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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


    when we walked in fields of gold; ryatah
    #1
    "Mama?" the little girl asks, confusion darkening her blue-eyed gaze. "Mama, why did you give me someone else's name?" she chirps. It's been a thought that has been plaguing her mind all morning. It had only been an earlier conversation that had revealed the truth, that there had been another Lilliana. The silver Regent had slowed and turned to look back at her daughter. Aletta had smiled, a look of maternal love that softened her usually impassive features.

    "Because your father had thought it was a pretty name," her mother had answered. And that, that had made her petite chest flood with warmth, made that butterfly heart of hers flutter with love. It also leaves her with more questions than answers but Lilliana had learned not to press at the subject of her absent sire. But the thought that her father might know she exists, that he could have knowledge of her fills her in a way that the ache of not knowing him empties her. For now, it is enough and Lilli can saunter after her mother. She thinks that all the reason there is to it - that her father had liked the name. 

    But her mother surprises her. "You were named after somebody very brave, Lilli," her mother intones. "And I'd like for you to grow up to be brave too."


    Morning dawns upon Beqanna, the early light spreading from tree to tree, branch to branch. In Taiga, it can be hard to see it but this morning the breeze wakes Lilli up. It whispers in her ears, offering promises of a beautiful day and so the chestnut rises earlier than normal. It moves around her and pushes her to the south, murmuring and leading her along the River, past the borders of Hyaline and Loess, to the Meadow where spring can be felt in full swing. The breeze here is sweet, bright with spring and the scent of lush grasses, of morning dew, of the coming days of summer, make themselves known. 

    Her mind tries not to dwell so much in the past. As stands beneath the treeline, Aletta's words still echo in her ears and the dream still lingers in her gaze. She tries not to stay in the memory too long; as much as she loves her family and is grateful for the love that she still carries, the memories always leave her. She is always left alone, trying to grasp for ghosts and shadows of a past life that is behind her. Lilli tries to use these memories as a way to blaze forward, to use them as foundation blocks to carry her through her days but the loss of a family is not an easy thing for her to overcome. 

    But the sun is warm where the sunbeams come trickling through, the day looks to be a radiant one. And then, there it is. A young doe, her eyes dark and reluctant, takes one cautious step forward and then another. She turns her elegant head back to the bushes before taking a few more steps before a speckled fawn emerges. He is still unsure of his steps on his impossibly long legs and as his mother continues on in this empty part of the Meadow, he bleats after her. The doe flicks an elongated ear back at him and the fawn takes more unsteady steps until another emerges from the brush. Twins. The second isn't as reluctant as her brother and leaps where he walks, bounds where he stalls. The second finds her mother and then vanishes beneath the long grasses, hidden the camouflage of her mottled coat while the first comes hesitantly towards them. 

    "You can do it," Lilli whispers, encouraging him on from her hiding place. "Just a few steps more," she urges. 

    Finally, he joins them. His mother, reunited with her children, collects her fawns and moves on. The shadows from the trees obscure them as they move out of sight and Lilli is left with the glow of morning light and birdsong above, the music of the breeze as it moves through the spring leaves.
    LILLIANA
    i left home on account of snow
    (buried all the things i know)


    @[Ryatah]
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #2

    She is made up almost entirely of flaws and mistakes, broken and fragmented but stitched together by toxic coping mechanisms and an uncanny ability to hide behind a mask.  She is a hyaline surface of a sea, pristine and smooth but begging for something to crash right through it; begging for something to jump-start the chaos that brews beneath.

    She breathes in, and though the feeling is grounding – the feel of air as it fills her lungs, the feel of it passing again between her lips when she sighs it out – it does nothing to settle the unrest in her chest. Her heart beats, ticking like a grenade with the pin pulled but she isn’t sure when the explosion is going to come, or if it ever will.

    There was something about the early light of morning that unsettled her. Maybe it was the unnatural quiet, the false sense of serenity and the way it clashed with the turmoil that surged in her veins. Maybe it made her thoughts too loud when there was nothing else to drown it out, and she was forced to face her mistakes. She is forced to see Skellig’s face, she is forced to remember how he would clench his jaw when she came home covered in their scents but he never said anything. She isn’t sure when he finally left; she just knows the emptiness gave her an excuse to try and fill up the vacant space.

