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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


    To glory in self like a new monster - any.
    #1
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray


    He is a little like carrion.

    Mangled and abandoned roadside; picked at by scavenger birds till bone-bare. A dead thing (as good as), wearing the cloth of putrescence like a jester's motley. A great joke; a damaged parody of his mother, and a prank from god — laughter and mockery come from all sides to beat him like fists, bruising the soft places of his psyche. Forcing from the undersides of his young body the brilliance of youthful prospect.

    A little golden boy, born to a bronze bitch, with a little, lonely wing. Pollock had been teased with the impossibility of flight, but he was not just humbled by the incomplete couple, but also by the twisted and broken nature of his one and only — fractured in a hundred different places down his humerus, ulna and radius. And by the derision that animated words like slaps across his face. He has been defective from birth.

    Or was.

    He carries these wounds like reminders, hot intimations of the dispirited boy he had been. And of the loathing and self-pity that still boils beneath like wicked demons. The stallion reads them like a prayer, mouthing the words into the air with squalls of snow and white breath, “A little. Broken. Boy.” Spittle gathers on his lip, and he laughs, shifting in and out of translucency. Becoming flesh in cold light, and then nothing. Mighty nothing. With every phase he grows egomaniacal, blood rushing to his muscles in preparation. He is more than whole! Overnight, a godlier incarnation of himself — refashioned by some queer, northern dream-magic.

    He passes through the dense forest with quiet, unnatural speed; leaving strange, two-toed prints behind — and the snake-belly drag of his wing alongside. He finds a snowy hold (grey and cold, but clear and quiet) and runs the long curve of a horn down the frozen skin of a nearby tree, not yet accustomed to their burden. He tenses his muscles, feeling their new found capabilities quivering underneath his golden skin. On his left the unmovable, dirty wing flops and twists sickeningly as he moves over swells of snow, testing the dexterity of his footholds.

    In his chest, he feels the thrum of something dark — something he feels he knows by touch, but cannot comprehend, or remember. Something singular in its capacity for malevolence. But he holds it dear, clutching it to his breast like a wild-eyed urchin holds a stale end of bread. It is as essential as nourishment to him, now.

    Let something come to him this time.


    Pollock,
    The gift-giver.
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #2

    And inside you're burning
    with some secret yearning

    She has never been anything but perfect, a beautiful bay child tinged by teal with laughter in her eyes and starlight in her soul. But life has a way of changing things, of bringing imperfection even to the most perfect of creatures. Still, she is lovely, a creature born of the cosmos, meant dance through the stars and spread their light across the earth. But alas, she is grounded, a child of this dull plane as much as she is one of that far off ether.

    Life had taught her that lesson too recently for her to forget. The scars still linger upon her once smooth cheek, slashes even now fading to muted hues of red and green. She would forever be marked as a contestant, an inept warrior for a distant cause. She remembers too well, the emotions (hers yet somehow not) still burgeoning in her chest like a wayward vine, driving out the purity and child-like wonder that had once thrived there.

    The conflict within her has driven her from the deepest recesses of her home, the places where she might normally bide her time in practiced patience, into a far off land of wood and brush. Despite the thoughts roiling within her mind like a snarled mass of snakes, she makes her way easily through the trees, steps smooth and graceful, any childish ungainliness left behind long ago. Her magic, the one born in her on a bone-littered beach the day she had come into this world, encases her like a cloak, her red pelt dusted in starlight, a gentle blanket studded in diamonds. She glows in the dim light of the forest’s interior, a warm and inviting beacon that she would pay no mind to even if she had realized the way it beckons.

    She is, in so very many ways, the opposite of him. Perfect and perfectly beloved.

    She does not notice him at first, lost as she is in the trappings of her own thoughts. When she does, she halts abruptly, blinking wide, silvery eyes as she stares. He is a rather grotesque thing, but she had grown with the uncommon. She had spent her youth with a half-dead girl as her closest friend, bone and tendon and skin re-knitting a common sight to her young eyes. Next to this, he holds little comparison.

