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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


    bury my heart on the coals; ramiel
    #1

    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us



    There are visitors, but not for her.
    She watches some of it unfold, the reunions, but more often than not they leave a bitter taste in her mouth. It’s jealousy, that taste. Because she is alone here, the strange and dubious queen of the afterlife (never proclaimed, but the land was made for her, because of her, a limbo to exist within because she is too alive for the dead and too dead for the living).
    Her dark god visits, sometimes, but time is so different for him – he drifts and dreams in space, traces constellations, grows stronger there while she walks these empty sands.
    (Time does pass, though, and she considers it a blessing. And there is no sign of the langoliers and that awful chewing sound, reality dripping apart before their eyes.)

    She gestates her own powers, feels herself shift as she continues to exist here. They come from the land, she thinks, though she’s not entirely sure what they are. It’s the afterlife, seeping into her bones like radiation.
    Their death queen.
    (He would be so proud.)

    Mostly, though, she is alone. She walks the same stretch of beach and nothing changes. There’s no weather, here, always the same low light and grayed sky. The only thing that changes are the ghosts, a rotation of faces. She recognizes no one.
    She tries something, one day: she calls out. She shouts a name across the murky ocean as if her voice could carry across worlds.
    It’s not Carnage’s name that she shouts. He’d never really listened.

    Instead, it is the ghost-king’s name, shouted into the void: Ramiel.



    this is Not Very Good but I am trying to knock out all my posts before my four day weekend with no computer access.
    Reply
    #2
    They may be indefinable.

    Stars may part for Carnage and Gail, galaxies may swirl and time may twist at their whim (his whim). The world might be shaped by their separation, by the methods they employ to be rid of the divide between them. Hell may freeze and ghosts may rise to walk alien shores when they are together. Their bond is unique, legendary - indefinable.

    But he and Gail are inevitable.

    Ramiel. Her voice calls to him in his sleep, long after he’s tucked his little family into the protected space between himself and the mountains. He had watched Sela fade with the sunset, her eyelids like masts falling more and rising less with each star that blinked to life. Ea, too, had eventually succumbed to her weariness. The simultaneous weight of new motherhood and a new crown could not be easy to bear; Ramiel only hopes he has helped share the burden as best as he can. The sight of Ea and Sela finding sleep together soothes him as much as it sets his heart to race. Most nights, it is hard to let his own exhaustion steal the picture of mother and daughter from his greedy eyes. Most nights, he spends hours watching the rise and fall of their ribs with breath, watching their lips twitch with dreams, watching the culmination of his life and his greatest success in their hours of absolute peace.

    Some nights, he even sleeps himself.

    But this night, she calls to him as drowsiness is just beginning to pull him under like the waves of the ocean. Immediately, he is awake. Immediately, he disappears from the Dale and pops back into existence on the shores of the dead. It is too simple to come here, his mastery of his gift finally final. But even easier, even more instinctual is his response to the black woman. Answering her call (even as it carries over the line dividing those with heartbeats from those without) is like a reflex he cannot help, cannot ignore. He is powerless against her voice. Carnage had trained them well.

    “Gail?” The nearly-white stallion asks unnecessarily when he finds her. She stands out, somehow, as if she is untouchable to the same force that drains everyone else of their color. She is still pitch black, as he had been the first time they had met. But that is not what he thinks of as he stands before her. He isn’t reminded of monsters that had puckered the skin at his thigh or the quickness of time as it flashed in the wormholes (though oddly, the heat of the six plus one pressed together warms him now as he looks at Gail, a shiver he cannot place). Instead, Ramiel remembers the last time he was here, remembers the deep well of ache at his brother’s murder.

    Like before (like forever?), she had guided him through his sorrow. He wonders if this is why she has called him now, to do the same for her. But he doesn’t ask anymore. He is sure she already knows he will do whatever she requires of him. He has done enough, but he will always do more. For her. For his black light transplanted from the end of the universe.    




    R A M I E L
    this is a man pulling at his iron chains
    Reply
    #3

    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us



    He comes back.
    Perhaps it could have been any of the six, had the others chosen to come back to this haunted ground. But perhaps not. Back at the end of the world, when reality split off and they each played their hand, he’d been the one to touch her. To say, I won’t leave you like you’ve been left before.
    And maybe it had happened, then, a spark ignited, inevitability rising on creaking bones.
    Because from then on he comes back. He comes back and saves her not-daughter, comes back and shows her his wounds, comes back when she shouts his name into an abyss.

    She wonders if her dark god knows, or senses it, in whatever universe he now inhabits. If some string vibrates, a sign that her own universe shifts. That she grows stronger. That there is another, that there is something being made, something she doesn’t acknowledge but rather feels, like a bone-deep ache, but sweeter.
    You did this, she thinks to him, thinks to no one, you brought all of them to me.