    She watches the copper colored mare as she watches the doe and her twins, and she isn’t sure why she pauses to actually look at her. She isn’t someone that she knows, which is usually the only thing that draws her from the distracted fog she was typically lost in. But there was a twinge of loneliness somewhere between her ribs, and for a moment she almost remembers what she had been like before. She had been sweet, once. She had been enchanted by strangers and their stories, she had been genuine and caring.

    That had changed at some point; somewhere between death and lost loves and all the heartache, she had changed.

    “They’ll be grown, soon,” she says in the soft lilt of her voice as she comes alongside the stranger, her gaze still lingering where the doe and her fawns had disappeared to. “One of the saddest parts about motherhood is that eventually they don’t need you anymore,” she says this as though she has any idea where her own twins are; as if her scattered mind can keep track of anything long enough. She saw them not long ago, she is sure; one black and one white and both of them dripping with the color of the galaxy they had been conceived in. She’d look for them when she leaves here, she thinks.

    Her nearly black eyes turn now to the girl next to her, and offers her with a tranquil smile, “I’m Ryatah. I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

    Ryatah
    even angels have their wicked schemes
    Reply
    #3

    Lilliana has never known whole.

    If the question was poised to her, the concept would be a foreign one. Lilli, in some way, has always known broken and fragmented, flawed and cracked. But she has known happiness too - it is warmth and laughter mingling together with a girl of sunflower yellow. It is her ribs aching trying to contain it all and her heart so full to bursting that it overflows into the places where loss has left ridges along her soul. It is the deep mocha brown of her eldest brother, Malachi, as he watches Kalina lead their boys into the open for the first time - the love that illuminates every feature of his noble face light the midnight mare has just risen and set his sun, has become every star in his sky. It is her mother, silver and fierce against blazing cosmos, refusing to be made small in the face of something so large. It is a stolen glance of her family through the veil of their willow tree, as much together as they would ever be. 

    It is the feeling of quiet mornings like this - where the dreams still linger so close around them because the world hasn't fully woken up yet.

    Lilli has never known whole but she has known love and she has known happiness. She carries the light with her because she knows that eventually the world always goes dark.

    So as she watches the deer vanish into the undergrowth, as the last leaves still from their retreating forms, Lilli hopes the best for them. (What future awaits such a creature, she wonders?) But then the chestnut mare has wondered about the stories the trees might tell if they could whisper them, what memories dance on a spring breeze, what secrets a star might reveal if she only had the means to listen. Its not such an unusual thought for her - so whatever path lays before them, Lilli hopes the sweetest grass for them and that they grow up to be swifter than anything that might chase them.

    Perhaps something in Lilliana should have changed by now. Perhaps she shouldn't dream and hope as she does. But here she is - still as much a dreamer and a wisher as she has ever been.

    To change means to accept defeat, that darkness has finally found a way to snuff out the light and that is something Lilli refuses to do.

    The soft voice behind her is one of a mother. The chestnut turns her head to the side and finds a silver mare coming beside her. Together they look at the empty spaces where the doe and her fawns had been, where the shadows and few rays of stray sunshine come together. The young mare feels a gentle smile dawning, one she hopes is an understanding one for the mother who stands beside her. "We all have to learn to let go in the end," she muses, "but a mother is always remembered by her children. A little piece of immortality."

    The mare turns her dark gaze to Lilli and she meets it with her bright blue one, studying the lovely stillness of her face. "No," she smiles, "I don't believe we have. I'm Lilliana."


    @[Ryatah]
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #4

    She cannot remember if she had ever radiated such a glowing innocence the way the younger woman before her does.

    She cannot remember ever being innocent at all, actually.

    It was such a short span of time that it may as well have been a fleeting moment. In comparison to all the years that she has lived, those few years where she was simply reckless and sweet and untouched feel like they hardly existed. That night so long ago when the darkness had touched her, it had consumed her. She had let it swallow her whole, let it twist and corrupt what light was there until her moral compass couldn’t stop spinning.

    Until she couldn’t stop spinning.

    She had never turned hard or cold, but she was fractured. It doesn’t always show, and not because she has put on a brave face, but because she has simply learned to hide it. She would never consider herself particularly strong or resilient, but she had her ways of survival. Masking was her ideal choice, and over the years it became easier than feeling.

    “I suppose so,” she answers her softly, thoughtfully. Her curious gaze studies the young girl’s face for a moment, wondering if she knows what this place is like. Wondering if she knows that most that leave eventually come back, that letting go in a land such as Beqanna was nearly impossible because you never knew when a line that had been slack for centuries was suddenly going to yank taut again. “And if that’s the case, I’m immortal several times over,” she says with a stolen glance and a small tilt of her lips.  She has more children than most, and while there were worse mothers out there, she was certainly not the best. She doesn’t think many of her children would actually miss her.

