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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]  caught in the afterglow; eyas
    #1
    The day had started ordinarily.  A little grazing here, and a little dozing in the sparse rays of sunlight there.  Which was all good and wonderful...for the first four years of your life maybe and possibly the first few hours of your day thereafter.  But there was only so much eating and napping that a young lady could do before the mind would start to go absolutely bonkers.  Even given the blessing of her dream weaving, it was no substitute for the absolute world.  Or so she had come to believe thus far. 
    At least she had good enough sense to know when the impending crazy threatened to settle in. 

    Like today.  

    After the normalcy of the morning had faded and after the fifth yawn in a row, she’d had enough of the stagnancy.  The nagging itch in her heels told her run, run, run! But her still dream-fogged brain was slow to come round, and all that came about was a half hearted shuffle forward and another lazy, over exaggerated yawn. So it might take her a little while to warm up, big deal.  She’d get there.

    A scuttle and whooshing sound seemingly on top of her causes her head to toss and body to stiffen.  The glimpse of a fluffy white tail vanishing beneath a dying shrub makes her relax and a small, devilish grin blooms with the promise of a rising challenge.  The poor creature, unknowing of the game it has just become a part of, flees from the sound of hooves meeting the ground behind it.  
    Weaving and winding, the painted woman evaded trunks and boulders and startled  equine alike.  The shouts and hollers of delight certainly did not help in their confusion as she raced past them.

    Her venture brought her along the side of someone she’d met before and turning her smile a tad more wicked, bumped her muzzle into their shoulder as she zoomed by. ”You’re it!” she wheezed between bouts of laughter.  Turning a reptilian pupil back towards them for the briefest of seconds, she disappeared into the foliage for a few more paces, only stopping with heaving sides and a listening ear in a clearing just up ahead.


    @[Eyas]
    #2
    Hyaline in winter was almost bearable to Eyas. Her mountain ranges were capped in white, glistening white, and her valley’s turned soft shades of brown like the bare trees clinging to the rocky slopes. The water from her crystalline lake and the river that ran through it kept temperatures cold enough that the female pegasus breathed plumes of white smoke through her nostrils, her shaggy head (complete with goat-like beard) bobbing pleasantly along to the rhythm of her quiet steps.

    This place wasn’t as cold as Nerine and not nearly as deadly as Icicle Isle, but Eyas hadn’t fully recovered from her year of solitude in the barren tundra so she wrapped her wings close beside her and picked her way along some faint deerpaths carefully.

    North. She needed to go back. Neverwhere and Set had given her enough reason and plenty of drive, now she actually had to get there. Easier said than done, given the sad state of her body and wings. One was layered over in hot, heavy fur that clumped irritatingly (sometimes painfully) with knots and burrs. No telling what color she was beneath it all anymore: a lack of grooming kept her a solid shade of dirty tan that darkened on her legs, around her eyes and nose. Only her mane and tail still held the same shade of night-black, though the raggedy strips of hair fluttering behind her could hardly be a tail anymore.

    The other, her wings, were covered in a downy fuzz. Most of the white tips had fallen away and the black had faded. When she paid them any attention at all Eyas could see the fuzz had covered whatever shimmering blue had been on them before.

    No one should recognize her, but someone does.
    Someone comes crashing through the woods, startling enough that the young mare stopped, turned to look, and widened her eyes in amazement to see a nearly-grown horse barreling through Hyaline’s quieter sections like a bat out hellfire. Eyas frowned in the time it took Catcher to reach her, she would’ve warned the mare if she’d had time but the disturbing female whizzed by and touched her shoulder, leaving Eyas reeling and blinking under the sway of an unwelcome vision.

    Lost and alone in the Forest, hiding when she should’ve been brave. But Catcher had been brave enough for the both of them and they’d flown through their dreams together towards Loess...

    “Catcher?!” Eyas blurted out loudly, coming back to the present and jerking forward a step or two. Hadn’t it been three years or so? Despite being torn away from reality against her will, the frown on Eyas’ mouth tilts up into a smile and she takes another, less hesitant step or two in the direction of scattered forest debris. “Is this a dream?” The pegasus mused as she broke into the clearing as well, taking in the brilliant sight of her childhood friend now grown.

