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    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


    we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea; any
    #1

    In some ways, she is robbed of a childhood.

    Woolf’s gift of independence, of freedom, of self-sufficiency is in truth a ripping away of innocence. She is barely but a babe, finding her feet and learning how to drag the cold air into her limbs, when her father arrives. Whatever lives between him and her mother is a different thing than love, different than passion. Respect, maybe. Curiosity, more likely. Regardless, it becomes immediately clear between the mage and the woman of winter that they are not cut out to raise this child between them. They have no interest.

    Still, Woolf is not entirely cruel. He does not desire to fling out a child out into the ether with no means of survival, with no ways in which to protect itself, and he does what he can. He drags the wicked edge of his magic down his shoulder, splitting his flesh and letting the rubies of his blood fall down the familiar path. When the blood fall is sufficient, he pulls upon his wisdom, upon Kora’s experiences. He drags and tears. He imbues his daughter with it, reaching into the clock of her life and winding the hours. 

    One year falls away and her limbs begin to lengthen beneath the snow.

    Two years fall away and the roundness of her cheeks gives way to angles and planes.

    Three years fall away and she is grown, flowers beginning to bloom in her silver hair.

    Four years away and he pulls back his hand. 

    Evia, a babe for barely an hour, stands before them, blinking slowly, her mercurial gaze even upon these two who she now recognizes as her parents. Woolf nods and she does the same, moving her lips and working her tongue, finding the strange muscles and feeling a body that is foreign and yet her own.

    She doesn’t wait long. Doesn’t cry goodbye in her mother’s hair. Doesn’t press delicate kisses to her father’s cheek. Instead, she moves to the sea, to the siren sound of the water that she can hear—a soft chime of bells that crooks its finger to her. She glides into her, graceful despite the awkwardness of limbs recently grown, and continues forward until the water rises up her chest and around her throat and then over her head. It glides over her scales, practically iridescent in the play of ocean, and it fills her mouth, as natural as the air she had breathed when she had first took her breath deep into her lungs.

    Evia is not sure how long she swims. How long she moves.

    Hours, perhaps, her scaled, slender form finding the tides and the currents and the pull of the ocean. Not as easily as those strange tailed creatures but elegant all the same, her legs churning beneath her. She doesn’t stop until the water narrows, as the salt begins to filter out, and she realizes that she is moving upstream. She doesn’t stop until she reaches a point where the bank begins to slope upward.

    Her hooves sink into the mud and she emerges from the water, the river dripping down her sides, the flowers in her mane remaining unusually vibrant and fresh. Content, she stands in the middle of the river, the channel narrow and the water gliding past her as she looks down at her reflection. 

    So this is what it is to be alive.

    Evia
    we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea
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    #2
    A year old, and the island and her surrounding seas could no longer hold her. Mom and Da had raised her more of the sea than not, though some of her fondest memories involved the cove she'd been born in. Sheltering in both the stoney cliffsides and the depths of her family's love, the nereid filly had grown strong in mind and body. 

    In the year since her birth, Aquaria had begun her morphosis from brassy champagne to a pearlier tone. One day, she would be foam white from head to tail. Today, her slim form stood halfway between, ruddy shoulders bleeding into silvery belly, and the promise of her adult beauty already blooming in her figure. As irascible as the tide, the girl had kissed her mother's cheek this morning, and left her home for adventures of her own. As the youngest of three, she felt it was more than time to see the world for herself. 

    As happens to most sea creatures as one point or another, they discover that the waters they come from are fed by many smaller ones. Such was the way she found herself at the mouth of the river. It tasted different on her inexperienced tongue. No familiar tang of salt, instead it flowed with silt and snow melt, swollen in the warmth of spring. 

    Curiosity pricked at her, a trait she couldn't have escaped if she'd wanted to. Inquisitive as a minnow, the cream scaled filly struck out against the current, feeling the tingle of power tugging at her blood as she swam. One day, when she was a bit bigger maybe, she'd be able to cast her will on the water just like Mom and Adria could. For now, it was enough that she could swim and not be overpowered by the flow of the river. For now. 

    Her delicate hooves sank into the black mud of the riverbed, sticking and clinging until the water's movement cleaned it away. Blinking at the sunlight rippling on the surface above her, she marveled at the glimmering white bellies of trout as they swam over her head. A giggle escaped her, the pure joy at doing something so unplanned. The froth of bubbles that sprang from her delicate muzzle tickled the fish, making them dart away in surprise. 

    Beneath her feet the riverbed rose, the banks spreading wide in what must be a ford to those who couldn't swim so well as she. A set of darkly gleaming legs swirled and eddied the river around them, catching the sea girl's interest immediately. Strange colored legs, scaled like her own. Soon she had walked uphill far enough for her head to break the surface, deep blue-violet eyes blinking away the river water until her quarry came into focus. 

    "Hallo, lady!" She greeted in a piping voice. Shaking the water from her head and neck Aquaria smiled brightly up at the taller mare. She was a lovely creature, to be sure. Almost as beautiful as the mares in her own family. Perhaps they were relations? She had met some relatives not so long ago, an uncle and cousin. But the scales, those were things from Mom, mout Da's side of the family. Tilting her head, she waited to see what the flower adorned female would do. She had an air about her, like a baby dolphin separated from its pod. Lost, and alone and not quite sure what to do with itself. Maybe she could help her find her pod? 

    @[evia]
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    #3

    Evia has not yet met anyone outside of her parents—and even that interaction had been stilted. It had not been cold, necessarily, but it had not been steeped in love. Her mother had not pressed a thousand kisses to her forming jaw. Her father had not beamed at her with pride. She had been as much a product of their curiosity as anything, and it showed in the bewildered expression in her face. She doesn’t glow with warmth when the child rises from the water behind her. Doesn’t delight to see a kinship there.

    Instead she blinks her strange silver eyes, the water having run from her elegant scaled neck.

    Her nostrils flare, and she drinks in the riverbed. It is dirtier here than the land where she had been born—there it had been the clean, sterile scent of ice and then the clean saltwater of the ocean. Here, it is muddy and the water mixes with the loam to make something different entirely. It’s nearly distasteful and she decides that she prefers the saltwater to the fresh in that moment, the decision final in her mind.

    Still, she doesn’t ignore the cry for long. Her angle angles toward the child, studying her, trying to categorize her and understand her with this inherited knowledge. “Hello,” she tries out the greeting, feeling the way it sounds on her tongue. “Are you talking to me?” Her language is nearly stilted, almost thick on her tongue with something exotic flavoring the edges of it, but it still sounds graceful. Her way of dancing around the syllables, slowly rolling them out and clinging to the edges of it, still lyrical.

    She takes a step forward and her motion is fluid but less so than when she is the water. The mud clings to her, pulls her down, and she frowns down at it, disliking the way that it suctions to her.

    “This is,” she hunts for the words, pausing to flip through the mind that is not herds, “distasteful.”

    Her eyes flick up, peering out from beneath the flower and the silvery hair.

    “Is it not?”

    Evia
    we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea


    @[Aquaria]
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