    “Lilliana,” she repeats her name, and finds that she likes the almost lyrical way it feels on her tongue. “What brings you to the meadow so early in the morning?”

    Ryatah
    even angels have their wicked schemes


    @[Lilliana]
    Reply
    #5
    Lilliana remembers the first Immortal she ever met. Lovelace had been imposingly elegant and yet still carried a warmth that radiated from within that Lilli could only assume came from a millennia of seeing beautiful sunrises, of an eternity watching spring come again year after year knowing that winters frost eventually would be melted. And the stories - she had lived for those stories of golden ages gone by of kingdoms ruled by kind-hearted kings and their beautiful queens, where love and life thrived together in a way that only foalhood stories could. 

    The shades of gray, the way that life could throw one impossible trial after another, the struggles that could weight a soul to the earth hadn't touched her yet. Now, she can't even imagine what the gravity of immortality must be.

    At the mention of her children, the smile lifts in pleasure. The chestnut mare doesn't miss the knowing glance from Ryatah and Lilliana enjoys a moment of rare conspiracy. She comes from a home of several siblings, of nieces and nephews and cousins and countless other distant relations, her pieces of immortality. The more time that passes, the stronger they become etched in her mind and memory where she intends to keep them for the rest of her mortal life. Everything turns to dust in the end, she has thought but those days in the sun, those perfect days where there isn't a heart capable to hold all that love and joy without bursting, that simply can't fade.

    She likes to think it goes back out in the very universe that created them, to their gods and their fates where they might be reimagined, recreated - that love will breathe into the life of another cherished memory.

    All this talk of immortality and...

    "Ryatah?" the thought finally comes from a history lesson underneath Taiga's indomitable forest. And suddenly the look on her face makes her seem so impossibly young, so impossibly hopeful, that makes her glow so impossibly bright. "Of the Dale?"

    @[Ryatah]
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #6

    Of the Dale. She cannot remember the last time she has heard, or even so much as thought that phrase. Truth be told, she didn’t think of the Dale all that much. The Dale had never been hers; she did not earn it, and even though she fought to be accepted by its residents, she always felt like a false queen. The Dale, in her memory, was just another tangled weave in the thread that bound her to Carnage, because he gave it to her, and eventually spilled her blood across it. And if it had not been for that, she is not entirely sure she would remember it at all.

    The Dale had made her a queen, but the Valley was the kingdom that she missed the most.

    Still, the fact the younger girl before her knew of the Dale at all was enough to ignite a spark of curiosity in her dark eyes. The new lands were already so firmly cemented into everyone’s minds, with generations having passed since their creation, that she was sure the old kingdoms had been all but forgotten. “I lived in the Dale once, yes,” there is a smile on her lips but the words are spoken carefully, studying Lilliana with a practiced gaze. She doesn’t strike her as the type to have an agenda, but her trust in others was nearly non-existent. Because she has seen too many swords hidden behind pretty faces, and her greatest betrayals have been dealt by those she considered friends.

    “You seem too young to have been born there, though,” she continues in her soft, quiet way of speaking. “It’s been gone a long time.” But she does not ask how she knows; she does not comment on how the girl had made the connection between her name and the Dale, or even how she knows who she is at all.

    Ryatah
    even angels have their wicked schemes


    @[Lilliana]
    Reply
    #7
    The Dale had been a bedtime story. Stories of that forgotten kingdom had been passed down from mother to daughter for generations until it was told to her own mother on the rooftops of the world, another silver mare who was said that she carried the coloring of that noble line. Of a line descended from kings of a place called the Forbidden Dale.

    It was one story amongst a plethora of others that had been told to Lilliana as a girl; there had been stories of the Amazons, of fierce queens like Aslyum and Prague, of the child-queen Antarda and stories about what that band of jungle women represented. Those stories had been told alongside the ancestors of her sire, of Ichiro and Ramiro and Legado.

    And honestly, Lilliana hadn't given much thought to those stories until she was grown. Until she had struck out on her own and those stories were the only things she had to carry with her. What she knows of Beyond is no use to her here but what she knows of old Beqanna? That too had been rendered useless by the Reckoning until Aten had spoken those magical names, until he breathed life into the legends of her youth: Magnus and Ryatah. 