    @[Catcher]
    ► Powerplay Me : Powers (any)
    #3
    It took longer than she had wanted, and it's enough time passed to make her second guess her memory.  It had been quick, impulsive to take a chance and touch that person she thought she recognized.  But it's possible she had been wrong.  Instead of initiating a carefree game of chase, what if she had startled some poor soul into complete shock?  The opposite entities on her shoulders began to bicker, pulling her conscious this way and that in a moral tug of war.  Her saving grace is the treeline parting, and the voices rendered silent.

    "Hello Eyas." She smiles brightly with relief at the sight of the bedraggled pegasus.  There's no mistaking that unusual mane and coordinated colors now that she's here and not a blurred passerby.  With an extension, her nose reaches to offer a plumed breath against the chill, chased by a lazy step nearer.

    "It's not a dream," she chuckles.  Now that she dares standing closer, her stormy eyes draw intensely along the poor condition the sight of her welcome companion brings. The mare looks nothing shy of exhausted - perhaps not the best word, but the kindest she can imagine for the present time.  As feral as Catcher truly was in the eyes of kingdom members, she was used to the film of grime and the clutching of brambles at her sides.  But it looked as though the world had been incredibly unkind.  If this were a dream, there is no way I'd leave you to look as though you carried the burden of misery itself on your shoulders, she thought, her brows rising in a silent question. "Unless you would really like it to be," she chimes mischievously with a telling curve of her lips.  

    So many questions rise to be asked, but remain unspoken.  The young mare wants to offer help, to tell her she might be able to fix her friend's state if she'd let her just try.  But maybe Eyas is content with how she is, and doesn't want assistance right now.  But the driving urge is there still, so she bites her tongue and cheek so as not to possibly offend for the sake of her own pacification.  Asking the only thing she can to encompass all these worries politely - just as she had done years ago - and with a curious tilt of her marbled crown "Are you alright?"

    @[Eyas]
    #4
    Come on then, come close Eyas wanted to tell the chessie girl - well, woman now. Comfort me, she longed to say because comfort had always been so impossibly far away from her since Gale’s death. Catcher chuckled that their meeting wasn’t a dream, but Eyas knew better than to believe in happenstance. Maybe not a dream but certainly fate, and something inside of her is connected to Catcher - has been connected to Catcher - since that day in the Forest. Eyas smiled through her old friend’s concerned stares, too eager to feel her nose running over the soft curve of some other horse’s and much too concerned with a great amount of many other things besides appearances. Catcher was here and they could be together again: it was dreamlike even while awake.

    “That’s the only way you’d beat me at tag.” She finds herself retorting, “In your dreams.” The pitiful mare found the audacity to raise her head and turn her ears. The smug look of friendly rivalry seemed out of place underneath caked mud and the gaunt lines of so many restless nights, but in her dark gaze a mischievous, familiar light sparked.

    “Um, no.” Eyas admitted, reversing that edict in the very next second with, “But also yes? It’s… hard to explain.” How to summarize the past year? The past three years? “I accidentally discovered my own immortality, among other things.” She emphasized that final word as if it could stand alone in quotations.

    “Puberty has been a real bitch.” The pegasus hen laughed a raspy, bitter chuckle. Sighing, she appraised the mare standing in front of her and admitted to herself just how horrible she must’ve looked. Catcher reflected what Eyas had been ignoring for far too long since rising from the riverbanks with Set, causing her to momentarily shift with discomfort under the scrutiny of a trusted friend. Sure, she stank like shit and her wings looked pitiful but if Catcher (who always had a wild appeal to her) was throwing her some side-eye…

    Maybe Eyas was overdue for a good bath.

    “Anyways what the fuck, Catcher? Three years without a ‘hullo’ and you’re making me want to go another three. Sheesh.” The wings over her back shuffled, irritated, “Give me some spring grass and a good itching post I’ll be like new.”

    Feigning some more anger in order to milk the pity, Eyas huffed quietly and the long cords of her forelock drifted out of her eyes to settle over her right cheek. “I’m just glad I didn’t get beat the hell up with the same ugly stick that caught you in the face. Ragged crone. Calling me out. Sheesh.” Her cracked, whiskery lips fidgeting as they failed to hold back a wicked grin.

