"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
i've got a face of gold, i've got a heart of coal, but baby that's my cross to bear
Draco does not often remove himself from his wicked wiles and Dove’s side.
He was always terrible at carrying ambition and even more terrible at being a King, but he believed in a new Beqanna and his wild brother—so he comes when the war drums sound.
Perhaps not to battle; no, fighting was never the stallion’s style, but observing the bloodshed and assisting where he can—why, he thinks he is just a little capable of that.
Draco looks surprisingly suave for a twisted creature, handsome face contorted in an eager, charming grin. The acrid scent of smoke and metallic tang of blood crowd his nostrils—he loves it, bristles with it, prances and prowls and dances to the rhythm of rebirth. The snark building in his throat scratches up his larynx to get out, to make the world know this is his prime, his perfect Beqanna.
To tell them all his brother will conquer the world and Draco will sit back proudly, bask in the secondhand glory as a trusted confidant.
Draco finds the victory, the fire and the flame. He finds it with a grin, finds it with a proud sway in step.
He finds it, but what he finds as the scene fully unfolds is unlike even his darkest dreams.
Ghaul, aflame, screeching as a section of his scales shatter. Draco knows that magic, knows it so well; and with a wavering, uncertain breathe, his eyes trail upward to find Ghaul’s killer.
“M-mom?” the demon manages to stutter out, but he is across the way from her and his voice is so soft and broken that she would never hear it.
“No . . .” Draco whispers and closes his eyes, taking a meager step back. This isn’t right. This wasn't supposed to happen. Not like this. Not by her. No. He thinks and thinks and thinks--but just as quickly as the thoughts spin, they stop and dissipate, the eerie calm after a tornado has been sunctioned back into the sky.
The clenching in Draco's chest tears him clean in two.
Ghaul, his blood, his bone, his reason for believing in Beqanna. Gone.
There is no rage, like one might expect from a demon. No, Draco is empty, hollow. His typically glowing eyes leave his brother's burning body to stare at his mother and battered half-brother. He is overwhelmed by the sensation that he picked the wrong side. That not only has he lost Ghaul, but he lost his parents, too.
Draco understands Starsin, why she did what she did. As the dam in his chest breaks, he begins to feel a flood of what usually acccompanies sentience: empathy. An extension he does not offer most. But he is too lost now to make sense of it, too jumbled and crushed to understand what this means. He takes several numb steps back, eyes only showing a sign of life when Anaxarete tells the Pangeans she is returning Ghaul to their home.
"Home . . ." Draco whispers, then turns from the fire to return to the flood.
She slips away from Lepis and Wolfbane and their family without a word. What is there to say? Were she very good at offering comfort, she knows that Lepis would not want it from her. This is not why she came to Loess today, not why Lilliana had asked her to leave their protected borders.
Pah! Protected!
Brennen's magic had reached her, had shown her the fire and the fury, the way Beryl and Ama and Lilli stand to protect Nerine. She does not know what happens beyond that, because he goes silent soon after, but she thinks of the bay magician in the water, and the scene laid out before her, Wolfbane burning, the threat he has posed to those she holds dear dissolving into char and ash and a thick, oily smoke that makes her eyes water and sting until, if @[Brennen] can see, there will be nothing more than the bright blur of whipping flames.
Is this an end to it? Nothing is ever certain in Beqanna - Neverwhere knows this is true of everywhere, yet somehow, in this place of magic, the future seems more unclear than in others. It is the end, for now, and she leaves it at that, letting go softly of the Duplicate when there is no-one to see it fade away. Immediately, the next problem becomes clear - the fires are well out of hand here, the scrub pines and sun-dried grasses spread it like a disease.
Her steps are careful through the twisting paths, and there is no way to navigate confidently, no way to back track safely. The ground smolders beneath her feet, until her frogs are sore, but there's no stopping. Not until the screaming begins, and that brings her up short.
Ghaul?