    And so, unafraid, curiosity the only emotion in those silver eyes, she takes another step nearer. Upon closer inspection, a faint aura surrounds him, dark and forbidding with the barest tinge of something lighter coloring the edges. She takes another step, a hint of familiarity coloring her vision of him. ”Hello,” she says simply, her voice lightly soothing, like a harmonic chime ringing in the distance. And she wonders, her inquisitive mind filled with questions about this monstrous creature with the dark aura tinged by light.

    Lirren

    starlit daughter of joythief and carnage

    html c insane | pic c laura-ferreira.deviantart.com
    Reply
    #3
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray


    Her preciousness chokes him, bitter cold hands with a furious vice grip. It fills him with something envious and violent; he shifts, every muscle fibre and tendon flexing and loosening with a healthy pump – he could gnash the stars from her body piecemeal, before she could even react. Her underestimation of him feeds him, like blood to those newly gifted shoulders and thighs. Her press towards him serves as electricity, waking up the yawning monster tucked into his ribs.

    Pollock still holds phantoms of touch like tattoos: on this shoulder, where once a fury of yellowed teeth pinched the folds of baby skin; there, where a shove had stumbled him on spindle legs and marked his coltish knee. He wonders what sort of memories her tight skin carries, and then he sees the red and green (oddly familiar colours) and thinks, no, these thing were not the doing of someone charged to love you. But nobody is guaranteed love, beloved one. In that moment, he thinks she is ignorant to that (whether or not that is true, is irrelevant entirely), and he imagines he must teach her that valuable lesson in time.

    And yet when she gets near all this is stayed in his chest, beating like a thrashing rabbit in mortal throes. His ears fill with a great humming sound, mechanical and steely. Cogs and the hiss of released steam under pressure. His dark eyes narrow and then close tight, pulling his chin into his broad chest, a sharp sting of something like concentrated ill-will spreading from the center. That dark shard – grabbed by greedy, strange flesh to break a fall, and sate a desire – pushed through his gilded flesh, now hanging down beside his heart like a strange ornament. It crowds his body with an order: to pull the light from her eyes and destroy that brother-magic, and it is undeniable.

    You were there.
    You tried to stop me…

    To take from him the thing that now fuels the reawakening of his mind and physical form. The thing that gently nurtured his enormous headgear and super-equine movement; that granted him a single, powerful control over emotion. He does not remember her personally, too full of his godliness even there to mind, but he feels wronged by her. Not only because of what transpired like a dream-thing in that northern dimension, but because she ripples and bulges with privileges he never enjoyed in his formative years, or since.

    “Hello.”
    That she doesn’t run is interesting. But no mind, if she did he could hunt her down in a heartbeat, unseen. She could send a squall of starlight and riddle his eyesight with white, but to stop a beast so incensed is a heavy undertaking.

    “What a lovely little trick,” he drawls, tilting his head. Once, he would cower at her feet whilst wondering how best to pull her apart from the belly. Now that inborn fear is his to take charge of, and he refashions it into purpose. He means her stars, and he is reminded of young days mouthing little whispers to them – little questions, searching for answers. They had been cruel in their silence.


    Pollock,
    The gift-giver.
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #4

    And inside you're burning
    with some secret yearning

    The stars have never been silent. They whisper constantly in her ear, enticing, enthralling, luring her with their bright beauty, gifting her with their tender touch. One need only listen to hear their siren song. But perhaps it is only she who can hear. Perhaps their song falls upon deaf ears in those unwilling to wait, unwilling to submit to that subtle give and take. And perhaps, just perhaps, she is simply special.

