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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]  i leave you my dust and bones; Raed
    #1

    For a time the Brilliant Pampas had been safe - a shelter from the plague. Raed had taken her there, and she had followed willingly. Somewhere along the lines the innocent touches became more passionate… then, suddenly, everything changed. The plague found her. The plague found everyone.

    She ran - blind and afraid. And when the dust settled she was utterly lost and alone once more. Only she was not alone.

    The day came and Odelia made her entrance into a world of pine trees and forest fog.

    She grew quickly - a beautiful mixture of her mother’s golden light and her father’s startling blue. Her mother thought often of Raed. Sometimes Odelia would see glimpses of the blue stallion - thoughts from her mother infiltrating her own - she could almost feel the longing in her mother’s heart, although she didn’t really understand. How could such a young, unbroken heart know those feelings?

    One day the thick trees reveal a narrow path.

    “Come.” Osyva says to her daughter (now nearly two years old). This is what Osyva has been searching for since Odelia was born: a way back. A way back to him. Eagerly she leads Odelia through the tangled woodland until a more familiar part of Beqanna spills into view.

    The Brilliant Pampas. Her heart shudders.



    @[Raed]
    #2
    it's a lonely road, I know,
    and nothing ever stands between a bullet and your soul;


    He had thought of her, because it was impossible not to.

    He has never been good at staying, never been good at being something that anyone could rely on, but she, above anyone else, had made him think of trying. And he had, for awhile. It had been easy; she made it easy. Lovely and light, so unlike those he usually tangled with, always so soft and delicate beneath his touch. He never grew tired of the way she sometimes glowed when his lips traced a path down the slender arch of her neck, or how she would shiver at the feel of his teeth along the slope of her back. In the weeks and months that followed since he brought her here, he did his best to make her his.

    But the day Beqanna rid itself of the plague, he suddenly couldn’t find her. And of course, he had looked. He was a wayward fool, but he wouldn’t let her go that easily.

    After exhausting all of his efforts, he finally had to resign himself to the fact that perhaps she had left on her own accord, and perhaps she did not want to be found.

    He did not stay in the Pampas often, but he checked back frequently. Just on the off chance that she would come back. Today, as he once again scans the familiar terrain, he does not dare to hope that she will be here. It was easier to come here with no expectations, and it made it easier to leave.

    When a flash of gold catches his eye, and when the familiar sound of her mind’s voice infiltrates his own, he freezes. Brilliant and blue, he turns his head to find her face, and even though his jaw is set in a tense line, the sight of her stirs something to life in his calloused heart. He stares at her long enough that he almost does not notice the young girl alongside of her until he begins to walk towards her, but when his steel-blue eyes settle on the blue-pointed buckskin, his heart leaps. There was no mistake that she was his, and he can feel the strangest mixture of excitement and guilt begin to bubble inside his chest. He should have been there; he should have tried harder to find her.

    He doesn’t stop moving until he is in front of her, and perhaps he should be a bit more cautious, but he cannot help but to reach and brush his lips against her golden forehead and to murmur her name, “Osyva,” and he steps closer to breathe her in. He resists the urge to keep touching her, to pull her into his chest, but instead he casts his attention to the young girl that was clearly his daughter. He offers a smile, but it is hesitant and unsure, realizing that he has no idea how to behave around his children. “I’m...I’m Raed,” he finally says, unsure if Osyva even wanted the girl to know that he was her father. Perhaps that was why she had left, he thinks, and even if it stung, he couldn’t blame her.

    R A E D

    @[Osyva]
    [Image: Raed.jpg]
    (click for full size)
    #3

    For two years she has had her mother and the forest creatures for company. The chitter of squirrels, the sing-song voice of the bird, the rustle of the tiny mouse - and always, always the thoughts of her mother. But their forest home was quiet compared to this.

    There are others here, and their thoughts are deafening to the young mind reader.  She staggers, her mind overrun. Then, she closes her eyes and slowly the world grows distant - as if the voices were underwater. She breathes and everything drowns into silence.

    Silence.

    And then a familiar blue. Her doe eyes flutter open.

    She knows who he is because she has seen him before in her mother’s fevered dreams.

    “Look.” she whispers softly.

    Osyva’s breath catches in her throat as his blue form materializes. There is a mixture of gladness - pure joy that manifests as the soft glow of her skin as he approaches- and anxiety.

    “Osyva.” he says with a gentle touch, and she breathes.

    They smell of deep forest - of mushrooms growing from ancient trees and sweet pine. They’ve been gone for so long.

    He casts that storm gray gaze at their daughter, and Osyva cannot help the smile that traces the lines of her velvet lips, nor the pang of guilt that seizes her chest.

    “Hello, Raed.” the young girl returns. He is a little different than the images her mother’s mind had conjured up in the depths of the night, but perhaps it is the light, or perhaps it is that flesh is different than memory. “My name is Odelia. It is nice to meet you...” finally. She smiles.

    Osyva watches them carefully, silently. How she has longed for this moment. How strange it is to finally be standing here. She brushes her nose against the crook of his neck.

