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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


    scorch
    #1

    you can't get struck by lightning
    if you're not dancing in the rain

    The sounds of the Jungle echo around them in a variety of noises so loud it might be catastrophic. They are the sounds of home — the jaguar’s growl, the birds’ assortments of trills and caws and hoots and songs, the hum of waterfalls, the wind rustling through the highest points of the trees — and his mind feels the sweetness of relief at their familiarity. It’s a perfect Amazon day, warm and humid against his skin, and he audibly sighs as the coolness of the stream licks against his heels.

    A kiss is pressed against his strong red shoulder. Her mouth is as familiar to him as the sounds of the Jungle, if not more. Above the Jungle that curls around them, above the northern kingdom that will chill them eventually, she is home. He feels a smile tug at his lips, bright and sunny against the shade they stand nestled under. He turns his head, and she is there — his flame-wife, rippling with muscle and the bright shades of her fire. “Ti amo, mio fuoco.” His voice is low and rumbling as his mouth travels from her cheek down her neck.

    She laughs, free of worry and drunk on love, and he soaks it in. But then her laughter becomes roughened and jumbled as if he were hearing her from underwater. It grows louder until it cancels out the sounds of the Jungle and then it grows louder still until he can’t hear his own thoughts (which must surely be screaming for her to “Stop!”). His eyes snap shut and his body tenses, hoping that it will all just stop.


    Hestoni’s eyes snap open so violently his head hits against the roof of the cavern. Everything is dimly-lit and hazy, with light only barely filtering through the entrance. He realizes he’s in a cavern with a sloping end to it, much like a tunnel or — and he shudders slightly — a tomb. The red stallion takes a few slow steps forward, wincing with each one, to reach the supposed mouth of his resting place. A wall of snow and ice has built up against the entrance, only furthering along his thoughts of the tomb, and Hestoni wastes no time to push through it with his broad shoulders.

    He immediately realizes Beqanna is not how he left it. Winter is upon Nerine, where before they had been in the midst of an unnaturally warm summer. The smoke from Tephra’s volcano lingers in the western distance when it had been found on the eastern horizon the last time he’d been awake. Worry forms tight, deep knots in the pit of Hestoni’s stomach. The red stallion wastes no time in racing up the embankment to search the empty plateau for Scorch, hellbent on determining just how long he’s been asleep.

    On any other day, Hestoni might have waited to call his wife’s name until it was absolutely necessary. But this bizarre situation grips him with fear so deep and impatient that he cries her name into the wintery sky without concern for what business she might be dealing with. The worry and confusion and fear is caught in the rough call in his throat and it forces Hestoni to keep moving, making his way across the Nerinian landscape in search of Scorch.

    Hestoni



    @[Scorch]
    #2

    WATCH THE FLAMES CLIMB HIGH INTO THE NIGHT

    She dreamt of him more nights than not.

    Him, and others - but mostly him. The taste of him on her tongue was one she would never forget, or at least, she had yet to; the image of him may have begun to fade, but his taste hadn't. She feels him, too, in her dreams, tall and strong just like her; they are often in their prime. Sometimes they were old and dying, a dream of their first ending which should also have been their last. Sometimes, they were in the grey afterlife, cold to the touch and yet still warmed the presence of one another.

    But as I said, there were sometimes others. The magician she'd bedded and born children for came to speak to her, though she never decided whether the phantom Brennen was real and penetrating her dreams, or simply a figment thereof. More recently, a woman; from times before, from the days before her Amazonian reign. Brunhild; she dreamt of Brunhild, and the contents of her mind found themselves drawn exclusively to the dark and the twisted, though she rarely didn't find pleasure within those things. After all, she'd found it once, in real life, between the once-Queen's thighs.

    It would seem that she had a tendency to bed once-royals whose names began with B. She had to keep some semblance of pattern in her life; otherwise, she would just be a whore, with no poetics about it.

