have to be the black and red stallion that walked through it.