    “I don’t know what to say.” she whispers against his skin before pulling away. “I am sorry.”



    @[Raed]
    #4
    it's a lonely road, I know,
    and nothing ever stands between a bullet and your soul;


    He feels frozen, staring at Osyva and then at their daughter. She can read minds, he realizes, and there is a small flare of pride in that. “You’re beautiful,” he says to Odelia, his blue-gray eyes captivated by everything about her. She has his blue, and his ability, and she was in every way imaginable a perfect combination of her parents.Of him and Osyva, who he can no longer keep his gaze from returning to. She is nervous, he can feel it in her thoughts and sense it in her muscles, and he wants nothing more than to draw her tightly to his chest, to once again memorize the curves and angles of that beautiful body that he had grown so accustomed to having next to him. He wanted to touch her and make her glow like he used to, but there is a part of him that isn’t sure if she is his to do that to anymore.

    But then she touches her nose to his neck, and he can feel her warm breath against his skin as she whispers her apology. There is a flash of heat, first, a flicker of want, but Osyva has always, from the beginning, been so much more than that to him. Her apology makes him shake his head, a sudden jerk and a hardening of his jaw, before he presses into her. “No,” he says firmly, and without a second thought he lays his neck across hers, and he pulls her into that embrace he had been longing for. “Don’t you dare apologize for anything, Osyva,” he says with his lips pressed into her neck, and then her cheek, before caressing along her jaw. “I’m just glad that you’re okay.” He looks up, looking at their daughter, and he disentangles himself from the golden mare only so that he can reach to lightly touch the young girl’s shoulder. “Both of you.”

    R A E D


    @[Osyva]
    [Image: Raed.jpg]
    (click for full size)
    #5

    If she could peer into his mind, the way he fingers so gently through hers, perhaps the mystery that haunts her and keeps her pinned like butterfly wings to his soul would be gone. Maybe she would know not to feel sorry for wandering because he is a wanderer too.

    But she does not know. She is as deaf to his thoughts as the stone is deaf to the sea.

    There is so much she does not know, and perhaps it is better this way. Oblivious to those things that would bleed her heart until there was nothing but an empty husk within her chest - those things that would turn her sweet innocence into consuming jealousy.

    Perhaps it is better this way.

    How she has longed to feel his touch again, and when it comes she devours his warmth like a starved child.

    He tells her not to be sorry - that’s he’s happy that she and their daughter are safe. Osyva wonders how he can be so forgiving when she has spent the past two years blaming herself for having lost him in the fray.

    Wasn’t it so like her to disappear anyway?

    Since her parent’s deaths she’d never stayed anywhere for long. Even when they were alive her time had been split traveling between two kingdoms. Her home was nowhere - caught somewhere in between - never quite belonging. But, when he touches her, she feels it: that belonging. She can’t help but wonder if it is real.

    “Please let it be.” she pleads silently.

    She’d be content to stay in this silence forever - to sleep beneath the dappled shade and just be with him. But two years apart is a long time to just go back to the way things were. She would give anything to steal back the time they’ve lost, but she can’t.

    So, she simply says, “I am still yours.” A hushed whisper against the blue of his hide. She wants to promise that she’ll never leave again. She wants to confess the words that beat at her ribcage, “I love you.” But she doesn’t.



    @[Raed]
    #6
    it's a lonely road, I know,
    and nothing ever stands between a bullet and your soul;


    He has always been a wild thing, and she was too, in a way. Before they had found each other they had both been accustomed to drifting. This idea of having an anchor – of having each other – was still foreign, to an extent. There was a foundation there, though, laid firmly from their time previously spent here. He has never spent time with any the way that he has with her; he has never gone for any stretch of time where he woke to the same face everyday, where his mornings and afternoons and evenings were all just for one, as they had been for her. That moment in time, though it may have seemed fleeting to some, was more than enough for him.

    There is no room for anyone else in the chambers of his heart, no room for anyone besides her. There are things that he should tell her, other children that bore his coloring that it would be wise to warn her about, but he is still at his core just a stupid boy, and he doesn’t think to tell her. He has nothing to hide. There were no emotions elsewhere, no one else that she would ever need to worry for a second over, and so it never occurs to him what would happen if she found out on her own.

    Those thoughts are miles from his mind, though, and the softness of her voice and the feel of her breath against his skin draws him back. They encourage that crooked, boyish smile to his face, and he tugs a pale strand of mane just gently as he says, “All mine? You promise?”

    He could have left it that, he could have pretended as though he didn’t hear the thoughts her heart was saying to him. But they come as such a surprise – or maybe not a surprise at all – that he doesn’t have the chance to feign a reaction. He regards her quietly for a moment, all signs of the previous teasing seeming to disintegrate from his eyes and face. It just a breath of time, between her thought and him pulling her again to his chest. “I love you too, Osyva,” he answers the thought aloud, his voice again a low rumble and his mouth against the slope of her neck. “And I am yours.”

    R A E D


    @[Osyva]
    [Image: Raed.jpg]
    (click for full size)




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