    Tonight, however, she dreamt only of the one whom she truly loved. "Ti amo, mio fuocco." Words she'd not heard uttered since the day of her husband's disappearance. They made her smile, but also squirm in her sleep; the vision faltered, then slowly re-stabilized. She knew consciously that she did not deserve to hear those tender, loyal words - but her subconscious gave way to greed and glutton, desperately self indulgent for a nicety that did not even exist.


    Scorch!

    The single word, yelled above the tree tops with the intensity and tone that could belong to but one man, woke the mare. As she blinked the sleep from her dragon eyes, a vomit-inducing dread washed over her, the tightness in her chest which had led to her bedding Brunhild now threatening to tear her apart from the top of her seams to the bottom. The pressure felt insurmountable, and to her great shame, she hesitated. Considered turning away from the call and dismissing it as an illusion of her dream; considered running out of Nerine and never coming back, of calling to Brennen and bidding her stay with her in the place of her choosing forever. It wouldn't be so bad, living in solitude with a magician.

    Alas, the part of her that still loved Hestoni (that is to say, the whole of her) wholeheartedly refused these crazed thoughts, taking charge of the woman's legs while her mind fell to shambles within. She closed her eyes periodically and tried to force herself back to sleep, imagining the sounds of the jungle around her, imagining that the forest around her stood ten times as densely, until true twilight surrounded her at every turn.

    It was hard, without Hestoni, and she had resorted to the back-stabbers way of dealing with that fact. Now, to her further discreditment, she played the coward; stumbling closer to her downfall with nary a single defense in mind. What she had done was wrong, a blatant, severe crime against the sacrament of their marriage. She thought of Leilan's angry words, of how Ea choked on Brennen's name, and of how Shahrizai had looked at her as though he no longer knew her.

    She feared much, much worse on behalf of he who she crawled to, mewling and pitiful.

    Upon the crest of a rocky hill, she spotted him, moving dazedly across the landscape. The sight of his broad red shoulders easily plowing through the tall snows at one elated her and defeated her; she wanted to cry for joy and for shame. For now, she settled on neither, the internalized energy creating ever more pressure just beneath her skin.

    And just like that, they began to speak all at once. Their voices, familiar now yet still alarming when coming unbidden, caused the mare to cloak herself in twilight, rendering her invisible; the clamor of ghosts within the small area of her mind felt like blood being pumped into her already full veins. She tried to speak and to quiet them, but they would not listen; the man she loved came closer and closer with each minute that she struggled against the voices; and, panicked, she resorted to pure impulse.

    "STOP!"

    At the exact moment she screamed the word, her skin erupted into living flame, and the voices stopped. Not only this, but she realized upon opening her eyes and shedding her now-useless invisibility, that Hestoni had stopped dead in his tracks at her command, looking for all the world like he had that first day in the meadow. She wanted to scream again because of this, to scream and scream and scream, until the time came that it all went black.

    But the newborn fire lining every inch of her body spoke to how impossible such a task would be.

    Unable to scream for fear of it all, she stood: reborn, though she yearned to die.

    Scorch

    Once Khaleesi of the Amazon Jungle



    @[Hestoni] uh oh.
    [Image: scorch2.png]
    #3

    you can't get struck by lightning
    if you're not dancing in the rain

    The nauseating dread that fills her chest struggles in Hestoni as well. It is bitter cold and yet red-hot at the same time, sliding against his heart and into his blood vessels. He can feel the thick syrup of fear drip from his chest into the low of his stomach and down into the curves and bends of his ankles. It coats him in layers so heavy that not even the frozen bite of the snow can curb the perspiration that begins to dampen his rust-colored skin. His impatience meddles with the workings of his lungs, forcing him to heave gulps of winter air that taste of terror and windswept skies.

    There is something wrong. He can feel it on the edge of his mind; it is a dangerous chesspiece walking the line between knowledge and mystery. Little does he know: there is more than just the passage of time that is so desperately incorrect.

