• Logout
  • 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


    [open]  oh, this my weapon, this my loam; any
    #1

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    He hungers for more.

    He is but a yearling, his body still youthful and stretched too long in some parts. His hip juts out and his antlers have begun to grow, but they remain small—not yet the dangerous things they will eventually become. His wings though. Oh, they are the most mature part of him. Helped in part by the magic that lets them switch and shift beneath his thoughts, shimmering between forms, stretching large and fierce.  

    But his eyes do not look youthful.

    His eyes do not maintain that innocence of children.

    His eyes are sharp and curious and overbright, the grey of them peering out from beneath a swath of wine-dark forelock, the hair growing longer with each passing day. Today, he does not have twin by his side, which feels strange in part, a ghost of a ligament that he can still feel, but he does not begrudge her her adventures. Does not begrudge her the chance to slip away and taste the foreign pieces of Beqanna.

    Does not begrudge her the chance to follow quests and meet friends and find herself.

    Just as she will not begrudge him this.

    The wolfish boy sleeps out when the sun has not yet risen and although several of his father’s pack rise with him, they do not attempt to keep him leaving. They know by now that the red son of Daemron is as stubborn as his mother and as fierce as his father. His heart does not beat to the sound of domestic life and he does not pause as he takes to the skies, as his wings unfurl and lift him, as he passes the border.

    Flight has come more naturally to him with each passing day, but he still tires easily, and when he reaches the forest, his coltish chest is pounding, his nostrils flaring. It was the furthest that he has ever flown, and although he knows that should concern him, he can feel nothing but a roaring hunger in his veins.

    Reply
    #2
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    She is grown, now, but there remains something childish about her. She was dream-grown, see, raised in a strange fantastical world, a dream made flesh.
    (What it had cost her mother, she doesn’t know, and will likely never learn – this is no doubt a secret Heartworm will take to her grave.)
    She is more acquainted with reality, now, knows the world for what it is, but the world has not yet robbed her of a certain whimsy.
    She looks the part of whimsy, white with a rainbow sheen, wings fluttering at her sides. Like something dreamed.

    She has been absent from Beqanna for longer than she’s realized, when she returns it’s changed, sickened, but this does not make her hesitate.
    (There are dreams, sometimes, of her in another world, her first iteration. There was something like a plague there, too. She remembers a castle crumbling, birds falling from the sky. But they’re just dreams, is all.)

    She sees the boy, or perhaps he sees her – their eyes meet, and then her rove over his wine-dark body, the wings at his sides. Her own wings flutter as she pulls them in closer, moving towards him. She does not know if he wants company, but there is a smile bright on her face, and she nods hello as she nears him.
    “Hello,” she says, “my name is Irisia.”



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm


    Reply
    #3

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    He is not sure if he wants company, if he wants silence, or if he wants something he cannot name.

    It is a disconcerting feeling to not be able to name your own desires, to feel something swell, the pressure of it against your ribs, but not be able to understand it. It presses against his throat and builds in his chest and makes him wilder than usual, more reckless, something simmering in his veins that wants to send him catapulting off of cliffs and diving into oceans and doing anything but just standing here quietly.

    But she comes and he is tethered by the moment, his wings clipped, iron grey eyes steely.

    “Brigade,” he offers, voice terse but not wholly unkind. It is a voice of tumbleweeds and wind whipping down savannas; it is frigid and warm and nearly feral. It is not cruel, because wild things do not know cruelty (even when they rip the throats of prey, they are not cruel, they are simply surviving) but it does not coddle her. It does not soften for her ethereal beauty or puddle at her feet or wrap around her.

    Instead his coltish shoulders straighten and his mouth remains in a firm line. The breeze pulls at the tangled, matted locks of his mane, the broken edges of his blaze peeking out from beneath his forelock.

    He almost runs, almost takes to the skies, almost leaves without another word, but he doesn’t. He remains anchored, his gaze intense and focused, something within the waves of it daring her to say the next word.



    @[irisa]

    he has N O social skills i am so sorry
    Reply
    #4
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    She is intrigued by him.
    She is intrigued by everything, to be honest, that same whimsy giving her a curiosity that’s lingered still. She is intrigued by the look in his eye, faraway and somehow steely, by his tone; the whole windblown look of them. She feels strange in comparison, white and rainbow-sheened, entirely too cultivated, even if that cultivation took place in a dream world.
    “Nice to meet you,” she says, smiling, unfazed by his terseness.

    She steps closer – only a bit, and cocks her head, examining his wings. They’re different than hers, clearly, and she is captivated by the shape of them, the shimmer she sees where they briefly become something else.
    “I like your wings,” she says, and her own move, as if to emphasize the word, “do they change?”
    She’s seen such things, wings melting into one thing or another. She loves her own wings well enough, but she thinks it might be lovely to change them every so often, when the mood struck.
    She extends her wings, then, brushing the feathers against his wings. It’s too much, perhaps, overstepping boundaries, but she is so curious. Of course, the feathers do not transmit much in the way of sensation, only that there is a thing there, but any part of her skin would have surely been too strange and intimate for this stranger.
    “Sorry,” she says, withdrawing them, “I don’t always think before doing things.”



