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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]  a falling star fell from your heart; islas
    #1


    Since Astrophel returned to Beqanna, he has found himself back in the meadow again. It is the only place he knows—wishes they can hear his cries again. A part of him is optimistic that his instinct to come back here is to be called back home. It’s his only deepest hope. His only desire to return to the celestial world.
     
    But each night he returns to the center of the meadow, to the same spot where he was taken to join the celestial beings. Nothing happens. The passing of days, months, and seasons are all the same. It does not change except for his diminishing hope. Astrophel wants to fiercely believe they will take him again. He cannot find out why he has brought back here. He has looked too long. Too many years he searched within Beqanna and beyond the in other lands. He has only come empty handed, but he pleads with every bit of him and more if he could to go back home.
     
    It’s the same tonight. Summer has settled into Beqanna. The sun lights up the world a little longer during the day—something he wishes that did not happen. But he waits every night to greet the stars above. He can feel them calling him, especially on this clear night. Their essence beams with life and he cannot help but to grasp at them, to pull their light from them and closer to him.
     
    He doesn’t pull every single star to him, but only one at a time. It would be a shame to take them all for himself. To take the light out of the night sky almost felt like killing them all. Astrophel only can choose one. Tonight, there are a lot to choose from, but he doesn’t hesitate to find one. It is always the first one that catches his eye.
     
    It shines the brightest tonight. Sparkling in a different way from all the rest of them. He connects instantly with it. Feeling the essence of the light the beams within it. It is more precious than anything else in the world. Nothing compares to the life of a star, the magic that it lights to the nightly world for all of them to see.
     
    He pulls it gently, slowly, at first. The star flashes faintly slowly as the bright essence of the star’s light twinkles down in a thin thread of sparkles from the night sky. It wraps around him instantly. Twirling and twisting around his legs, his body, and his neck. It warms his heart instantly to feel it, to feel a small piece of the celestial world meant everything to him.
     
    Deep within it pains him more than ever when he does this, though; however, he cannot imagine feeling the power of the starlight. It’s all that he has left of his home. A home he cannot give up on returning to. It is only the stars that can understand him—no one here would ever know the pain he was feeling.
    character info: here | character reference: here

    @[Islas]
    [Image: ioPeFeU.png]
    (pixel via bronzehalo)
    #2

    isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone

    She looks at the stars in an attempt to feel something, anything, but still there is nothing.

    She thinks that maybe that is where she is supposed to be, as she looks with an upturned face towards the celestial expanse above. They glimmer and blink, reflecting off the dark purple of her eyes, as she tries so hard to remember, or to understand. Something about them feels like home, but even in the most tangled of dreams, she cannot remember ever being there. It doesn’t make sense, though, how she can pull at the light that they emit. How she can twist and play with it, sometimes turning it into something tangible. She doesn’t understand how, occasionally, she can flash a light so bright that she feels like she is a star.

    And yet, for all the power she wields, she cannot make the connection. No matter how much she plays with the starlight, it never fully makes sense.

    She doesn’t manipulate them now, however. She simply watches, her strikingly white body glowing just faintly, as it always did on starlit nights. But her eyes narrow when a particular star begins to shimmer and move, and she follows the showertrails of it where it falls to meet a stallion that  stands in the distance. The stardust threads itself around him, the same way she has been able to do with the starlight, and for the first time in a long time, there is an inquisitive ember rising in her chest. She has never met anyone else that could connect with the stars; her mother and twin sister couldn’t, and any questions regarding what kind of powers her father had were always hastily evaded.

    When she approaches him she is not cautious, but she still stops a few feet away, staring at him with a mixture of fascination and suspicion. She still has not grown comfortable with conversation, and even though her voice is light and lilting, there is something detached and awkward in the way the words are formed on her tongue, “You can control the stars. How?”

    Islas


    @[Astrophel]
    #3

    Astrophel closes his eyes as the feeling of serenity fills him in these quiet moments. The star essence continues to twist and turn around his body. He can feel their magic, the power that makes them stand out against all other magical things beyond the earth he is a captive in now.

    Their magical properties were above all else. It was a blessing, a privilege to be able to call upon them when he needed. The celestial beings had chosen him—one among a million—to be their guardian (or so he thought himself to be their protector). They had found something within him all those years ago when he thought of himself as nothing. His mother did not want him, but the stars above wanted him.

