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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


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    [private]  we're not meant to stay forever; Wane
    #1






    Agnieszka




    Her belly was slow to round and there was a short while that she didn’t think it was going to. There hadn’t been any particular intention of conception when she and Wane had come together, they’d simply come to that chapter, the place where things went further without either of them declaring what they did or did not feel thus leaving the entire thing just a little more complicated than it had already been. Though she cannot say that Wane has been complicated. He was kind to her in the beginning, willing to flirt with her a bit and she had expected him to cast her aside...but that hasn’t happened yet, to her knowledge, though she has avoided him a bit since their union. 
    Not a bit. 
    Entirely. 

    The water is like ice, and the babe in her belly kicks in protest when Eszka plunges away from Nerine’s shore. Normally it enjoys when she swims, fluttering and kicking in a way she interprets as happiness. The cold though is a shock and Eszka belatedly wonders if the cold is too dangerous for the pair of them. She swears the babe is burrowing up under her ribs, and there is a piercing stitch in her side when she once again stumbles onto the rocky eastern shore of Icicle Isle. 

    Agnieszka shakes herself carefully, wishing for the enchanted breeze that had dried her the last time she’d come here. She looks back toward Nerine but her features are placid. Perhaps Breckin and Djinni will forgive her for abandoning their home, she had never expected to. She isn’t eager to dwell on unexpected things. 

    She has lived long enough to feel life growing within her, and will not look back on how close she’d come to never seeing this cold grey day. 

    The moment she had realized she was pregnant she had been flooded with the deepest and most inexplicable sorrow. Her throat had closed and she had wailed and lost her feet. Sickened and suffering she had retreated far from everyone she could and mourned. Truly, the dark thing mourned but Eszka could not know that. Usually it could not reach out of it’s prison and effect her but it’s broken heart (poorly stitched, just enough to keep the body living) was rent anew and it bled out into the painted mare’s heart and mind like poison. No one would ever know about that strange agony, and in time she was well again and began to fall in love with her unborn child in spite of whatever the dark thing suffered. 

    It is that love that drives her out of Nerine and into the supposed safety of the Isle. Love that motivates her to find Wane (does she love him? She cannot ask herself, the answer lives on the edge of that strange and foreign sadness), because his child should know him. 

    She almost can’t believe how excited she is at the prospect of seeing him, and the infant kicks in response to the anxious fluttering of her heart. Scarred Agnieszka climbs the beach but does not leave it, she follows the curve of the land one eye always on the blue-green sea.


    an unequaled gift for disaster






    @[Wane] So I forgot that she is weird and I love her.
    Reply
    #2

    maybe you were the ocean

    For a long while he had left it well enough alone.

    After their quest together when he had lost her in the blizzard and consequently found Khuma anew, after Salvage was born, the more intelligent parts of him realized that he should not seek out Eszka again. Those parts had known that there was nothing good to be found by looking for her, be it her own demise in the snow that day, or simply the smoking affection that threatened to bloom and become fire at any moment (an affair that could jeopardize what had newly come to him again with the mother of his new child). He had done his best to clear his mind of her then. He tried to unsee the round of her hips, and the gentle curve to her neck. He tried to forget the way she became darker in the sea. He swore up and down that the time he compared the colours of her eyes to the bleeding sky was just a distant dream.

    But in her absence she was everywhere.

    In every space that she wasn’t he would be reminded of their last moments. He would see the snow falling all around them, blinding them both. He would hear the way her voice rang out, broken and afraid, the last time she’d called out to him on the shoreline. On every inch of this frozen wasteland she’d become a ghost, haunting him between copses of evergreens and watching him from just beyond the opposite edge of the heart shaped lake.

    The happiness he’d found with Khuma and Salvage was real, and unwavering, but it became eclipsed with not knowing until the shadows were so large and dark they threatened to swallow him whole. He had left then, swimming those same frozen waters back to Nerine to see if he could determine what had become of her. He braced himself for an ugly truth remembering the biting, unrelenting cold.

    But instead he found her — safe, alive, lovely in spite of her scars.

    And they came together like when the sea meets the shore; again and again, with violence and passion in equal measures and with just enough shame settling upon each of their shoulders to ruin the rosy afterglow of it. It isn’t that he’d meant to ruin what he’d begun with Khuma and Salvage, but he’d never been made for it, had he? They’d parted ways again, Wane wondering how he was meant to face his family again when he so clearly reeked of his own betrayal. In spite of his nagging doubts he swallowed the truth and returned home without mention of what transpired in Nerine that night.

    Somehow, he had managed to swallow the guilt, too.

    But now, as she stands before him dripping and with a rounded, swollen belly as he breaks through an edging of bramble along the shoreline, it creeps forwards again. An instant sense of foreboding creeps up through his legs and burrows into the pit of his stomach that makes him swallow, hard. Quickly, he cranes his head to peer across the distance for any trace of Salvage and his mother and when the visual comes back clear at last he moves forwards to meet her.

    “Eszka,” he says, unable to swallow the edge of disbelief that escapes at the sight of her here, like this. He means to question her sanity, swimming the frozen waters in her condition, but the thought suddenly alludes him as he draws near. All he remembers is the way the soft colours of her body come together, and how her eyes could melt out into the sky. The guilt is alive and well, of course, but there’s something else; smoke, becoming flames, becoming fire.

    He says, and with a rakish grin: “You missed me that much, hey?”
    What he means is: I missed you.

    The isle just got a whole lot smaller.

    Wane
    and i was just a stone



    @[Agnieszka]
    Reply
    #3






    Agnieszka




    Wane comes down to the rocky shore summoned by whatever connection they share, perhaps. The sight of him brings up feelings more intense than she expected, memories, poignant emotion twisted up in confusion. She desires him even as her heart aches. And it does ache when she watches him turn his noble head back inland, reminding her that she is the other woman, her child his bastard. It had not occurred to her that he might turn her away, refuse to be father to the wriggling bit of joy growing every stronger in her belly.

    Her nostrils flare and she fills her lungs to drown the anxiety and prematurely protective anger in oxygen. She has given Wane too little credit before, doubted him, only to have him blow her away with his concern for her, consume her with his desire.

    Still, he looks for Khuma, for his firstborn and Eszka tries to tell herself that she needs to remember her place.

    But her name spoken in his smooth timbre makes her fierce and hungry, rebellious.

    He looks at her like she is beautiful, like there are words written on her skin. His smile is a siren song, his words a familiar signpost on the road home.  (Too much imagery, moving on).

    “Looks like I did.”

    She thinks he likes her like this, foolish and concealing her fractures. It isn’t her playing false. When she is with him and pretending to be whole she feels as though she might actually be whole. Not understanding that this is how a new self is built, relationships and heartbreaks stitching her together into something.

    A smile flickers at the corner of her mouth and she comes closer, amethyst eyes flicking down the beach and then back to his own. She reaches for him carefully, breathing tight and careful breaths when she brushes her lips against the corner of his mouth.

    “I’ve got something to tell you.” She says gravely, a smile in her voice, knowing she isn’t keeping any secrets from him. She is stretched and round, full of aches and pains in places that have never had aches and pains. Her scent is her own and somehow also his, her little stowaway changing the perfume the rises off her skin. She has forgotten to be afraid that he will not want his child.


    an unequaled gift for disaster






    @[Wane]
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