    She steps closer, another small, easy step that draws her nearer to danger and further from safety. She has never known fear. It is an emotion that does not register in her utter unawareness. She has never had reason to know fear. She has lived a gentle, comfortable life, surrounded by those who love her, by those who mean her only well. That distant world had been her very first taste of life outside the sheltered confines of her quiet home. There she had known pain and rage and loneliness. She had known all of the emotions she had been missing in her previously simple life.

    She can feel the fear that he pushes upon her, can feel that he wishes to engender such things in her, wishes to elicit a response from her. And perhaps for that very reason, she refuses to give him one. It is not a boldly overt response, one fueled by bravery and reticence. Instead it is done quietly, with steadfast resolve and an easy, forgiving curve to her blue lips.

    She is close enough now to touch him, though she does not. She thinks that he might refuse her touch, that any touch she might bestow would frighten him as much as he wishes to frighten her. She, his very opposite in this and nearly every other way, has no desire to frighten him. Her silvery eyes are soft, enticing in a way that is difficult to explain. His words are met with a smile, a quirk of her lips that says simply ‘you do not fool me’.

    ”I have many lovely tricks.” The words are said with amusement, a pithy reply to a pithy comment. Her bright silver eyes remain fixed upon him, a quiet challenge held within those clear depths. ”I am Lirren,” she offers finally.

    Lirren

    starlit daughter of joythief and carnage

    html c insane | pic c laura-ferreira.deviantart.com
    Reply
    #5
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray


    A privilege.

    That in her counsel with the blinking night sky, she had always found open ears. That when she looked up she saw warmth in that cosmic dusting is endearing, but he would find her wistfulness is nauseating. They are distant, cold things, friends of hers because she can be intimate with them in ways nobody else can. But to him they are the naked brightness of a wasteplace, impossibly hot and probably long dead. They had offered him nothing in the way of comfort, and at night, he had been too preoccupied by his disquiet to dote on their poetry.
    It would have been a pleasure if he could.

    Once, he would have been afraid of her. In an older build of himself – without the horns and two-toed hooves, and the might of his manipulation. In a younger version of himself, her advance and boldness would have ground him to dust. He would have sought the refuge of his transparency long ago. Followed her in smoldering silence to a better place to strike, pooling her blood under her skin. Tender reminders of his compliancy and cowardice and danger – his anxious muttering to her face, and his vicious projection onto her body. Once. Like she is intimate with starlight, he is bosom buddies with fear. As she can manipulate her night light, so can he manipulate his brother, dread; now fear is his.
    His own fear, and everyone else’s.

    So as she presses forward into him, her impertinence elicits a swell of antipathy and rancor. But not fear; not anywhere but deep down, where the boy is still undergoing his death knell. Not that he is immune to fear. He can give it as easily as he breathes; he cannot shield himself from it. However, when one can wield dread like a blade, and one is as snug with it as he, the threshold becomes thicker. It takes much more than it used to, and in his delusions of grandeur, he gives her a crooked grin, willing her on.
    “I bet you do.” Lirren does not scare him, not because she is incapable, but because instead she only loosens that powerful misogyny. And if the delicate tilt of her fine head, or the beacon of that magnificent teal, churns up anything other than hostility in him, he hates her all the more for finding a weakness.

    He cannot conceal the crinkling of his nose, disgust. He tucks his head back towards his chest, because female touch is a loathsome thing to the golden stallion – first given to him in violence, then spreading like a virus until Phina had corrupted everything that could have been soft and pleasurable. Then the pressure of it comes to the top of his throat and he disappears from sight. Stepping back and away from her, rounding the curves of her body. Here he does not abhor touch, so long as it is at his discretion. He imagines she doesn’t feel the same. And so he does not touch her, though in his invisibility he tests a strike with his horns and a nip at her thigh. Stopping, his right shoulder to her left, he comes back into view, looking beyond into the mossy forest.

    “Lirren.” He tastes it on his gravelly tongue. He looks to the side at her, and her challenge rustles the dark shard in his chest, the hot ember of power, gone to his head.