    And the fact that the Fates have delivered one of those legends in her presence, well, Lilliana isn't about the question the irony of gods and divinities.

    Ryatah eyes her with curiosity and Lilliana repays with open wonder, with a smile that hides nothing. It is all delight and admiration in that blue-eyed gaze, "Aten told me of you. Of you and Magnus." She doesn't know if this means anything to the silver woman but the chestnut girl has to start somewhere.

    When Ryatah confirms that, yes, she lived in the Dale once, Lilli feels the world shift beneath her. The stories were real. There was truth in her mother's words and for a girl who has longed for nothing but her family, Ryatah brings her closer to them than she has been in years. Lilliana could bask in the warmth of this feeling that drowns her; of the love that spreads to every corner of her soul. She can't help the daydream smile that lingers on her dark mouth, "What was it like? Did you know the old kings? Solomon? Coca-Cola?"

    The daydream has to end with the remembering. (So much of her life is this - of the dreaming and then remembering what can't be, what no longer exists. She should be used to this by now, the way that the dreams ripple apart.) Lilli mourns the loss of the daydream with a small shake of her head and a touch of apology on her chiseled face, "I wasn't born there. I wasn't born here." She admits with her foreign-born heart. And then another question, the curiosity returning again. "Were you born there? The Dale, I mean."

    It dawns on her that she is asking questions of an immortal. What do you ask of someone who has known endless days? At some point, do all questions become alike? Does daybreak still hold the potential of possibilities or do they all blend together?

    @[Ryatah]
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #8

    The name Aten is not familiar to her, but the momentary confusion does not register on her face. There was a time where that would not have surprised her – for a stranger to know her name, or to know the things that have happened. It was a rarity now, though, when so many alive did not even remember the kingdoms of old, much less those that had ruled them.

    But knowing Magnus’ name was less surprising, since he had never been good at laying low; it hadn’t come as a shock to her at all to see that Magnus had already made a name for himself even amongst this new generation when she had returned. Considering his lineage it made sense that he had found a land – even a new, strange one – to be fiercely loyal to. “Magnus was ruling Tephra when I decided to come back, not long before the plague struck. He was in the Gates, too, a long time ago.”

    The old kingdom’s names were like sparks on her tongue, like a name that she has been looking for a reason to say. She can see the excitement in the other girl’s eyes, and it was all too easy to get caught up in this nostalgia. “Solomon and Coca-Cola were a little bit before I ever came to Beqanna,” she says with a shake of her head. “And the Dale was actually not my real home. The Valley is where I lived the longest, and the place I miss the most.” She can feel the knot beginning to form in her chest – a twisting and tangled feeling of homesickness, a longing for something that is gone forever and existed only in her memory and in illusions crafted by a dark god.

    “I ended up in the Dale because Carnage took it from Moselle and placed me there.” Her tone is carefully measured, cautious to not lend a hint at how she cannot say Carnage’s name without feeling her pulse quicken, without feeling like the brand on her hip was suddenly just as hot as when he had marked her with it. “My knowledge of it is really just a little bit of Moselle’s reign, and then my own.” She doesn’t offer details – not yet. Her time in the Dale was not exactly peaceful, and neither was her descension. She supposes if Lilli wants to know specifics that she will ask. And she will find out rather quickly that the unassuming white mare had led a life far more interesting than most could imagine.

    Ryatah
    even angels have their wicked schemes
    Reply
    #9

    something in the wind has learned my name
    and it keeps telling me that nothing is the same

    Beqanna had been a fairytale for Lilli. It had been the setting of her ancestors even her mother had been here once. ('The land had been ravaged. They had spoiled themselves with magic and so the land turned on them,"  her dam had said. 'They became so drunk on power that they would have sold their very souls for it.') The picture that Aletta had regaled to her children had been tainted with corruption, with darkness. They were safe in Beyond (or so they innocently believed). They had thought themselves protected and as Lilliana stands here in quiet contemplation with Ryatah, she finds her mother's portrayal of Beqanna almost arrogant. As her blue eyes take in her pale counterpart, there is nothing in the silver mare that she finds corrupt or evil. It is only her original assumption that remains - that there was something maternal and gentle about her.

