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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]  come whichever hell or high water; brunhilde
    #1
    KENSA
    we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.

    There has been a quickening, and though there had not been an intention to conceive with Brigade the child growing swiftly within her can only be his. She has not informed him, not yet, and when she does, she is not confident he will be pleased.

    It puts her in mind of Litotes. His pride and pleasure in his brood, nearly every single member of it—she knows he has his favorites—Brunhilde, Kelynen, the demon he’d made with Starsin called Draco. She never tired of seeing the glow of his affection for his children, especially the ones the two of them shared. He was always excited, always proud, affectionate, just as temperate with discipline as she. Perhaps they would have populated Beqanna with a bloodline of unruly things, spoiled and hungry, but terrifyingly beautiful. He would have wanted them all, loved them all, celebrated them all.

    All children should have someone to celebrate them, even when their own mothers cannot.

    The sky is grey, winter waiting to bring the first snow to Hyaline and turn her white while the rest of Beqanna continues to pretend at autumn. Close, heavy clouds full of the snow are stalled overhead. Her body has already prepared for their issue, her pelt thick and muzzy and ready to keep her warm and dry against the freezing alpine winter. At the moment though her raiment is too warm, and she falls out of the head-clearing gallop she’d launched into. Finding herself in large copse of hardwoods, naked with years of leaf litter forming a noisy, fragrant blanket over the ground. Swish, swish, Kensa wades into the lake of cast off leaves. A nondescript mouse-colored bird is sitting on a bare branch overhead but flits away before she can look at it too long. Though she stands still there is a sound of someone moving through the leaves and Kensa moves towards the soft rasp. The trunks shift and seperate, and between them, though she catches only a glance at first, she recognizes her firstborn. “Hildy?” Kensa’s voice has a catch of anxiety. The independent girl comes home rarely, and even if she has had word of her parent’s split she would not be drifting among these trees on the edge of Hyaline. She would have come and shouted her mother down directly. This is something else, and Kensa feels a mother’s fear and fury clenching in her breast without knowing why.



    @[brunhilde]
    #2

    i'm a geyser, feel it bubbling from below
    hear it call, hear it call, hear it call to me, constantly

    The weight between her shoulders is pointed and heavy. It sits like a perfect round ball, somehow two thousand pounds the size of an acorn. Her shoulders roll with the ache of a weight she can hardly withstand, and her hooves drag lines in the earth beneath her.

    Brunhilde is dead-eye and zombified, draping her muzzle against the autumn leaves in the hopes that one will be sharp enough to pull her from this daze.

    It should not surprise her that Hyaline is where her half-brained wandering leads, but it does. The colorful leaves should invigorate her, but the brilliance only serves to overwhelm her. She sighs and leans into a tree, closing those constantly glazed eyes. Brun feels so listless that even the two legs left to hold her weight begin to crumble, and her body is barely held up by bent knees and the sharp bit of a tree trunk. She is hardly showing the colt that grows inside her, but the evil of its creation sits like a heavy stone in her stomach.

    Mom, she almost whimpers, forgetting that she is pushing six years old and beyond the age of coddling. She wants so desperately to forget, to turn back time to her first taste of sexuality, to the brush Leokadia’s skin. Even the strange cremello is one she will not return to, and she does not think she would even if they were incredibly close; but she does find she misses the touch of one she desires.

    Cold, she thinks. I’m just cold.

    And she is. Hyaline is unforgiving even in the autumn. Her coat is thinner, slower to thicken this year. Slowly, she pushes herself from the tree with a loud and tired sigh, thinking now is a good time to turn back before her family finds her.

    Between the thick trunks stands Kensa, ever fierce and beautiful. Hildy tries to remember the last time she came to visit her mother, but her mind struggles to focus in her panic. None of the fury over her parents’ break up spills out of her mouth; instead, she merely tucks herself behind a particularly tangled set of branches, hoping they hide whatever little roundness her stomach has found.

    It is the concerned, knowing way that her mother calls her name that breaks her.

    “Mom, I . . .” she answers, stepping into view with a shameful hang of her head. “I know you wouldn’t judge me for meaningless sex. I know you wouldn’t care if I was pregnant.” Her words are making no sense, spinning in her head as she latches onto this phrase and that. She stumbles closer and cries as her knees knock into the trees. It is only then that she realizes she is weak because she has forgotten to feed herself, forgotten to do anything other than wander a bit and sleep.

    “I think I need your help,” is her final, tired admission, and she leans her exhausted head against the shoulder she did not realize she had reached.

    and hear the harmony only when it's harming me
    it's not real, it's not real, it's not real enough

    Brunhilde


    @[Kensa] :'/
    #3
    KENSA
    we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.

    Kensa has been lucky to as yet never have lost a child or see one of them suffer in sickness. The possibility of her young coming to real harm has always been there but it is unreal, far away, even when Soothe was born small and frail she’d still had that willful fire burning inside her.

    The coals are barely aglow in Brunhilde.