    He returns, and he is almost white now. He’d nearly been a child when they’d first met, a boy, and now he is a king. He thrives.
    Yet he comes back.
    Like maybe that old promise made on the beach while the world ended around them and time reset meant something.
    She’s used to promises being broken, scattered at her feet like ashes because the man she loves is ultimately a liar. Carnage does not lie to her to be particularly malicious (she thinks), but rather, because he is something so apart from all of them that his reality shifts and what happens in his world does not happen in hers. He does not realize the particular depths of his betrayal.
    Or perhaps he does. Perhaps he doesn’t care, now that he knows where she is kept, doesn’t care that she is alone, a queen of ghosts with no desire to rule.

    He might care if he knew the exact way she looks at Ramiel as he materializes, the particular flutter of her stomach and the way she’s drawn to him like magnets.
    “Ramiel,” she says his name and savors it, “I’m sorry to call you.”
    She’s not, not really. Maybe she’s the liar.
    “I’m changing,” she says. The strange and dubious powers have leeched into her skin and she isn’t sure what to do with them. Isn’t even sure what she can even do. She only knows her body sometimes thrums with a new energy.
    She is this land, its gatekeeper, and the connection grows stronger. It remakes her.
    “Like I’m being remade,” she continues. She isn’t sure how to explain it. Isn’t even sure an explanation exists.
    “And it scares me, a little. I-“ she stutters, does not meet his eyes, “- I didn’t want to be alone.”


    Reply
    #4
    For what it’s worth, he’s not sorry she’s called him, either.

    He’s not sorry, but he should be. Because the family that he leaves behind when he heeds Gail’s call is everything to him (or almost everything). The black woman is a light here, in the everlasting dusk of death, guiding him like the tireless beacon she is. But she cannot help him out there. She cannot take the reins from him like Ea, directing when his soul grows too weary of the responsibilities it carries. She cannot make him a child again like Sela. She isn’t wide-eyed with questions or ready to take off in chase at any given moment. Gail is a light, but not the same yellow sunshine of his little girl or the sensible, silver sheen of his queen. She is the absence of shadows, despite her dreary location. She is a place he must return to long after the mission has ended; he comes back like a soldier reliving the days of glory, full of his own life but unable to forget the past. She is unlike either of them in so many ways, but somehow, she still means as much.

    She is a part of his family kept away from the rest.

    Ramiel studies her even as he thinks it. He is lost in the word secret for a moment. He knows he shouldn’t have them, shouldn’t keep anything from his family on the Other Side. But when he looks at the woman who has lost so much in her life (peace, love, time), he thinks he is only protecting her. If he stopped coming here, who would she have left? If Ea knew of their hidden rendezvous, what would she say? Would she sense anything nefarious about the way they seemed to call each other at their times of greatest need? Would she suspect that his admiration for the black mare’s strength lied deeper within him, down passed the muscles that held his posture straighter when he stood before her, down between his lungs, squeezed but beating faster with each breath?

    Even he does not understand himself when it comes to Gail.

    The grey ghost shakes his head dismissively when she apologizes, but she continues on. Her words are as uncertain as the monochrome sand shifting under his feet is unsteady. “Changing…” he echoes, his voice carrying out over the waves that rise like the dead on the horizon. Ramiel remembers changing himself. He can recall the exact panic that had gripped him as he become less alive and more dead with each second (even if most of his worry had stemmed from his need to escape the Other Side at the time, rather than his newfound ability). He wonders if she is experiencing the opposite effect, if she is growing more alive instead with each passing day.

    In some smaller way, she plays Sela’s role, then. Because he can feel the careless hope of his younger self slipping through, despite her fears. He is a fool, a dreamer; he can’t help but ask. “Can you come home now? Back to the Other Side, with me?” The matured, greyed part of him knows it is not the root of her change – he knows that life is not so perfect, knows that she will never again walk the grounds of Beqanna – but as he also knows, it is hard for him to let go (Gail is proof enough). The grown stallion moves to her because she says she is scared and he knows she should be. He knows what to say, but he means it, too. “I am only a call away. Always.” He touches her neck like before, his muzzle brushing firmly against skin that should long ago have turned to dust.

    “What can I do? What needs to be done?” He speaks like a man, like that same old soldier willing to take up arms again to whatever end he will meet. When his eyes meet her’s, though, they are still like a child’s. His hope is immortal, even here on this plane of expiration. But a thought occurs to him then and a dark wariness supersedes his optimism. “Is it Him?” Ramiel doesn’t have to name him for her to know. Something like jealousy flashes through him and once again, he becomes a stranger to himself. Carnage had failed all of them in so many ways (his sister, the other acolytes) but no one more than the woman who stood beside him now.