    For a brief moment, Hestoni catches a glimpse of her. It is the barest breath of sight, so quick that he decides that it was merely a working of his discontented paranoia. He isn’t sure how much time has passed, but the soldier knows of Beqanna’s tendencies to take someone’s content life and twist it into a paper airplane (shot off into the nighttime with a long, curving angle that proves difficult to return from). An audible choke forces him to pause in his erratic searching at the thought of enough time passing to age Scorch’s body and return her to the Beach’s shores.

    As if Scorch heard his desperately-terrified thought, her grating voice screams from amidst the silence. The tension nestled in his bones and wound tightly in his muscles makes Hestoni shift rapidly to the right. He nearly trips over a granite rock hidden among the snow, hooves clipping the stone just enough to produce a noise that shrieks just as wildly as his wife’s own cry. Just as the chestnut is correcting his balance, she bursts into flames.

    If he could marry her all over again, he would have.

    The moment of her sudden appearance is both fleeting and eternal. Hestoni is caught in the essence of her, just as she had been in the Meadow (engulfed in the fire that identified how her emotions were so wild and painful and brash). Their decades of time together pass through his mind’s eye in a matter of seconds; memories of children and grandchildren and servitude for love and sobbing against the cold cheek of their daughter and heated whispers against the melody of a Jungle night.

    He is frozen in the act of looking at her. His muscles are tense and defined, rippling just underneath the rusty hue of his skin. Dampness darkens the broad swell of his chest and the length of his feathered legs, though there is no distinguishing between the snowmelt and the anxiety-induced sweat. Thick, long tendrils of mane and forelock cling against his strong neck and cheekbones (cheekbones that used to be branded with fire, in that Jungle so long ago).

    Hestoni struggles to swallow, to breathe, to move. And she appears to be caught in the same vice-like phenomena. Finally, a sigh so large it might be considered a wind sweeps out of his lungs. It is infested with paranoia and fear and anxiety; all the sob-inducing emotions held in the linings of his body exhale with the release of his breath. On his next inhale, his deep voice echoes the name he had just repeated with such impatient terror. “Scorch.”

    Hestoni steps toward her; at first, he pays little mind to the fire that coats her body. Her Amazon tattoos had never hurt him (he had spent many nights tracing their shifting, living lines with the tenderness of his mouth) and his relieved mind unconsciously supposes these flames will do him no harm as well. Yet their sudden heat, just as intense as real fire, stings his skin as he draws closer. Snow is beginning to melt around her into unfortunate puddles and it makes Hestoni’s ears pull into the thickness of his mane. All he wants to do is feel the comfort of her touch, to know that she is alive under his muzzle.

    “You’re on fire.” It’s a nonsensical statement, but it’s all he can get out amid the myriad of emotions that plague him so deeply he fears he will never be rid of them. Despite her sudden appearance, covered in red-hot flame, Hestoni begins to seek her advice (as husbands are wont to do with their wives). “I fell asleep when it was summer and now it’s winter.” His masculine head is tossed toward the sky, where the clouds are uncharacteristically absent. “How long have I been gone? What happened?”

    Hestoni



    @[Scorch] ):
    #4

    WATCH THE FLAMES CLIMB HIGH INTO THE NIGHT

    And as the flames reclaimed their beloved Khaleesi, the stallion (for there had only ever been The stallion for her, only him) stopped, eyes drawn to her with a devotion of love so powerful that they could have left it at that, and forgotten the outside world entirely. They could have, if only her eyes reflected an emotion as steadfast and certain as his. They could have, if she hadn't given in to the pull of infidelity. They could have, if he had never disappeared.

    The fire danced around the cheater's skin, mocking her inability to feel the pain of its tongues with its giggling crackle.