    That assumption (whether correct or not) remains instilled in Lilli as Ryatah speaks. Her youthful exuberance, all those questions that seem to come out at once, are met with patience and understanding eyes (a gaze that seems a testament to time and experience). The chestnut listens and learns, stands still with fascination because there is something about immortals that Lilliana finds captivating. She has only known one in her lifetime and trying to imagine the decades, the lives, the events that Ryatah has seen dance across Beqanna's stage... It seems impossible for her to even comprehend.

    So the chestnut blinks it back and instead focuses on what Ryatah offers instead, this history of the Dale that she is so hungry for. It is the last tie she has to her family and Lilliana fervently soaks up every word that the immortal mare has to offer.

    Her ancestors came before Ryatah but still. There is something to be said for standing in the presence of someone who had stood in the Forbidden Dale. Ryatah takes the images that had been figments of Lilliana's imagination (and much like Elaina had with her father) gives her something tangible, makes it something almost real and for now, that is enough. For someone who has been starving in a land of unknowns, the fragment that Ryatah offers is enough substance for her aching soul. At the mention of the Valley, her smile falters (only because this mare doesn't fit the image of horses that she had been told of) but it is quick to return. (It's magnetic, that smile, it never stays away for long.) The look she gives to Ryatah is an understanding one because Lilliana knows exactly what it is to have homes that aren't really homes. She knows what it is to reside in places for the sake of only existing.

    It's that understanding that emboldens the young mare. Lilli reaches out to brush her nose gently against the silver neck of the other, a touch of kindness if Ryatah wishes it. To let her know that there is someone who knows the emotion and who remembers with her (different places but that yearning, that loneliness that digs a cavern in both their chests is still the same).

    Ryatah continues to speak. Lilliana takes these names as she had with Aten, she remembers and she promises herself that she will keep them with her. It is the next words that cause her eyes to momentarily widen, the blue to burn a little brighter with shock. She had heard rumors, of course. The words Carnage and Pangea had seemed synonymous to her. One could hardly be uttered without the other following in the same breathe. Ryatah speaks the name of the Dark God with such ease that Lilli holds hers before asking, "You knew Carnage?"

    LILLIANA

    Image by Bronze Halo


    @[Ryatah] i am so so sorry this took so long and also i couldn't help myself
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #10
    she fell for the idea of him
    and ideas were a dangerous thing to love
    She does not flinch away from Lilli’s touch, but instead returns it – her pale muzzle brushing just lightly against the young girl’s red neck. It was so rare that she interacted with someone that was genuinely kind, and she had forgotten what it was like. To not have to be on edge, to not have to tread so careful and speak so lightly for fear of setting off the hair-trigger tempers she tended to be surrounded by. She had been kind like her, once. Not in the subdued, almost distant way that she is now, but the kind where warmth radiated from every part of her and she was convinced that everyone had a small spark of good in them.

    She doesn’t look for that light anymore. She knows now that some souls are meant to always be in the dark, and she has found that it no longer bothers her. She knew the dark – the real dark, the endless black of being blind – for so long that it felt like home, more than light ever could anymore.

    She wonders, though, how long it will take for this place to change Lilli, too. She could be lucky enough to escape the tragedy that seemed to follow everyone that lived here – no one seemed to make it out unscathed, not even the ones that did everything right.

    When she says Carnage’s name she notices the curiosity that almost immediately ignites in her eyes, and for a fleeting moment she almost regrets it. The story of the dale, and how she had acquired it and later lost her eyes in it, was one that had been told by others and herself so many times that she could speak of it – and him – in an almost mechanical way. It isn’t such a simple story, now. It had been easy before when the story simply was she was given the dale and then, during a disagreement, Carnage blinded her. It was not a strange tale, not for those that knew anything of what the dark god was like, and not even she had harbored any ill-feelings towards him. Getting angry over someone behaving exactly as they were known to do seemed futile.

    The story was a little more tumultuous now, though. Other events have transpired – complex and turbulent, with none of it painting any clearer of a picture.

    She ignores the way her chest tightens, and instead tips her head to regard Lilli with a slow, faint smile. “I do know him. He’s not always seen, but he’s still here.” She pauses, and she doesn’t know if it feels as heavy to Lilliana as it does to her. Because there is a part of her that wants to say everything, that wants to tell her how he is both brilliant and terrifying, but then there is a part of her that wants to say nothing at all.

    “Where do you live, Lilli?” She chooses to skirt away from the previous topic, but makes sure that the shift does not appear abrupt or unkind. “You don’t strike me as the kind that just lives in the meadow.”
    ryatah
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