    He is too caught up in the moment to hear the footsteps of another coming or the scent that clings to the stranger. It is her voice that pulls him out of his dream state. The star boy’s eyes open wide. Astrophel gasps softly with surprise. The star essence bursts around him, but he quickly pulls it together.

    Astrophel’s blue eyes blink dreamlike for a moment as he turns to look at the white mare. A white ear flickers at her curiously. “Sorry, I-” He struggles to find his words as his thoughts are far away from him to grasp onto. A shy boyish grin crosses over his white and pink stained lips. “I didn’t know you were there.” The words come awkwardly out. Astrophel did not have the slightest clue she had been watching him. Most times he was able to find a quiet time alone when the meadow dwellers were sleeping.

    “The stars!” He says with wide eyes suddenly, excitement filling his blue eyes as he remembers the question the mare asked him. “I do not control them,” he laughs softly. “I am their guardian. They gave me the privilege to use their magic many years ago.” The stallion turns his gaze towards the sky, lifting his muzzle as he peers at them with an obvious gleam of wonder in his eyes. It had been wonderful then. The happiest he had ever been when the celestial beings had heard his cries.

    A smile touches his lips as he turns back to the mare. This time he takes a moment to really get a good look at her. He examines her slowly, feeling a connection deep within her that was not obvious until now. “You are one of them!” He takes a step forward towards her. “You’ve come to take me back,” his words are filled with excitement, “You are here to take me home, finally!” After all these years back in Beqanna, it was finally time for him to go home. He could not believe tonight was the night!
    character info: here | character reference: here

    @[Islas]
    [Image: ioPeFeU.png]
    (pixel via bronzehalo)
    #4

    isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone

    She is confused at his excitement, and it causes her to take a step back. Much of her interactions have been limited to her mother and her sister, and she didn’t know how to react when someone else was so eager about something. But she does not shy completely away, and she regains her composure as she studies him a bit more closely. That strange feeling that lived inside of her heart, the one that felt like something trying to claw its way to the surface, was seemingly drawn to him. The magnetic pull still didn’t make anymore so sense to her, and if anything, it had her raising her guard instead of lowering it.

    “Take you back?” She echoes his exclamation in her soft voice, the confusion that laced her words also reflecting in her eyes. She stares at him for a long moment, before casting her gaze upwards, to the stars, and then back to him. “I don’t...I don’t know how to get to the stars.” She knows she should sound more apologetic than she does, but she cannot bring the emotion into her words. Instead they are spoken in the same detached, almost hollow tone as before, and the lines of her lovely face remain sharp and angled. Empathy has always been hard for her to come by.

    “I feel connected to them, though. I can do this,” she says quietly, and she looks again to the sky above. With hardly a tilt of her head, the starlight begins to gather together in ribbon-like streams, twisting and twirling and spinning until she had formed several floating orbs. Guiding them with her eyes alone, she lowers them until they are floating in between the two of them, bobbing as though they were adrift on the ocean. “I’m not sure why. My mother and my sister can’t do it,” she continues, her eyes once more settling on the stallion’s face. “My mother says it’s just left-over magic from my father, but I don’t know.”

    Islas

    @[Astrophel]
    #5
    His eyes widen as she takes a step back from him. The excitement that quickly came is now gone. A look of confusion takes over his more discerning pink and white features as he takes in the same look that touches her own features. The question pushed forward echoes in his head during the long moment.

    “Take you back?”

    “Take you back?”

    “Take you back?”

    The white mare glances towards the stars. His blue eyes remain sharply on her. A big part of him wishing and hoping she didn’t mean those words. The words that echo into his head. But he was wrong. That thin thread of hope is beginning to break now. It’s ready to snap in half.

    She turns back to look at him. His expression had faded to sadness. The realization that he will never get back home fills him with grief. But he doesn’t say anything. Astrophel knows if he says anything then he knows he is defeated. He will and can never be defeated.

    There will always be hope.

    “It’s okay,” he musters to finally say after a long pause between her last words. It’s all he can say. There was no reason for him to blame her. It was not her that was the problem. It was allowing himself to get excited too quickly without any real indication she was the one to bring him back home.