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm


    Reply
    #5

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    She is kind and sweet and he feels brutish in comparison. She is a delicate flower and he wonders just how easy it would be to break her, how easily she might wilt, how quickly she would be crushed. Or, rather, if she is like his sister. Does she have steel beneath the velvet? Does she have an unwavering core? 

    Wonder is softer than him, but she is strong. It would be a mistake to think otherwise.

    Perhaps this girl of gossamer and rainbows is the same.

    It is enough to hold his interest, a thread snagged on a thorn, and his steel eyes, broody as they may be, remain on her. “They do,” he answers, never giving more words than absolutely necessary. It feels like a physical effort to form each syllable, an exhausting endeavor to explain himself verbally. It is easier with his twin, the weight of it lifted so that his tongue can loosen, but he is still not the chatty one. 

    So, instead of explaining further, he concentrates and demonstrates.

    His wings unfurl, the feathers of them melting first into interlocking branch and leaf. Useless but beautiful in the way of a dying autumn tree. Then, they melt into leather and bone, draconic in their power (this is one of the most exhausting to hold). Finally, they shift into feathers once more, but these pale and dipped in an oilspill, reflecting her own ethereal beauty back at her just as her own wings reach to touch him.

    He flinches, and he doesn’t attempt to hide it. The feel of her wings against his own is intimate, deeply personal, and a storm cloud of confusion crosses his features. His lips press closed as he withdraws his wings, returning them to their natural state as they fold around his coltish barrel. 

    “It’s fine,” he finally says, swallowing hard. “It’s fine.” 

    He pauses for a moment, focusing on her with a faint frown.

    “So where are you from?”



    @[irisa]
    Reply
    #6
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    She has not been tested, and it is thus unknown to her what she is made of. Her mother was weak. Irisa does not know this – she mostly knew her mother in a dreamland – but she is. She broke under what was given to her (and it was a fair breaking, the adversity heavy enough). Irisa had not been so unfortunate, she has been able to skate through her life without knowing much in the way of pain – a skinned knee there, a thorn-cut here.
    There is no telling what lies beneath her, or if indeed, there is anything – perhaps she would simply crumble to dust and be gone.

    She watches with curiosity and fascination as his wings change, from feather to stick to bone, and there is a lick of envy in her throat. Perhaps she could have done something similar, in the dreamworld – she remembers mother tweaking her, shifting her color, until she nodding to herself, murmuring that’s right. But not now, where magic is a scarcer thing (at least to her grasp). Now, she is stuck as she is, which she doesn’t entirely mind – but ah, wouldn’t it be interesting to shift and warp at will?
    He asks a question, a common one that she has an entirely uncommon answer for.
    “From here,” she says, “but also not. Mother mostly kept me in a different place. A more magical one. She liked it, there, and kept me with her.”
    But that hadn’t lasted, as Irisa grew, as she became more herself and less such a malleable thing.
    “But that place is gone. So now I’m just from here.”
    She misses it, and she doesn’t – she liked the world, it suited her (of course it did – she was made from ad for it!). But it was not hers, it was mothers, and there, she was ultimately a pawn – a decoration.
    Here, she is herself, wholly.
    (Whatever that may be.)
    “What about you?”



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm


    Reply
    #7

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    She is like talking to the stars—to the very galaxies, as milky as their light and intangible as it too. It filters through him, frustrating and fascinating him in equal measure. He is a thing of forest and wolf and fang. He is made for this world, born of its dirt and carved from its bone. But not her. It’s clear in the color that shimmers beneath the weak sunlight and the way her voice floats between them.

    He is acutely aware of his wild nature, the broad strokes of him.

    For the first time, he wishes he had the delicacy to be fragile.

    But in the same breath he knows it is an impossible thing.

    “What happened to it?” he asks, struggling to keep the curiosity from his voice, that naked desire to know more about her and where she came from—that weakness in his hunger for more. His reaction to her crossing the threshold of his privacy dies in his throat as his gaze sharpens on her, as he studies her more intently, wondering at this other place she came from, this place that birthed someone such as she.

    She asks of his own home and he makes a sound in his throat. Part dismissal, part annoyance. “Tephra,” because it is the only home he has ever known, even though his parents only claimed it as a home just before his birth. “It is not far from here.” It is a land of volcano and ash and he doesn’t despite it even though it doesn’t claim him. One day he will leave the safety of the pack. He will not be bound there.

    “What was it like being there?”

    He tries to cloak his curiosity behind indifference but it is unveiled all the same.