That can't be right, yet coming around the blackened trunk of the once-red rock spires of Loess, she finds him, scalded, blistered, dead. His own are gathering around, and Neverwhere has no interest in claiming space among those mourners, but she is surprised enough to stop and watch from a distance surprised by the bitter taste of grief on her tongue. She did not realize that she had considered the dragon a friend.
How completely ridiculous.
The tight grip of her throat passes, giving way to thoughts another friend fighting desperately against her own flames in the north. Lilliana knows where she has gone - she had asked her to come, of course - but she cannot know why Neverwhere does not return running when Nerine struggles, and though using the magic so much, and at such a distance, is distasteful and risky, Neverwhere finds @[lilliana] in Nerine, and borrows her shape, one more time.
In the rubble of Beryl's attack, the air shimmers beside Lilliana, and then there are two standing side by side. The mirror approaches Lilliana, presses its muzzle against her shoulder. Clumsily, because Neverwhere does not have any real control, images attached to emotion. Wolfbane and Lepis and Ghaul and anger. Sadness (not Neverwhere's own, but what she knows the others must feel,) and relief as he dies. There's a blurred moment where the magic rebels and she does not know if anything will make sense. Neverwhere's muscles tense, her jaw clenches. Then flames, fire and confusion, creatures alive and... and some that are not, running from the inferno, running into it. @[Ghaul] -
09-18-2020, 08:05 PM (This post was last modified: 09-18-2020, 08:07 PM by Nashua.)
stars when you shine, you know how i feel oh freedom is mine
It had been another pegasus that knocked him from the sky. Another winged horse fleeing the madness below that was Loess.
Seeing through the haze of smoke made it almost impossible to know what was happening down below. He had looked down for a brief moment - a mistake - because a straggler departing the chaos crashed right into Nashua. They had intertwined, became a wriggling mass of wings and limbs until they had both crashed on the ground. When their bodies collided on Loessian soil - a loud thud that was followed by the cracking and splintering of multiple bones - the pair rolled apart.
He doesn’t know what happened to the other pegasus.
Nashua had tried to stand but one wing hung uselessly at his side while he hobbled from a fracture in one of his hind limbs. He could feel his Magic working furiously to heal, to put things back to rights but it has never been a quick process with Nash. He has never had much use of his Healing and therefore had never practiced with it - hadn’t tested, or challenged it for speed or precision.
The pegasus limped along, moving as fast as he could. The smoke nearly blinded him; the ash that coated his throat made him cough and soon Nash began to feel the sweltering heat stifle what little air he could breathe in. The cries of others surrounded him as the smoke and flames spread - a plea for help, sobbing from around another wall of smoke, a rasping cough in the distance over the crackle and hiss of the wildfire.
"Hel-, he started, "H-help.”
Coughing again and understanding that his cries would be futile (just another to add to the cacophony around him), that his energy was better used for getting himself out of this maze of smoke and ash, he continued to walk. He continued to go on until he tripped over something. A fallen log, he thinks at first. But when Nash looks down, he is staring into the unseeing eyes of a black stallion.
There is blood, everywhere. It seeps somewhere from the corpse and the green eyes of @[kildare] stare up into a sky that he will never look at again. At least not in this life. Nash recoils, stumbles away from the fallen horse who is charred and burned in places. Who Nash can’t fully see because of the soot that threatens to suffocate the remaining souls in Loess.
He can’t see but he can hear.
It’s the sound of hooves on the sandstone that attracts his attention, something that is different from the noise of blackening cacti and blazing grasses. The hoofbeats sound frantic - like a skirmish? - and different from those who had tried outrunning the flames.
(What Nash can’t see is a gray pegasus, desolate and raging and wild. As furious as this fire. His youngest brother had laid out on the ground, their shared blood spilling out for all to see. Their mother’s lovely green eyes looking up, up and away from him. A stare that was already gone by the that Tarian had come. Too late. Too late.)