    Astrophel follows her gaze to the sky this time when she says she feels connected to them. His eyes light up instantly as he watches the white mare bring together the starlight into two floating orbs. Slowly she brings them down from the night sky to between them. His expression of sadness fades away as he watches the two starlight orbs dance between them. Astrophel is filled with happiness once more, but also awestruck by learning the other mare can manipulate the starlight.

    He turns his gaze away from the two starlight orbs to the mare when she speaks. “It isn’t just magic,” he says with a hint of warmth in his words. “You are more than just magic itself.” He laughs softly at the idea of someone like her just being called left-over magic. “You are one of them!” The stallion quickly looks above into the sky. “You are a star,” he says with astonishment.
    character info: here | character reference: here

    @[Islas]
    [Image: ioPeFeU.png]
    (pixel via bronzehalo)
    #6

    isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone

    She offers him a faint smile, one that could almost have been apologetic. She doesn’t think she actually feels sorry, though. It’s not her fault that she cannot take him to where he needs to go, and she can only almost empathise at what it feels like to feel like you don’t belong here. She thinks she doesn’t belong, but even in that, she is not entirely sure why. She isn’t sure if she doesn’t belong because she is not like the rest of them, because her smile is empty and her laugh is hollow. She isn’t sure if she is not like the rest of them because her eyes are like a bruised, starless night sky, dark and vacant, and she feels cold clear to the marrow of her bones. She wants their warmth and their happiness and their laughter, but she can’t seem to find it.

    The orbs continue to float between them, but her eyes are on him. She is somewhat fascinated at the way he shifts so easily between emotions – disappointment when he realizes she cannot take him anywhere, to a resigned acceptance, and now a look of wonder at the captured starlight she controls. She does not have time to give too much thought into what that must be like, to so wildly feel everything, because his last statement catches her off guard.

    “How could I be a star?” She doesn’t know her father is made from galaxies and stardust, that he is everything powerful and otherworldly. She doesn’t know that it’s not that far of a stretch that his magic could somehow – maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose – steal a star and turn it mortal. She doesn’t know, because she never asked, and her mother never told. It was better, Ryatah thought, the less her daughters knew, because they were beautiful and pristine and she didn’t want them to be anything like her. Islas never pressed it, because it never occurred to her to care.

    And so she is skeptical, regarding him with a cautious curiosity. “And even if I was...why am I here?”

    Islas


    @[Astrophel]
    #7

    His blue gaze turns back to @[Islas]. Her question in reply to him revealing what she truly is obscures him. Astrophel contemplates the complexity of his words to her for a moment. Perhaps it was much the way he felt when he first learned he was more than a standard horse in Beqanna after finding out he was given the powers of the stars. It was unbelievable at first, almost too crazy to think he could possibly ever possess such an exceptional attribute.

    Astrophel listens, watching as she contemplates his words. He can feel the doubt in her voice as she asks him another question. Questions he knows he likely could not completely answer. Even when he is struggling to find answers to his own questions all these years since he returned to Beqanna. But he knows he must try. Part of him doesn’t want the young mare to feel like she is nothing when every part of her is something more than she ever imagined.

    “I don’t really know how it works,” he says as he reaches to find his words. “There are many things that could be why you are a star.” The matter of death comes to his mind. “Sometimes stars simply die for some reason. Perhaps they are given a second life by living a mortal life.” He has truly never seen a star die, though he wonders if it was possible for them to actually make the choice to become mortal. “Perhaps they make a choice to live like we live.” Astrophel considers the latter for a moment, remembering the time the celestial beings answered his cry right here within the meadow so many years ago.

    The star boy turns to look up the starry night sky again. “I wonder if they are curious as much as we are of them,” he says aloud, though he is more speaking his thoughts. “Maybe living forever like they do is too much sometimes. Choosing to give up their immortality for a moral life seems almost better considering how much they might have seen for a thousand lifetimes.” Astrophel could never imagine it was that bad. He had felt completely at peace living among the stars. But perhaps, most likely, they had seen too much in their lifetime. Maybe it was the only safest way to die peacefully instead of waiting thousands of more years until the very starlight burned out.
    [Image: ioPeFeU.png]
    (pixel via bronzehalo)




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