Beqanna
[open] oh, fire away, any - Printable Version

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oh, fire away, any - Selaphiel - 05-05-2023

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

How strange to have lived through the change and have absolutely nothing to show for it. 
(He had hid, as so many others had, as was—and had always been—his nature.)

There is nothing familiar about this new world. Even the faces have changed. He had not been greeted by Mazikeen in the ruins, but her daughter. His niece. A newer generation.

And what did that make him?
Irrelevant.
(Though this is nothing new, there has never been anything significant about him at all.)

The whole world reeks of death. It makes his head swim and that heart (amplified by some strange magic in the bleakest days of all that darkness) beats hard, persistent, twinging with the weight of it. He draws breath, though it pains him to do so. 

(Some months ago, he had wandered to the edge of some great cliff and looked over the side. And how terribly it had hurt to wonder how far down it was. To wonder what it might be like to simply step off into that great oblivion. Would it hurt less than it hurt to live? This is perhaps the thing that he wonders the most. If his own death would hurt as terribly as theirs.)

There is nothing familiar about the Gates. Nothing at all that indicates that he should be here. But the stench is lesser here, lesser than the rest of Beqanna, and he finds that breath comes a little easier. Cleaner. And he settles, turning those glacial blue eyes to the horizon as the sun sinks and he thinks maybe he’ll just rest here a bit.

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder



RE: oh, fire away, any - Raea - 05-05-2023

Raea

They said it used to be called Heaven’s Gates, and that alone had been enough to pique her interest.

The term ‘heaven’ inspired imagery of golden clouds and infinite sky—of Stratos. She could not help but wonder if it is true that there is a place here on Beqanna that bears any kind of resemblance to what was almost her homeland. She had always thought if she could fit in anywhere that it would have been there; with her feathers the color of a sunrise, and the soft breeze that billowed around her, she had always felt as if she belonged in the sky rather than the sea. But her eyes—those impossibly black eyes with a single slit of silver, unique only to Baltians—and the water that spilled from her sides that sculpted itself into the shape of wings branded her as an outsider.

Not only an outsider, but an enemy.

And so she had stayed on her island—her sanctuary that felt more like a prison some days—where she could stare at the sea and at the stars, and wonder what it might be like to wholly belong to either one.

Beqanna was her chance at a fresh start, and instead she cannot stop chasing old ghosts.

But from the moment she steps into the Gates she knows this is not what she is looking for, and immediately she feels guilty for the sinking feeling in her chest. It had been foolish on her part to think that she would find a replacement for what she had lost—or never really had.

It is a beautiful place, but it is not like Stratos.

She pushes aside her own sorrow (reminding herself that it is not even her sorrow to feel—Stratos was not her home, even if it was half her blood) and ventures further into the land, taking in the unique beauty of it and letting herself see it for what it is. The rolling hills of green washed in towering purple flowers; the long limbs of the willows that sway in a gentle breeze, and the golden sun that sinks just on the horizon.

And in the corner of her eye she sees him, and her heart seems to catch in her chest.

Angel, is what immediately comes to mind, although he is nothing like any other angel she has seen. Bright white, but with ice-blue cracks across his body, and a halo of ice above his head, he is both haunting and beautiful and she realizes then that she is staring at him. Immediately she darts her gaze elsewhere, trying to ignore the flustered heat that rises in her cheeks. In all her travels here it seemed to be Baltians that she stumbled across, and now, faced with someone that reminded her of Stratos, she finds herself stricken and tongue-tied, and she had not realized she had walked closer to him until he is close enough that she can see the glacial blue of his eyes and the worry that had seemed to etch itself like cracks across his face.

“I’ve never seen an angel like you before,” she breathes, and though the wonder she feels is lost in the pitch-black of her eyes it finds its way into her soft-spoken words, even when she is nearly frozen by her own shyness.


RE: oh, fire away, any - Selaphiel - 05-06-2023

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

Selaphiel has never known peace and it is no surprise that he does not find it here. (There is some approximation of quiet, certainly, as he drags in as much of this half-clean air as he can. As if he has been drowning and this is his only hope of survival.) 

He notices her just as she notices him, but he knows better than to try to make friends. He feels no overwhelming urge to approach her, to smile, to acknowledge that he has seen her at all. That he has cast some cursory glance across those sunset feathers and acknowledged that she is a thing that has come to Beqanna from the sky. (This, an incorrect assumption, but he has no way of knowing that.) He does not call out to her in greeting, only turns those eyes away. (If it is rude, dismissive, cold, then it is all of those things but this is the only way he can protect himself, you see.)

It is only when she ventures close enough to speak that he turns his focus back to her. (And there, as always, is the faint stench of Death. He understands that whatever it is is the remnants of their war, Stratos, Baltia, a war that he is only aware of through snippets of secondhand stories.) He exhales.

If he had been someone else entirely, he might have laughed. He might have blushed and turned away, coy. He might have shaken his head and found some great amusement in her appraisal. Instead, he blinks. (Perhaps he had forgotten that he is an angel when he feels so much like a devil. Angels are good, he’d thought. And he is… 

He is?
Not good, certainly. But what does that leave?)

He studies her a long moment, noting the Baltian eyes, how they betray no emotion. A pulse of quiet passes between them and, finally, he shakes his head.

“I’m not much of an angel,” he says. He glances again at the horizon, noting then that her feathers reflect the color. What a strange magic, he thinks. “No more an angel than you are, I suppose.” 


—I just bite my tongue a bit harder



@Raea