    Her defiance is adorable and maddening.
    Once he would have feared her, now he only wants to conquer her. And if he didn't know any better, he'd have to think that she wants it to. But maybe like darkness is known to chase out light, maybe light is made to search the darkness for something.


    Pollock,
    The gift-giver.


    @[insane] let me know if it's okay to use his fear induction on her, since it is a powerplay, I didn't want to just do
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #6

    And inside you're burning
    with some secret yearning

    His approach is akin to a battering ram, determined to overcome whatever defenses she may have with brute force. He wastes no time on pleasantries, seems to care for naught but seeing her become a quivering puddle of fear before him. With her soft smiles and even softer curves, she should have been an easy conquest.

    But they always seem to forget that with the ability to bend comes a certain amount of resilience. A certain unbreakable quality not noticeable until one tries to apply force.

    She, on the other hand, is far more similar to a chisel. She would bide her time until a weak chink is exposed. That small crack would be her way in. He simply does not know it yet. Though what she will find beneath she does not know. She knows only that she wishes to find out. Whatever the consequences may be of such an act, she does not doubt that she will find what she is seeking.

    He retreats from her, and she merely smiles, the faintest of satisfied glints in her silvery eye. He disappears from view, invisible to her eye. She does not search for him, has no need, really. He had not left her. She can hear the faint crunch of his hooves upon the leaves littering the forest floor, the soft chuffing of his breath.

    She had not expected him to strike at her however. She flinches reflexively from the sharp sting of his horn against her flesh. Before his teeth can meet her thigh, the stars studded across her delicate frame coalesce into a shield, diamond bright and just as hard, protecting her soft skin from his ravaging bite. Her delicate head swings around, censure in her lovely gaze as her turquoise tail flicks towards him in stinging rebuke.

    But her admonitions are brief, that soft smile back upon her lips more quickly than might have been expected. As he draws alongside her, shoulder to shoulder, a brief, tinkling laugh escapes her blue lips, her pale eyes lighting with amusement. She doesn’t hold herself back this time when the urge to reach out to him surges within her. Her teal muzzle brushes briefly, almost inconsequentially, against his neck, as amused words escape on a warm breath. ”Was that a test, darling?”

    Withdrawing, she meets his gaze openly, her smile deepening. ”Two can play at that game.” As she speaks, her particular brand of magic is already swirling about her. The stars crawl across her skin, up her neck, before finally merging into two horns curling elegantly back from her skull. They are a beautiful, graceful echo of his, shimmering in the dim light. ”But first, perhaps you might share your name?”

    Lirren

    starlit daughter of joythief and carnage

    html c insane | pic c laura-ferreira.deviantart.com


    Go ahead Smile
    Reply
    #7
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray


    That bend is so enticing. A tease, and he has acquired the patience for it alongside his clutch of ill-begotten gifts. He applies his pressure and she flexes from him, something of a dance. Once her smart reproach – that whip of her tail and the reprimanding glance – would have set his teeth on edge. “A woman with many little tricks,” he glances down the armoured crook of her belly and flank. There is a sharpness in his growl, a hint of his limits. Like her bowing will break, in time, so will her nerve get the reaction she so desires.

    Each giving the other their just rewards.
    They could work well together.

    If she could surrender to his darkness, down her spine and brain, perhaps he could make his sting mild. She could pick at his gilded flesh all she likes, trying to find that broken boy within. Or whatever it is she thinks she will uncover. He wonders, for a moment, if this starlight indeed seeks to protect that soft, bygone coward from Pollock’s own murderous hunt. Bit by bit, that coltish shade is being dismembered by the sheer force of his own glory and self-hate.

    If so, she is treading thin ice – the friend of his enemy, is his enemy twice over. And he finds nothing more nefarious than the vestiges of his wretchedness.