    For too long, that sound alone occupied the space between the star-bound lovers. In Hestoni's every exhale, Scorch thought she could hear the roar of the Jungle, a sound long dead and impossible to revive; and yet he brought it with him, the sound that her heart most longed to hear. Somehow, it were as if her husband and their once-home were in tandem - or perhaps it was the unison of the pair's heartbeats that revived the Jungle, though only in the abstract. Despite everything, despite it all, they still brought the best out of each other - but - the best, the jungle, was dead and gone. And the same could not be denied for what remained of their legacy, and of their relationship.

    Their stares lingered like winter's last snowfall, desperate, longing, and doomed. His eyes stuck to her with a wetness that made her stomach churn, for who was she to abide such tenderness? And yet in the same breath, she found herself looking to him. To his face, the one she always loved and always would; the muscles, the sweat, the height - everything. She wondered, irrationally, if he could still see her beneath her newfound flames - flames whose origin she was clueless about. With everything going on, the mare barely even registered the lack of ghostly babbling in her mind; later, she would worry. Later, she would mourn the loss of her connection with Ea, Echion, Rain, Kagerou, and so many more.

    Now, however, she mourned only the death of her marriage, the one which Hestoni hadn't yet a clue about.

    Siiiiiigh...

    Scorch.

    No,
    she thought, grateful to the searing flames which evaporated her falling tears before any others could glimpse them. No, don't say my name like that - with love. Please. Please. I'm sorry.

    But thoughts held no weight, and she knew that she would have to verbalize her infidelity before long. God; she bent at the neck, stifling a sob. The sinews of her chest felt as though they were about to tear apart, the muscles woven together by some higher power now being shredded by the same. Merciless, merciless, merciless - and yet it was she who brought on the pain, she who bedded others, she who found herself wanting when he had always found himself meeting her every need.

    He stepped to her, mindless in his adoration; how could she blame him? She, too, would approach him even at the risk of being burned. The child in her whom, not grown enough yet to kick, wiggled softly, reminding her that it would be the one scalding Hestoni now, with its existence. And let us not forget Blue, either. Taxed and utterly incapable of coherence, Scorch reached to touch him, too - but Hestoni retreated, ears pinning at the heat which greeted his efforts of reunion. A different kind of pain pierced the amazon; one of wifely need, one of subservience and dependence and utter devotion - all of these things, and a sickly knowledge that she had forsaken them in exchange for deviance and pleasure.

    Her head spun, full of thoughts, of Nerine and abandonment and the Jungle, and of Hestoni and Brennen and Brunhild, of Blue and the unborn baby and god, the born ones - of the fire, of the silence in her mind, of how fucked she was. Only the sound of Hestoni speaking once more calmed her, catching her off guard just as she bent to spiral into a full blown melt down, complete with screaming and writhing and all.

    You're on fire. Scorch laughed, the sound as uncontrollable as the rest of her emotions; by its garbled tone, Hestoni would immediately know she was crying. Yet she found that she couldn't stop, the soft noise growing louder as she disentangled her spiritual self from her physical body and viewed the situation as if from over her own shoulder. From there, dissociated and cold, it was funny: and as steam rose from the place below her eyes, she knew that it wasn't funny. The laughter was not that. But at this rate, with her consciousness dislocated and spinning, she knew that she knew nothing at all.

    The laughter stopped abruptly, without warning, and the mare turned to stone. Flickering, her dragon eyes stared to a point just beside Hestoni, glazed and unseeing.

    I fell asleep when it was summer and now it's winter. How long have I been gone? What happened?

    Even from where she levitated, she felt it: the grinding of her bodily fluids as the very atoms of her entire self ground together, each of the cogs suddenly stuck in others. She could have sworn that the friction of her pieces made an audible screech; but in truth, the only sound made came in the form of her confession. Immediate, impulsive.

    "You disappeared. For years." A part of her wanted to stop there, but it was clear by the way she would not meet his gaze that she would not. "Nerine fell apart. My legacy became forgotten. I... abandoned myself." And though the words were true, she knew that they were no excuse. At long, long last, she lifted her gaze - but when it met his, it was if they still saw naught. "I found solace in the arms of friends from times past, who reminded me of what I once was in your absence, and in the absence of anything familiar - in the absence of the home that I can never return to. I had a child with Brennen." She paused, bile rising all the way to her mouth before she swallowed it back down. "And I am having one with Brunhild."