    R A M I E L
    this is a man pulling at his iron chains
    Reply
    #5

    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us



    She doesn’t put a name to it because she can’t – or shouldn’t – because giving it a name is like breathing life into it. She doesn’t put a name to this – the inevitable nature of them, two creatures met and meeting in a limbo, ghosts and death-queens.
    It feels like limbo, a certain repetitive nature of things.
    (How many times, she thinks, how many times will I call his name before he ceases to answer? She wants an answer, and she doesn’t.)
    She doesn’t put a name to it because their dark god might sense it, that naming it would strengthen it, give it shape and form and breath.
    Maybe a name doesn’t even exist, for such a thing built on impossibilities – he’d traversed space and time itself to find her, and say I won’t leave you and it hadn’t ever been a promise she’d expected to be seen kept.

    She breathes in. The air tastes strange here and she thinks sometimes she probably doesn’t have to breathe at all but she’s scared to stop. She breathes and drinks and eats because it keeps her normal, keeps her sane, distracts her from the way things thrum in her skim, old magic weaving itself like ivy on her bones.
    Can you come home now, he asks, but she doesn’t know where home would even be – she’s been queen of the valley, once, years and years ago when Carnage was still mortal and neither one knew all the things that lay ahead.
    (He says home and she thinks of the beach at the end of the world, the plastic chewing noise of the langoliers. That wasn’t home but it’s the first time that comes to mind, and it’s awful – both the place itself and the small part of her that misses it.)
    “I don’t know,” she says. If anything, this feels more like an anchor, like she is growing and sinking into the piece of land like a forgotten monument. But perhaps she will become strong enough – perhaps she is strong enough – that maybe she could scramble across the earth and go back –
    Go back to what, though?
    She knows the Beqanna that exists now is not the one she once inhabited. She is a relic, a piece of the old world.
    But he touches her and her thoughts dissipate like mist, her neck arches under his touch and she returns the touch. It lasts only a moment but it’s enough to smell the life on him, earth and plants and other horses, ones too alive to come here.

    “It’s not him” she says quietly, though maybe it’s a lie, because Carnage is mixed into everything – he’s even the reason they’re here, now; the reason she knows Ramiel.
    “Not directly, at least,” she amends. Better.
    She wants to say other things but saying them means putting names on it. So she doesn’t. She breathes in.
    “I’m scared,” she confesses instead, “of trying to leave. Even with…this.”
    (This – a vague, stupid term. Does she mean her powers? The strange energy between them?)


    Reply
    #6
    Even he is not sure that he meant to keep his original promise.

    It had been convenient then. Not a lie, but not a whole truth, either. I won’t leave you, he’d said, knowing that he couldn’t leave her even if he wanted to. Knowing that if he did, he would be struck down in the end, anyway – their dark god would never allow total failure to go unpunished. His quick loyalty to the black light at the end of the universe had been gallant, chivalrous, self-preserving. But he had been a boy caught up in the thrill of it all. He had agreed to something bigger than he could have ever anticipated, tugged on a thread with no thought to what waited for him at the end of it. He had found himself precariously perched above waters that would swallow him up and never spit him back out again.

    He had said what he needed to say to keep from slipping under.

    But Ramiel has always had a golden heart beneath his dark mind. He will do what is best for Gail for her own sake, as long as it aligns with his own safety. Fortunately, for the both of them, crossroads have never come between them. Even here, in a land that should separate them quite permanently, he answers her call because no harm will come to him.

    She needs him, and he won’t leave her.

    Yet.

    Because he will always have to walk away. No matter how great her crisis or loneliness or desire otherwise, he will always have to fade back into the Other Side. And each time he leaves her, he will feel that same thread being pulled taut in his shining heart. Like the distance from his anchor is far too much to allow for more movement apart. He hates failing her, hates breaking that same promises time and again. She doesn’t know words that were once mere convenience have become more, multiplied into a million more sentences he can’t find in his dark brain.

    She touches him back and the words flee him again. Ramiel can feel her, even though he knows he shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be able to feel her, a ghost, a relic, but he does. He shouldn’t feel her at all, anyway. Ea swims in his eyes so he closes them and breathes Gail in instead. But there is nothing there (there is so much there) to smell. When she pulls away, the shifter feels the smallest tug in his chest but it is from her reply, rather than the distance she puts between them. So Carnage is not responsible this time. Possibly. He can’t say he isn’t pleased to hear the mage is leaving his once-lover to a well-deserved peace.

    But she doesn’t tell him what to do. He cannot combat her fear by doing anything like he had done before. There is only so much comfort he can provide before he fades away, before he waits in the Dale for her next call, whenever that may be. If she has no answers, he will have to find a solution himself. “I will do anything, I hope you know that.” Ram reaches for her again, so instinctual to pull her close, to soothe her. She is no wall of iron like Ea… But just as he thinks it, he remembers himself and stops. “You are the bravest woman I’ve ever known, Gail. But if you want me to stay with you, for a while, I will. We can face this together.” His eyes draw up to slowly meet her gaze. He doesn’t know the implications of lingering too long in this place, doesn’t know how time moves compared to on the Other Side. But if she needs him, he imagines he will soon learn.


    R A M I E L
    this is a man pulling at his iron chains
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