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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


    [private]  silent bones in a wood
    #1




    From the sodden shores a black capped beast comes slinking. The waves hiss at his back glad to be rid of him. He is Tunnel and he comes from the bottom of something, the end of something, the abandoned and empty and all but dessicated place beyond the furthest place you can think of. A spring rain has fallen and all the world is as wet as he is. The dark fragrant earth gives way beneath his hooves as he mounts the steep hills beyond the grey beach. The trees beyond are dark, and there is a smell of death borne on a cold evening wind. Something rotting in the forest, a clouded eye, as yet unplucked by the crows, is staring sightless. 

    He does not see the corpse, does not search for it, does not avoid it. Into the shadows he delves, sliding into the evergreens and leaving the coast once more deserted. 

    Here beneath the trees the wind is broken, and the chill does not seep into his corded muscles. Trees wave their hands over him, a shaman’s blessing, a madman’s curse. In the dark he looks back, can still see the black water beyond the trees. He goes no further tonight, but waits here in the inky shadows, concealed by darkness and the fragrance of death. 

    like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
    as though we were drowning inside our hearts


    the heart moving through a tunnel
    in it darkness, darkness, darkness
    Reply
    #2
    The child shivers;
    She is an inelegant newborn thing that is all legs and sharp jutting angles. It will be a few years until she grows into a self that promises to be small and darting like a shadow. For now she is chilled almost to the bone because she has wandered away from her mother and cannot find her way back.

    It is easy to remedy the cold and the dark. 
    The pale downy feathers of infant wings hug her sides until she stretches them out. As she does so, the feathers ignite into pure flame that burns. The heat begins to warm her and the dark is kept at bay by the light produced. She can only keep this up for so long until she is tired - drained of the energy necessary to shift from feathers to fire.

    The firelight is gone and the dark creeps back in around her. Cold follows it and the child huffs into the night. It was more like a sigh of frustration and exhaustion mixed together as she realizes she cannot stay here - to remain is akin to death and she might very well die by cold or predator, best to move on.

    So she does.
    She passes by a patch of rot. Ignores the corpse though she is not scared by bones and decomposing flesh. Neither does she look for it out of morbid curiosity. The child hugs her wings right to her sides and darts through the dark until she nearly runs right into someone else.

    He’s tall and dark and solid. Most definitely not her father though as she makes a loud indelicate sniffing noise near the area of his face. “Hmmmm...” is all she inelegantly and quietly manages.

    @[Tunnel]
    Reply
    #3




    In the thick blue black of night the creature Tunnel’s attention is drawn by the indistinct glow of what might be flame in the trees a ways beyond him. Dark nostrils flare to draw in the scents of death, forest rot, and cold air but nothing of acrid smoke. He does not focus on the light, does not sacrifice his night vision for this oddity. The flames die and he waits. Sounds of rustling, of movement through the low growing plants and the deep beds of brown needles come to him before the child does. How unmoved he is by the sight of her, tiny thing scrabbling through the forest on knobby legs during the witching hour. Something is probably going to eat her.

    She stumbles into him, and in the quiet darkness she snuffs about his shoulder and face ineptly. He tolerates this with cold disinterest and the girl makes a meaningless noise. His expression closed he lowers his head to smell the girl, drawing deep the scent of newborn foal. As he breathes her in, this misplaced infant, his muzzle butts careless and rough against her slender neck and angular shoulder, dragging, pressing, absent gentleness. He inspects her, not with tenderness but with an almost clinical detachment. Someone has misplaced their precious thing. He could make it his now. He could destroy it.

    His lips return to the crest of her neck where the ridge of her mane curls softly. Baring his teeth he moves to bite down on that delicate young arch, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard, hard enough that he could grip and shake the child off into death. He doesn’t. This precious thing is his now, and he won't destroy her yet. Instead he releases the babe from his administrations. His voice low when he admonishes. ”You should not wander away, girl.”


    like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
    as though we were drowning inside our hearts




    @[shroud] So he is a weirdo, of course he doesn't bite her or shove her around to much if you don't want him to. <3
    the heart moving through a tunnel
    in it darkness, darkness, darkness
    Reply
    #4
    Shroud has not been taught fear. Has not suffered a harsh bite or sharp kick. No ounce of meanness has been fostered inside her newborn heart. She knows what dead smells like though, and that something could quite possibly make a meal out of her. But she remains unafraid - for now.