    "The child grows in my womb as we speak."


    Shuddering, the mare struggled to remain cold, calculated, and composed; but a single blink left the dams wide open, allowing the oceans of flood water to cascade over her, pummeling her and drowning her and condemning her. She realized, as she sobbed, that the ocean was salty - a body of tears.

    "I am so, so sorry, Hestoni - please, send me away - I will go any where, I will die if you want me to, please - I cannot live with myself -" she reached for him, and remembered the flames which refused to lessen their engulfment of her figure. She sobbed harder, the strength of the convulsion filling her mouth with vomit. Coughing and gasping, she stumbled, eyes squeezing shut as a keen ripped through the air around them. "Please, I just want to hold you, why won't it leave, I - I - I need to hold you, before I leave, please, I -"

    And, given to its sickly sense of humour, the flames obeyed. Without a sound, they vanished - and in their absence, Scorch became utterly naked. Vulnerable, to the nth degree. Broken, and without a hope, the mare turned her cheek, expecting her once-husband to go.

    After all, it was what she deserved.

    Scorch

    Once Khaleesi of the Amazon Jungle



    @[Hestoni]
    [Image: scorch2.png]
    #5

    you can't get struck by lightning
    if you're not dancing in the rain

    As tormented as he might be (like a deep, unsettled sea roaring against the cavities of his body), Hestoni will come to realize that this silence between them will allow him to be the most peaceful he will be for quite a while. There is only the crackling of the flames that dance across her body, a warm noise amid the sharpness of Nerine. While she hears the music of the Jungle in his powerful respirations, he hears the melody of their marriage in the chatter of the fire. It had been the flames that had drawn him to her in the first place — and then it had been the fierceness of her tongue that had kept him there. The noise is a stark reminder of the nights spent sleepless in their marriage bed, of the days they would chase each other along trails and beneath waterfalls, of the seasons that ebbed and flowed with the pregnancy and labor of each child they created as a symptom of their love.

    And so he swells with love in the moments before she breaks his heart.

    He hadn’t meant for her name to drag tears from her eyes and force her to lean down as if the entirety of the sky had fallen upon her shoulders. Perhaps the sky had fallen on her shoulders when they sealed their matrimony — at least his sky had, colors of a romantic sunset sky dotted with wispy clouds settling across her spine. It leaves Scorch as the one to keep that pretty atmosphere from sharpening like a knife and slicing his throat, spilling all that lovesick blood into the bitter Nerine snow. Perhaps she had lost the reminder of her purpose in his absence. He had been there to offer her kisses and words of encouragement, softly massaging away the pieces of her that ached from the weight of that sunset sky. He had been there to nestle against her when the sky turned dark and heavy from the thunderstorm clouds and he had been there to cherish the moments when the sky was as light and dainty as a butterfly’s wing. Yet his disappearance had made the kisses and encouragement and touching and joy grow dusty and cold. And perhaps she had forgotten.

    Perhaps the broadness and the strength of his red shoulders had made it easier for Hestoni to carry her sky — to lift it high enough where she could watch the birds swoop and cry above her head. He keeps her sky with him now, cradling the weight of it against his back like a precious babe. And yet she has dropped the weight of his own sunset atmosphere; it has shattered into a million pieces and formed itself into a weapon that will strike his tender heart and the ache of that pain will force him to consider her own sky (yet he will merely consider it, never dropping it).

    Regardless of skies and marriages and the metaphors that bind the two together, Scorch’s tears form a dragon’s mist against her cheeks and he takes a step forward. Even as the heat of her flame threatens to eradicate the protection of his skin and muscle, he takes a single step forward. It is the action of a man longing to comfort the one whom he adores, even without knowing what is causing her sorrow. And then she is erratic; a shifting mosaic of emotions and behaviors and responses that Hestoni almost can’t tell the difference from one stained glass piece from another.