    His eyes narrow and he tucks his chin towards his chest, close to the beloved thrum of malice therein. It seeks its own twin behind her ribs, he can feel it; he wonders if perhaps it is not that she thirsts for instead. Like his dark shard needs to annihilate her northern token, maybe her light seeks to cleanse him from inside-out, or to reunite what was once a single whole. He looks to her again, his heart thumping in his breast.

    ‘Was that a test, darling?’ Her soft lips express warmth over his flesh, and he snaps from his speculation. His nose crinkles, and he finds once again, he cannot distinguish the cursory glance of her flesh from the remembered strikes of his mother. He carries them indelibly on his body. As he washes over with animus, she adorns her head with a horned crown of her pretty, little lights. Jeweled mimics of his own headgear.
    “You are incredible.” It does not taste of flattery, but of acid. Sour and corrosive.

    “Was that a test?” His tail whips across his haunches, and then back against her own.

    With an unnatural quickness he is standing face to face with her again. From that darkness in his core, he feeds fear into her. Just enough to cow her, and in its sweet cunningness, it feels incredibly organic. As if borne from her own mind, catalyzed by the hostility in his eyes or the unsettling swiftness of his movements. She may recognize in his eyes the glint of his own manipulation, giving himself away. She is bright, he cannot deny. But its origins are irrelevant.
    It is there, all the same, and her stars cannot shield her mind anymore than he can bite through its diamond strength. And it always has a certain... perseverance.

    His gift to her. He withdraws it, sated. Watching her teal features and eyes for the tells of his intrusion. He has come to find this afterglow to be his favourite part – they are always lovelier for it. “Pollock.”


    Pollock,
    The gift-giver.
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #8

    And inside you're burning
    with some secret yearning

    They are like the yin and yang, pushing and pulling in equal measure as they test each other’s strength. The slightest of prodding here, a little bit of pinching there. Each, in their own way, attempting to determine the other’s weaknesses. Each for very different reasons. Where he hates himself, she loves herself. She has never known hate in her young life, never known the sharp sting of rejection.

    They temper each other in the most terrible of ways.

    She does not know precisely what it is she searches for in this man (boy), only that she needs something from him as much as he needs something from her. Perhaps she merely wishes to taste victory, to know the taste of her own power. Not her power to make him bend and submit, for that would be too easy. No, it is something far more kind. And something far more terrifying, at least for one like him.

    ’You are incredible.’ His words belie the tone of his voice, the blackness of his aura. He does not mean them as a complement, but rather as another weapon in which to tear her down. Instead, she smiles, her silvery eyes glinting, bright as newly minted coins. ”Yes,” she says simply. She already knows that she is incredible. In more ways than one. She had grown with whispers of magic in her ears. How could she not know?

    His tail flicks across her haunches, an echo of her earlier reproach, snapping against the starlit armor coating her skin. Then, in the blink of an eye, he stands before her, gaze boring into her own. She can feel the fear rising, enveloping her like a malevolent cloud. Her breath quickens as her heart thrums a rapid rhythm inside her chest, causing her to flinch from him reflexively. She retaliates in an instinctive manner, slender vines of starlight snaking towards him, tiny thorns glittering brightly as they curl about him. But then, between one breath and the next, the fear is gone. She inhales sharply, stepping back as her thorny vines melt into nothingness.

    As her heart settles back into its normal, steady cadence, she stares at him for long moments in implacable silence. Finally a slow smile begins to return to her teal lips. ”Pollock.” She breathes his name as if he were a lover. ”Did you enjoy that?”

    Lirren

    starlit daughter of joythief and carnage

    html c insane | pic c laura-ferreira.deviantart.com


    Let me know if the vines aren't ok and I will change it Smile
    Reply
    #9
    I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
    I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
    And now I call you to pray


    He is finding her unwieldy.
    It is frustrating that he cannot grab on to her for long enough to wrap his fingers around her and seal the deal. He oh-so badly wants to – instead, he can only seem to trace the angles and finger the curves where fat and muscle hide the bones best. He is stifled by something. By her own queer alignment with the night sky and by something far more odious. She disarms him, just enough to save her own hide and to unravel him piecemeal. White-knuckled and desperate, he scabs himself on her diamond exoskeleton, trying to peel back those studs of starstuff to get to the soft place beneath.