    His over large head descends as if from on high to poke about her small self. Shroud endures his snuggling and careless rough prodding. These are nothing like the tender ministrations bestowed upon her by her mother’s mouth like kisses and a rain of love. She knows enough to know the difference but not why she doesn’t miss it.

    Then — his lips are misleading in their gentle feel upon her crest. Lips bare teeth  - - none of which she can see but the air buzzes above her with malice - - and bite down, hard. She grits her own teeth together. Clamps her mouth shut on the cry of pain that scrambles up her throat. Shroud will not give him any more satisfaction than the pain pinched on her young face and the scruff of a tiny hoof in the dirt. 

    His release brings some relief to her but not enough to erase the memory - the mark - of his teeth. Both her skin and her mind have been impressionable enough to be imprinted upon by that singular claiming bite. She finds it hard to buck thousands of years of instinct that shout resistance and subservience into her bloodstream and she can do nothing more than look up at him with a frown and a child’s hard stare. 

    “No, I shouldn’t.” she agrees with too adult of a manner to her tone and scrunched up face. There is still no fear in her, or even defeat. He has won nothing more than a child that cannot even manage a sigh of resignation at her plight. The only other sound coming from her is the rustle if wings at her sides as feathers jostle one another back into place. It leaves her staring at him, her small face upturned and waiting as if to say what now?

    @[Tunnel] no it was perfect! but now she’s like, you’re stuck with me sorrynotsorry lol
    Reply
    #5




    A smile breaks across his lips, curling. The child’s frown calls him unfair, cruel, and he is pleased with her, not with her but with his acquisition and the spirit with which she judges him and yet still submits. He’d come so close to killing her, once his teeth sunk against her flesh. How much smaller she had seemed once in his grasp, tender fruit he wanted to rend. The warmth of her had stayed him, the softness, the sweetness of her scent. And she had not squirmed or fought him, no tears or bleats of pain. The absence of these kept the stallion rational. His mind had raced through the possibilities and he had released her. An investment.

    The defiance in her words. The voice so cold that it could be mistaken for a spector speaking through the child. He does not punish the babe, the pain he’d inflicted would still be throbbing through her tissues. No need to bruise his little one any further. She understood then, that she had wandered once and should not do so again.  He does have a fleeting thought to bring teeth down on that scrunched little face and drag her to the ground but decides this too is unnecessary.

    Tunnel bullies her once more with his heavy muzzle, hot breath falling against the delicate skin behind her ear. When he breathes her in once more his lip twitches to bare teeth but he only speaks, voice a deep murmur. ”Come. It’s cold.” The blue stallion does not suffer from any chill and his coat has dried, but she is too small to pass a night so exposed. He tosses his snout against the side of her small neck to push her roughly toward the shelter of a broad conifer and placing her between his bulk and the windbreak of the tree.

    Once she is sufficiently sheltered, Tunnel drags his teeth over her withers, doesn’t bite, only directs and then reaches to pull her against his side with a tug on the whisps of her young mane so that she may prey on his own body heat. His touch never leaves the dark girl for long. Possessive. Dark lips pass over the place where he’d bitten her, touch just soft enough to be considered gentle. ”You will call me Tunnel.” He is no replacement parent--as if it needs to be said. ”Tell me your name.” He would not go on calling her ‘girl’, the detachment of that was rather like him but names strung webs between strangers and he would tangle her to him.

    like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
    as though we were drowning inside our hearts




    @[shroud]
    the heart moving through a tunnel
    in it darkness, darkness, darkness
    Reply
    #6
    Shroud is as grave and still as the dead. 

    Her eyes fail to leave him in their cautious perusal for signs of acceptance or expectation. The shuttering of lid over eye in a slow blink or the sudden twitch of an ear might be all the warning she has before more pain is administered. She has learned quickly that pain is quite an effective tool and attention-getter. Perhaps that had been his mission all along and now, her face smooths out into an expectant look. 