    Her laughter scares him. It is frothy with tears and laced with irony. There are hints of insanity in that laugh, so raw and jagged-edged that his heart grows cold and nervous amid the warmth of his chest. When she stops — as cold and stony as the granite cliffs that line Nerine — he almost knows what she is going to say. There are no specifics, but their hearts and souls and minds are so tightly wound that he can feel the wrongness of it. He can feel the pressure of the pain already beginning to snip at the strings of his heart, unwinding that instrumental muscle to drain the blood from the vessels of his body. She is a shell of herself, still wrapped in that protective fire, and that fact drags a shaky breath from his nervous lungs.

    The bullets are not weak. They are true to their course, having plotted their angles and lines in the moments between her inhale and their deployment. And they hit him with such a force that he staggers physically, kneeling in the snow at her feet. The stone he had tripped over moments before pierces into the skin of his right knee. Although blood spurts forth from the gash (staining that once-pure snow into shades of deep maroon; as though it were a symbolism of the streaks of pain she leaves on their once-holy marriage) he feels no pain from it.

    Hestoni’s heart is a mess and he cannot breathe. Those damned bullets have found the meat of his very being — the power of his heart and the swell of his lungs and the tenderness of his brain — and decidedly shredded them all until they are meager pieces of what had once been. The world is hazy; Scorch is hazy. The smoke from her shotgun’s muzzle has shrouded his once-rosy world in colors of gray and black and torture.

    Not only once did she betray him, but twice.
    Not only once did she seek to find another’s love, but twice.
    Not only once will she bring forth a bastard child, but twice.
    Not only once she has broken his heart, but twofold.

    Finally, he can breathe. It’s a long rattling breath at the end of her begging; a statement of an exclamation point to her sobbing sea of apologies. It’s a breath that is slippery and crackling with the tears Hestoni hadn’t noticed sliding down his face. They fall into the bloodsoaked snow, mixing together to create a wintery concoction of pain and grief and the sharpness of betrayal. When his head finally rises from its craned position close to the ground (nose almost touching the bitterness of the snow), he doesn’t see the absence of her fire.

    And how entirely ironic and symbolic is that: their romance began with the warmth of those flames and their romance shall break with the disappearance of those flames.

    “I…” He aims to say more, but the sky she had vowed to hold is crushing him now. Tender, lovesick clouds of pale pink and rose gold dance around his head like mocking cherubs. He is lost in the brilliant colors of that sunset sky that crashes against his windpipe now, and the air lacks the oxygen he needs to survive. She has let it slip from her shoulders in favor of Brennen and Brunhild and the children they have produced and now it is crushing, crushing, crushing. “You…”

    His face twists as he rises from his position bent at his knees by the weight of her sins. The heat of his blood streams down his legs now, soaking into the feathers of his legs and exposing the slick edges the stone has created. “You will stay here.” It’s the coldest his voice has ever been and even then it is warm: a deep rumble reminiscent of the Jungle and its humidity, the sound of a waterfall eroding away the minerals of rocks, the grumble of an unsettled jaguar among the shade and the bramble. “This is your home.” As much as the Jungle is their forever home, lost to the time and wrath of Beqanna, he knows she has found something akin to security in Nerine. “You have…” He pauses, face twisting into an expression of heartbreak that he has never made before. “You have family here.” Family that is not his. Children that are not his.

    He wonders what they look like.
    Are they like her?
    Are they like their parents?

    A moan is dredged from the remains of his shattered heart. The noise of it would bring tears to the eyes of even an outsider; it is the sound of raw grief and terrible pain. “I need time,” he says after a moment. Although he has been away for years, the time was as fleeting as a midday nap and her betrayal will scar him beyond the edges of time. Perhaps eventually he will be able to kiss her sides again, but the thought of it now only reminds Hestoni of how they will swell with the growth of an outsider’s child.