(What Nashua can’t see is two horses - both winged and both pale - near the edge of a canyon. Where one is nearly feral in his grief, the other has almost been that way. What Nashua can’t see is the way that one horse approaches the other, demanding answers despite the inferno around them. What Nash can’t see is the way that one slips on a ledge and falls.)
What Nashua can see is a gray stallion, looking down the cliff face. He falters forward with his useless wing and a stumbling walk. One wing drags on the ground while he tenderly holds the other. He comes forward and -
Despite the smoke, he knows. Despite the way that the world is burning around them, he knows. Despite the heat that is rising all around them, Nashua grows cold. He nearly freezes here, in this purgatory. His voice had already been going hoarse, made raw from the inhalation of ash and soot in the scorching air around them. Despite all this, Nash knows because despite the hellfire raising all around him, what he sees laying crumpled and broken at the broken of the smoky canyon is a pale form.
The mane is dark, could almost be mistaken for black now with all the grime coating it. The red-orange glow of the sky hides the loveliest of her iridescent stripes (already hard to see even in the best light). Nashua, son of his father’s sport and his mother’s sorrow, had been born into a confusing world; it was his siblings, like Elio and Celina and Gale, that had made sense to him. The way Celina’s body lays does not.
There are no fireflies (stars) glowing.
Only the sparks from Ghaul’s hellraisers. Only the shadow creatures lurk.
"You,” he accuses the stranger standing on this ledge with him. Two lost souls lost among the fire-and-brimstone that had once been Loess. Nashua accuses Tarian because his sister had always been a skillful flier. It had been her who had shown him how to use the cliffs in Taiga to his advantage once he learned how to soar. (Nash knows nothing about a torn wing left to rot in Pangea. Nash knows nothing about what @[Celina] might have wished for at the base of the Mountain.)
Nash only knows that his sister lays at the bottom of the cliff. Nash only knows that the world is burning. (There are other things Nash knows but at that moment, he is ignited into such a rage, such a fury that he forgets them all.) ”You,” he rasps again to the silver pegasus. "You did this.” He takes a step forward, stumbles and seethes.
The older stallion remains stoic though an emotion emerges briefly.
”No,” but there isn’t time for an explanation because Nashua lunges. He is ignorant of the first sparring lesson that Tarian had ever been taught. (And in another life, Malachi would have loved to have been given the chance to teach it to his nephew.) Lesson one: never make the first move. Weak and injured, even at the furious pace that his Healing works to knit himself back together, he is no match for Tarian; no match for the older stallion who has spent his life in one type of service or another, always preparing for battles and who can almost always hear the distant beats of war drums on the horizon.
What transpires is quick (perhaps an uncommon kindness from Tarian) and when the ash settles, while the fire burns at their heels, Tarian leaves the boy. But not before saying, "You are wasting your breath. Save it. Leave.”
When the winged horse finally abandons the other striped one on the ground, Nash tries to stand. He tries to rise. After several efforts, he finally manages it. By the time he gets up, the fire has crept closer. Though Nashua paces what he can see of the ledge, the black smoke hides everything, and even when he half-slides down a gentler slope, there is nothing to see on the canyon bottom.
He still goes down. He still searches through the blackness of the smoke and feels his own skin blister where the fire had burned past him. Nash calls out her name: Celina. He calls it until his deep baritones are no more than a whisper and when the winds start to blow in his direction, it pushes him back.
There is nothing left for him to do.
Hours later, he will pass by the few Pangeans still left without much thought. Hours later, he will still hold one wing to his side and let the other hang. Hours later, he will stumble upon the dappled Queen of Nerine (though startled and surprised to see her), and Nash will say, defeated to @[Neverwhere]: "Let’s go home.”
nash has great timing and went to go visit loess. he didn't have a good time at the bbq. he found a toasted kildare. saw celina fall and not get up. fought with tarian and then ran into neberwhere. they went home. the end.
![[Image: jCdBK6.png]](https://img.nickpic.host/jCdBK6.png)