    @[Catcher] never stop posting her to me please
    ► Powerplay Me : Powers (any)
    #5
    Inadvertently she must have opened the floodgates.  Catcher stood idly as Eyas replied and then kept going, and going...and going and going. It had started with a gentle enough trickle, but by the end of her spiel, the whole dam cracked and blew and the unicorn had gotten swept headfirst into the current. A little dizzy from the fallout, she takes a step backward.

    A simple “Uh….huh” is the most she can manage, followed by a “Accidentally? You died?!”

    She hadn’t realized her mouth had fallen ajar, or that her face had warped into a melding of concern and utter perplexion.  With a click, her mouth snaps shut, and she shakes her head as if to make sure it was still where she had last known it to be.  Satisfied, she returns to scrutinizing the Pegasus with eyes the same shade of an oncoming storm. 

    She wants to press, pry, ask and offer whatever she could to possibly help.  She nearly does under the weight of conflicted feelings, but if the pegasus had wanted to elaborate she probably would have.  Resigning to wait until later, her eyes narrow, without ever losing the small smile the curved the line of her mouth.  “Amazing,” she scoffs, switching gears towards a route that Eyas seemed more comfortable with.  Nodding to the lackluster wings and shag her childhood friend toted around, “For how dull you look on the outside you’re still just as colorful as ever.” 

    The distance between them isn’t large, to begin with, it would only take a few long strides to practically be on top of her. And that’s just what she does, stopping just shy of Eyas’ night stained muzzle, stretching her own out to exhale a cloud of warmed winter air just out of reach. “Three would be far too soon.  Better make it six. At least.

    And then she grins back, wicked and beautiful in her own design, “You missed me, didn’t you?  Maybe that was a shot in the dark by a blind woman, but it felt right.  “I missed you.”


    @[Eyas]
    #6
    She’s going around Beqanna and getting reckless, she knows. Eyas can’t keep inserting herself like this into other horse’s lives, hoping to make a difference but only complicating things with her own problems. She’s rambling and well aware of it but she can’t stop, not with the way Catcher is so obviously fascinated by what she has to say. I died - maybe. Came close to it? Eyas considers but plows ahead anyway, realizing that she has no method worked out on how to introduce an old friend to black magic.

    Sprinkle in a little NDE, mix it with some ancient magician turning you inside out, fight a dragon, find an unwilling friend… She muses to herself, hardly able to turn her eyes away from the impending storm growing underneath Catcher’s studious gray sight. And you have a blubbering, stinking idiot of a mare. Eyas breaks her sullen composure, shaking a ragged and clunkily-shaped head at the unicorn’s snap-back. Years might’ve passed, but the ability to smart-off certainly hadn’t gone away with them.

    For this small thing, Eyas is glad.

    It makes her feel a bit more alive to hear the way her unexpected companion steps forward, and she drops her furry nose to Catcher’s for a mingling second or two. She detects a hint of spice, a faint whiff of herbs common to this region. When the overo mare speaks, Eyas breathes in the words like a balm for her troubled soul. “I missed you more than I realized.” She was willing to admit, drawing her head back up and fixing her expression with a milder tranquility. “If this is what it feels like to go three years without you, can’t imagine what six would do.” The pegasus jokes, but it seems too real a feeling to brush off with a laugh.

    She’d contemplate that later. “It’s been, uhm… really difficult actually.” The steadfast tenor of Eyas’ own voice wavered, cracking underneath a pressure she hadn’t been aware Catcher would give. Who knew the simple kindness of touch would unravel her like this? Silly, Eyas berated herself, blinking away tears and swallowing down a lump, stop crying like a baby.

    “I would tell you more; I would tell you anything but -” She paused, gathering her wits again, “- maybe just not here? Like this?” She glanced around them.

    Quietly she stepped forward and crept closer to the pied female, close enough that her fissured lips crept over the delicate skin covering Catcher’s raised cheekbone. They paused near one fiery ear and whispered, “Do you still dance through dreams?”

    @[Catcher]
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