    Shroud assumes the mantle of obedience, shuffling her wings to her sides so that the only noise from her on occasion is the rustle of feathers resettling. 

    He is swift though to boss her about with his heavy touch and hot breath. It tickles the sensitive spot behind her ear. Her initial reaction is to squirm but she thinks better of it and clamps her teeth together against the impulse to shake him away. He shoves at her again and she realizes his intent: the large conifer that will pass as shelter for what will be an interesting night. 

    She gives the conifer one look before settling next to it, mindful of her wings to keep them from snagging on the rough bark. Shroud is entirely too aware of him beside her even as his teeth run over her withers then he pulls her close. She assumes that mother must have done this too, only lacking the possessiveness that he has. Confusion is a shadow on a face already dark in color as his touch turns gentle on the spot previously bitten. 

    Shroud almost relaxes into
    His side rather than holding herself stiffly there before her name leaves her lips in a blasphemous murmur - “Shroud.”

    It is followed by a bold hurried question as her face turns up to him one more and her eyes - brown as mud - hold fast to his; “Why me?”

    Because she is nothing special.
    Just a girl that wandered too far from mommy.


    @[Tunnel] gah sorry this took so long!
    Reply
    #7




    Her obedience is expected. The expedience with which the child understands this serves her well and the violence that is waiting behind the stallion’s lips ebbs back, fading away into the preternatural stillness of his demeanor. Not gone, only crouched down into the shadows.

    The icy wind breaks around the tree and pulls at his the course tangle that false across his broad forehead, he has raised his head a degree to lock eyes with the spindly girl. For the first time (though not the last) he considers that some unseen thing must have delivered this gift to him. Perhaps a demon amused by his lurking under the cloak of night sent him a shroud. Those creatures did often have the most base ideas of a good joke. He does not have any reason to leave her question unanswered, though his reply will not be a balm to the wounds he has already inflicted. “Would you rather die alone in these woods, Shroud? You are mine now, and I am yours. I will keep you warm, and you will grow up. You will not be a dead thing in the trees for the foxes to eat. You will be a girl who does not get lost in the forest. You will be a woman who knows not to let her children wander into the night. I have taken you, and you will be better for it.”

    He holds her brown-eyed gaze after he has finished speaking, the inevitable barbs in his words have dropped into her little ears and fallen to cling to her narrow shoulder and he would like to watch how she bares them. The morning is very far, and children are taken by sleep as easily as they are taken by death, and so he does not demand she look for rest but allows it to find her when it will. In the early light of morning they will sink into deeper forest, and Beqanna will think her as dead as the thing that lies in the trees nearby.

    like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
    as though we were drowning inside our hearts




    @[shroud] I finally got him to come out, and apparently i think getting eaten when dead by foxes is really scary.
    the heart moving through a tunnel
    in it darkness, darkness, darkness
    Reply
    #8
    Shroud knows that she must tiptoe a delicate line with him - too far to either side is to court punishment. The kind that is sure to be swift and violent. She remains meek enough between the press of his flesh to hers and the rough side of the tree. For her obedience to him, the tree exacts its own payment in the form of separation of two feathers that catch in the ragged bark. If she felt their loss, she suffers it in a silence too profound to belong to a child. 

    Their eyes lock as she listens to his explanation. He spares her the sugar-coating that another might have liberally applied and for that, she is thankful even if it fails to flicker across her tender solemn face. Shroud blinks in the face of his vows to keep her warm and see her grown. She can appreciate that but it is the heavy implication of ownership that has her tilting her head to him in open-faced curiosity. Instinct for survival cautions her to play along for now, in letting him think her an owned thing.

    She need not answer his initial question; he knows the answer to it as if it had been there on her little face, as plain as day for him to see. The girl had no deathwish and no desire to leave him, curious to see how this shall all turn out in the end. Shroud remains meek and biddable - gives him what he wants in response to the barbs he’s given her through cowed head and the nervous but careful arrangement of wings at her sides. Yawning follows, as she gives in to the demands of sleep nestled comfortably between him and the tree.

    “Goodnight then.” she mutters sleepily before touching the tip of her muzzle to his neck.

    @[Tunnel] daw I lub them! ❤️❤️❤️
    oh and shall we wrap this one up for a new thread?
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