    He steps closer, despite his last comment, but the consequences of his knee make him limp with the movement and grit his teeth at the sudden pain. It burns in a simplistic, perfect way: in a way that correctly infuses such pain throughout his entire body. Yet Hestoni steps again, coming close enough to press the sweetest of kisses against the roughened plane of her cheek. His eyes close with the heartfelt motion (although the heart that is felt is one that is shredded and destroyed by her actions) and he pulls away after a rabbit’s breath. “I will still love you, il mio fuoco.”

    Hestoni turns rapidly, but the action of walking away from her is painstaking. He limps slowly through the snow, shouldering aside the snowdrifts while leaving a trail of body-warmed blood, but he doesn’t look back until he is past the edges of Nerine.

    Hestoni



    @[Scorch] wow hello sad boi novel
    #6

    WATCH THE FLAMES CLIMB HIGH INTO THE NIGHT

    And as the full weight of her once-husband slammed inelegantly into the unforgiving earth of Nerine, Scorch watched through tear-filled eyes as the last streaks of light abandoned the once eternal sunset which she bore atop her shoulders. Even through death and rebirth, through trial and error, through trauma and joy, his sunset had remained an unequivocal part of her, as present as the expansion and contraction of her powerful lungs. To see his light fading from her life so vividly, to be cast into darkness with nary a clue as the her surroundings, to be so utterly alone with the bedfellows of grief, anger, and pain that she had accrued for herself - to be so without, Scorch was left ragged.

    Blood flowed unendingly from her lover's knee, a testament to the great scar that would be left there; but even such a scar held no candle to the forest fire of pain that Scorch had set upon Hestoni's shoulders. Where her world went dark without him, his ignited into white fire; gazing dejectedly towards her husband with quaking shoulders, she wondered which felt worse.

    The coolness of her darkness answered that question immediately, and immediately made her sick once more.

    In the bloodily silent wake of Scorch's begging, a sound like dying rattled through Hestoni's chest. The breath of the dying, Scorch thought dislocatedly to herself, tasting the ashes of their marriage like snowflakes upon her tongue which refused to melt. When the other lifted his gaze, Scorch recognized that same dissociation deep within the other's gaze, at once familiar with the defensive mechanism which held her feeble consciousness together, too. She wanted to smile at the thought, and perhaps she did - truth be told, she had no control over her facial expression as her husband rose, muttering incoherently, the words left unspoken hitting Scorch far harder than the handful that he cast out into the air between them.

    In answer to his silent accusations, realizations, and sufferings, Scorch could only stare. Tears mirrored Hestoni's as they slid down her mutilated face, getting stuck in the intricate lacework of scars, wetting her face in many places instead of sliding cleanly to her jaw. Her tears were nothing in comparison to the pooling of blood around Hestoni's hoof, however, the cascading maroon liquid gleaming in the pale light around them. Scorch's eyes became caught upon the sight, making love to the pain she found there, knowing that it would be the last time she could feel so intimate with her husband; knowing that whatever came next, would still be worse than this.

    You will stay here. The words caused a reignition of the mare's tears, the flames momentarily bursting into existence once more as she picked up on the warmth which yet remained in her husband's stone-cold voice. She did not deserve such kindness as he chose to bestow upon her. She did not. But the coolness of Hestoni's composure quickly overcame the mare's need to express the severity of the pain she felt. After all, it was she who hurt him, and not the other way around. If anyone deserved to be crying and screaming, it was him - and not even remotely her.

    Silence fell from her lips as the stallion continued speaking.

    This is your home. You have... You have family here.