    (Frothing and wild-eyed, that soft, pale-skinned thing (that strange, fleshy boy-thing) rings against his ribs, rattling them like prison bars; his strange hands (dexterous and five-fingered) reaching between them, towards her beautiful teal and brown, searching for something like him in her… He recognizes the northern scent – ice winds and nutmeg.)

    He runs his eyes down the smooth places of teal horseflesh, and the crown of glitter and dim nightlight she wears… and he would not deny that it is beautiful, though he can imagine it rearranged and made better still. He smiles, watching her skin jerk – it is the way they curl, in and back and around on themselves, that is his favourite part. 
    So if she is keen to subdue him, he is not defenseless. He has years of hate and rejection to feast on. They are colliding forces – coming together with a crack, like rams slamming headgear. They can stand together, entwined eternal like a new constellation, and figure out what motivates best: beauty and love, or fear and loneliness.

    He cannot hear her rushing pulse, or see it beneath the armoured coat, but he knows it all too well.
    He does not need to see or hear it to know it is there.
    He watches her silvery eyes for the bluster of anxiety in them, but her twists of creepers force him to look away and lean his head back. He watches them curl and lick the air protectively, examining the celestial glint in the sharp barbs, and when they pass around him, he cannot evade their rocklike touch. They brush against his chest and he tolerates their touch for a moment. 
    And then a moment too long, and he recoils slightly, “Beautiful defense mechanisms,” he murmurs, and they snap away from him and his vulnerable flesh.

    He hears her airy question, and the intimate way it purrs from her lips with his name in tow, in a distant kind of way. (Though he shivers – it reminds him a bit of Phina and unsettles his gut with something else.) He is staring at the space around her (where her starry vines had been, where her mimicry of his horns glitter and give of eerie light that reminds him too much of sadness), his greyish lip curls, and he turns back to her. His voice is thin and gravelled, anger biting against raw wonderment, “how do you crack?” 

    He can do it.
    He can do it, if he finds the flaw.


    Pollock,
    The gift-giver.
    [Image: kkN1kfc.png]
    Reply
    #10

    And inside you're burning
    with some secret yearning

    He draws her in, intriguing her in the most dangerous of ways. They had fought once, two sides of the same war. Still they battle, but it is a war neither of them will win. The magic that resides in their breasts are two parts of the same whole. It was inevitable perhaps, that they would come together. His darkness and her light are drawn to each other, longing to reunite.

    But they are too different. Two creatures from different ends of a vast spectrum. They would either meld in a violent explosion, or be torn apart. It is difficult yet to say which it will be.

    She can feel his eyes upon her, that terrible gaze almost a physical touch. Her skin ripples beneath her armor, shivering in mixed delight and fear. She should have left, run away like he had expected her to. But self-preservation has never been her strong suit. Her confidence in her own abilities, in her charm and beauty, leaves no room for such weakness.

    Her lovely vines startle him. Ephemeral they might be, but even something so evanescent can carry a sharp sting. But she does not reproach him. That small, secretive smile graces her blue lips instead. There are mysteries in the smile, secrets hidden in the unfathomable depths of her silver eyes. He could not possibly understand the satisfactions he has given her, the utter delight at the outcome of their encounter.

    His words shiver across her skin, causing her pale eyes to spark with amusement. She steps nearer, the delicately curling horns glittering as she raises her head to brush a gentle caress across his cheek, down his neck. She wonders if he will flinch from her, from such an insignificant touch.

    ”Not everything cracks, my darling Pollock.” Her words are breathed into his skin, her warm breath as much a caress as her lips had been. ”Some things are so much more flexible.”

    Lirren

    starlit daughter of joythief and carnage

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