    @[irisa]
    Reply
    #8
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    They are a strange pair, to be sure. As he envies her delicacy, her web-spun qualities, she admires the rough edges of him, the antlers protruded and the wings shifting, his wind-chafed features that look at her with something that she thinks is curiosity.
    He asks what happened to her world and she doesn’t know how to answer. Perhaps the world still exists, perhaps Heartworm is still dreaming (she doesn’t know – she hasn’t seen mother in years, now).
    “It was my mother’s dream,” she says, though she doesn’t know how this logic translates, how many are aware of that particular power, know how to make sense of it.
    “It was hers, and she woke up one day and couldn’t take me with her.”
    There’s more to it, but she doesn’t know how to explain it further, save for one more admission.
    “Maybe I didn’t want to go. I didn’t learn about this world for awhile.”
    There had been anger, when she learned. She is not angry now – she is a forgiving thing – but sometimes the betrayal comes back to her, a sour note on the tongue.

    He’s brief, on his own lands, and she nods, as if she understands.
    “Do you live there still?” she asks, curious, but he’s given her another question, circles her back to her own strange world.
    “It was…magical. Mother could control anything in the world – the animals and plants and weather. It was always beautiful. Always sunny. She didn’t like the darkness, so it was always daytime. I couldn’t change things, but almost anything I asked for, she would give me.”
    A pause, a breath. Her mind whirls in its remembrance.
    “But it was hers. It wasn’t mine. Everything lived by her rules. It was hard to be autonomous.”
    A word she’d learned not long ago, and when she had, it had struck her like a weight. A word she’d been searching for.
    Free to govern herself. To blaze her own trail in this world.



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm


    Reply
    #9

    oh, this my weapon, this my loam. this my blood, this my bone.

    There is a piece of Brigade that is a possessive thing.

    It is a vulnerable piece of him—something that he does his best to tuck away, to hide, to protect. It is a softness that lives beneath the surface, a desire for things that the rest of him resents. It is the part that looks at her with something like a want, something like a desire to tuck her away and keep her for himself. It is a part that he does his best to resist, that makes him almost angry in the realizing, but it is the part that keeps his ears flicked forward and his stubborn grey eyes trained on her as she speaks.

    “I cannot imagine what it is like to live within a dream,” and the words are both a soft confession and one that is ripped from him. His lips almost pull back in a snarl, nearly reveal themselves, but he keeps them hidden for now. Instead he just straightens himself, his back rigid and his muscles tense beneath the rich red of his coat. “I am glad you didn’t go,” he says suddenly and he is enraged with himself for the way that it slips so easily from his tongue. He opens his mouth to say more, but he chokes it back instead.

    “I do,” he says, terse, perhaps harsher as if it could balance the earlier admission. “I don’t know for how much longer though.” Tephra has already begun to feel small, the edges of it feeling more and more claustrophobic, despite the deep love he holds for the wolves and his family and the pack. “I just don’t know where I would go if it wasn’t there.” A shrug. “Perhaps it doesn’t matter where I would go.”

    But she’s talking again, and he finds himself enchanted once more by the flow of her words.

    He grits his teeth to control his words, to leash his desire to say more, and he is silent but it shows in flashes in the steely waves of his gaze, the turbulent stormy ocean beneath his forelock. “Perhaps you will have your own world one day,” he says, and he hates that strange desire to be the one that finds it for her.

    Reply
    #10
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    She finds herself smiling, and warm beneath his gaze in a way that is unfamiliar. None of her connections have lasted, she’s been a ship passing them in the night. Yet he’s still here, still speaking to her, still looking at her with his grey eyes and shifting wings, and she does not want it to stop, she does not want to be on her way again.
    “Me too,” she says, and she feels the gladness distinctly. She’s wondered, sometimes, if she made a mistake in striking out for her independence, in choosing to grow (mother would have kept her as a foal forever in the dream, she suspects). She’s done so little on her own. But in this moment she feels wholly justified in her choice.

    Perhaps you will have your own world, he says, but she feels a moment of sourness at the thought. She lacks her mother’s ability – she knows this, and does not lament it – and even if she had such power, she isn’t sure that she would use it.
    (But then, if she had such power, could she resist the temptation? Surely not. She is not so strong as that.)
    “I like this world, and have no desire to create my own,” she says, “I’m happy here.”
    Here. It could mean so many things. She isn’t sure.
    She steps closer. She is more cautious, this thing, none of the easy brashness from when she had first touched his wings. Her mind tumbles over itself, trying to find something to say and coming up blank.
    Here.
    “You’re very handsome,” she says, and she knows it’s wrong before she says it, because he’s young and he’s practically a stranger and she’s touched him once, just her wing to his, and he’s young, and she is a ship, passing in the night.
    Maybe she has overstayed.
    “I’m sorry,” she says. Now the words stumble from her tongue. “I shouldn’t say things like that.”



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm


    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)