    The mare wanted to spit on this accusation, the grind her family into the dust: to show, somehow, anyhow, that the only person who mattered to her already stood before her. But the attempt would be in vain, she knew; she knew from the way his voice changed from hurt to resigned, from confused to completely understanding. Whatever tactics remained her in this conversation would never prove wieldy enough to bring him back to the place in her heart that belonged solely to him. She had already used the arsenal of weapons belonging to her heart against him, though she had pulled the trigger so long ago that she had grown lazy in her worry, convinced that if they had not found their mark by now, that they never would.

    How wrong she had been.

    A pained moan split Hestoni's lips, bringing tears to Scorch's eyes once more. Their depths glowed a pure emerald green, a reimagined version of her original eyes - eyes that she knew Hestoni once loved, though perhaps never again. I need time. The mare stiffened, staying the overwhelming urge to give into sobs again, instead staring at her titan with a pained, straining expression. The effort of remaining calm nearly caused the mare to stumble, but in the end, she stayed upright; whatever time Hestoni needed, she would allow him it. Whatever space he needed, she would find it in herself to give it to him. He could ask anything of her, and she would comply.

    The life in her womb wriggled again, and she thought darkly upon how sincerely she meant it: that she would do anything to regain the love of her husband.

    Trembling but quiet, Scorch only watched in agony as the wounded stallion limped closer. His knee begged sympathy and the sweet, feminine touch of a woman's kiss; but Scorch no longer laid claim to any such right, not even to the right of encouraging his affection. Her eyes swam with tears, looking blearily towards the blood-ridden snow such that Hestoni would know that she did not expect him to be kind or sweet to her in these moments; she deserved to be yelled at, to be chastised and divorced, with a harsh immediacy that she knew would break her spirit.

    And so, when the most tender of kisses was placed upon the ugly and wet curve of her cheek, she felt the breakage of her soul all the same. The gesture was a divorce in its own right, a goodbye to all that they had shared for so many years - not a permanent one, perhaps, but one whose weight she had never felt the likeness of before. Her eyes screwed shut along with her mouth, the expression one of pain and unbridled self-hatred, the sob she refused to let loose causing pressure to build and to build and to build in her skull until she felt as though she might explode.

    In the end, she only gasped, leaning her head pitifully and needily into his, not able to stop herself from silently begging for more. But of course, she deserved less than nothing, and before her heart could beat once more Hestoni had removed himself from her vicinity. The emptiness stung her cheek, and left her biting her lips to keep from crying for his return. At the words he next spoke, her jaw tightened enough to draw blood from her own flesh; but she thought naught of this, trying only to retain the poor excuse of composure which yet remained her.

    "I do not deserve it," she muttered, the words garbled and pitiful - but before he could turn away, she inhaled sharply and reached, stopping the turn of his head with the briefest touch of her muzzle to his. "And for what little it's worth, I never stopped loving you, il mio titano." She tried to smile with the words, but her lips trembled to greatly and she ended up looking like a leaf being thrown roughly around in a gale, her edges dissolving beneath its great force.

    Knowing that she had no right to stop his retreat, Scorch extricated her head from his pathway, clutching the wide breadth of her head to the curve of her throat, not trusting herself to stand any less held with him so close yet so far. A thousand words stormed through her mind as Hestoni took the first steps away from her, towards an infinite gulf that the mare feared neither of them would ever come to cross again; but she kept them to herself, refusing to deepen the fatal wound she had already inflicted.

    She would not stay in Nerine, as he advised; but she knew, as she finally allowed her sobs to come keening and screaming from her lips, that he would find her when he needed to.

    He always had, after all; now, the only question was whether he would ever need her again.

    And, without warning, Scorch dissolved into pure twilight, her disembodied self flashing towards the border and away, scaring birds from the treetops as her wailing continued, even in this form. She went until she could no longer think; and when she stopped, a sleep blacker than her blind existence overtook her, the single black sleep one has after a night of trauma, one whose peacefulness would not be felt again for months to come.

    Scorch

    Once Khaleesi of the Amazon Jungle



    "@[Hestoni]" i literally dont know what this says i hope it makes sense, I LOVE YOU
    [Image: scorch2.png]




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