    A glimpse of saffron and orange trying to shrink away becomes Brunhilde, responding to her name and stumbling towards her mother. The chestnut, with her golden tracery only peeking through her winter pelt notices first the listlessness, then the thin coat, dirty and untended. Dull eyes are bleary in the girl’s sculpted face and she stumbles forward almost blindly. Kensa weaves quickly past the trees between them, some so close that bark scrapes off of pulls bits of hair from her shoulders and barrel but she is there in a moment. All the words, ragged and rapid that had fallen from the mare’s mouth as she sought out her mother process in slow repetition in Kensa’s mind. ..wouldn’t judge...wouldn’t care...pregnant… though they made more sense than they do now that she is turning them over and over again in her head

    I think I need your help. The flame child is not a soft spoken creature but the words are quiet, just for the mother who hates to hear them. This girl has never needed her help, never needed her beyond the smallest assistance with survival in her first months of life. Kensa clutches her close giving over her warmth and holding her child as she has only a few times in her life, as she has never needed to more than now. And what does she say? She doesn’t know what words to use as she clings to the weak ghost of Brunhilde, but she has to know, and if it’s the wrong thing to ask it will not be the first or the last mistake she has made as a mother, as a woman. “You didn’t want...he hurt you?” How is she supposed to ask? Kensa does not understand—not the way her daughter needs her to—but she tries, desperately, and that must be enough today.

    She has not lived all these years a woman without knowing to fear a man, to watch them with two sets of eyes. One confident and fierce, the other cautious and dark like a doe on alert. Kensa has had brushes with it, this evil that has touched her girl. The Primarch wonders if she did not do enough to prepare her, to keep her safe from the monsters who would take and break and ruin.

    And from whatever hateful beast had tried to smother Brunhilde there must be a child, growing small and secret in the red darkness. A child, like the one stirring inside herself, unintended. However Kensa does not need it explained to her that her grandchild is also unwanted. Drawing back she presses a cautious touch to Hildy’s cheek, pale muzzle against a dust streaked saffron cheek. “Come.” Sweet Kensa’s words have the steel behind them that only those closest to her know. She turns and side by side guides Brunhilde to a place that none still living in Hyaline know but she.

    Bringing Brunhilde to the cave with its obscured entrance has only one purpose in that moment: shelter from the wind. It is warm enough, if small, more like a nook that might shelter two or perhaps three horses pressed close. It is not terribly dark, normally, though the gray skies keep sunlight out of the cracks between the rocks today. There plentiful acorns in this part of the forested mountainside, and grass grows up inside the little hideaway in the places the sun can reach. “You can stay here, not even your brothers know it’s here. We will figure out what to do.” Kensa tucks Brunhilde close again if the girl will allow it, not wanting to say too much, be too much.



    @[brunhilde]

    A cave like this I guess?
    #4

    i'm a geyser, feel it bubbling from below
    hear it call, hear it call, hear it call to me, constantly

    Like a perfectly flat sheet of paper balled into an angry fist, Brunhilde crumples. She is an autumn leaf to her mother’s welcoming forest floor, and she falls. She falls and falls into those warm arms of Kensa, of the one to never leave her behind.

    No matter how she turns her back on Hyaline, how cold she can be in some misguided way to gain her father’s approval, how she may bristle in fear-turned-aggression--her mother never leaves her. Brunhilde knows now how this love between them knows no bounds, how even in her mother’s absence she only released her out of love (how it was not much of an absence or an intentional wound).

    This reality with a traitorous boy sucking her dry tells her of the twisted love of a mother.

    Of how a mother can love so much it turns to hate and even then she will do what is right.

    “Help,” she manages to whisper, then leans into Kensa as she whisks her into the shadows of the trees. She would cry if she knew what to feel, if she could feel anything besides the dull hunger in the pit of her stomach. She would cry if she could see the jewel she was as a child standing alongside the knotted tangles of her mane and tail. Her eyes glimmer with a flash (anger? pain? fear?), but she hardly has the energy to fuel its light.

    Her mother’s side is the only thing that grounds her, even when she brushes stone and vine to step into the cave.

    “I don’t know what to do.”

    and hear the harmony only when it's harming me
    it's not real, it's not real, it's not real enough

    Brunhilde


    @[Kensa]
    #5
    KENSA
    we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.

    Kensa is bad at a number of things, but being a mother is not among them. She has failed before, this girl’s full sibling can attest, but there is nothing that means more to her than her children. Now that she has found shelter for Brunhilde, and can gently groom the burrs from her mane and the dried mud from her skin, careful not to overwhelm she tries to think of something helpful to say. Yet she cannot admit to any understanding of the terrible black hurt choking her tempestuous firstborn.

    I don’t know what to do.

    The chestnut lowers her ears back, sorrow carving deep lines into her beautiful face. “You don’t need to do anything, my love.” Why did they have to grow up and go into the danger of the world? She hated that her darlings needed to learn that the world is darker and sharper and far more than just the playground that she herself would like it to be. “I will take care of everything that you need me to.” She would never leave the girl behind, no matter how far she drifted or how many times she scorned the reckless, selfish creature that had given her life.

    Kensa wants to tell Brunhilde to stay here, that she would be safe and it would get easier and that when she becomes a mother she will learn a love like she has never known in her life... But that would be a lie. She cannot keep the fire-summoner safe. She cannot promise that she will not hate the sight of her child...

    Outside their shelter the wind picks up, little cyclones of detritus jettisoning leaves into the narrow entrance of the cave. These settle to quiver weakly at their feet, joining the bed of leaves and dried grass and other such accumulation on the floor around them.



    @[brunhilde]




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