[open] moonlight raising from the grave

[Chemdog]

❤

Beqanna sleeps deeply, in a silent slumber, hibernating until its next magical mood swing perhaps. Everything is still here, but so quiet. Bodies move and shift, creeping along the dark summer shadows, their voices hushed and their conversations dreadfully boring. Although he’s much enjoyed his break from real life – from violence, love, politics, family, everything – the time to come alive again is apparently upon him. He’s slept his days away too long, lounging in the rich sunlight in whatever shape he wanted. Today he travels as himself, a big shapely black stallion with milky white markings splashed across his front and speckles to about his abdomen and back end to match. His coat is sleek and shimmering, bearing his scars loudly in grayish-white against the inky black. His snake companion is wrapped securely around a thick braid in his mane. The python’s iridescent scales catching the light perfectly as Chem moves through the shafts of daylight piercing through the canopy above.

The Chamber.

The smell of smoke, timber and mists is so familiar – and something else, something without a name. His ancestors thrived here once, and he too has found a home here on and off, but it’s never been again what he knew as a child. And never again what the stories of old speak of – a great empire, a formidable threat, a fierce force. Its fire has died; left to fizzle out and eventually letting its coals to cool.

If he called them out of the dark, would anyone be here?

He knows the center of the territory well, picking out the overgrown path that was once busy enough with foot traffic to keep it clear and making his way to the charred tree. He spends the afternoon pushing stones in a precise spiral around the blackened trunk. A tribute only he may understand; a mysterious prayer. It takes one powerful breath of fire to ignite the tree (which while miraculously be unharmed and go back to what it was before). The fire burns high and bright, a beacon to anyone left, or anyone who might want to come.

CHEMDOG

*sets the big tree on fire*
just seeing if anyone is around to revive the place
also to clarify i figure he can use his mma shifting to breathe the fire but if thats uncool i'll fix it
<3

[Iliana]

I L I A N A

She doesn’t live here, but the closeness she feels with the Chamber is so deeply planted that nothing can uproot it. Even if her father’s heartbeat no longer pulses beneath the soil, the stories are something that she has carried with her always, with such a vibrant clarity that they may as well be her own memories. She has always admired her father; it was difficult not to. She has witnessed the way others regarded him—the stoic, battle-worn king—and she cannot help but wonder what Beqanna must have been like in its golden age, when he ruled.

Unlike her parents, she never felt the same pull toward kingdoms or politics, but that did not stop her from haunting the lands they had once ruled. Today, she finds herself in the Chamber. It is easy to go unnoticed; silence clings to Beqanna like a shroud. Though she does not fully trust the peace, the usual tension she carries has eased. The hush that has settled over this place does not seem eager to break.

Typically she chose to be in her panther form, finding it easier to slip unnoticed that way. But lately it hadn’t mattered much, and today when she wanders the Chamber it is entirely equine, save for those blush-colored rosettes that glint when the sunlight catches them just right. The kingdom looked just as it had the last time she was here, which is somehow simultaneously frustrating and reassuring.

Then, sparks rise from the treetops. Smoke unfurls into the sky.

She stops, head tilting slightly. It seems unlikely to have started on its own. But fear does not stir within her—only curiosity, and perhaps even a small thrill. She moves toward the glow bleeding through the trees, the scent of smoke threading through the leaves, until she finds him: a stallion standing before a tree wreathed in flame.

She steps from the shadows, the firelight flickering in her rose-gold eyes. “Well,” she says, a small smile subtly softening at the corner of her lips. “You have my attention.”

-- the shadow is mine, and so is the valley

@Chemdog

[Set]

The Chamber has been quiet for some time now, a sparse few residents keeping company with the forest’s wildlife and its many ghosts. When I was a child, the steady strum of the panther-king’s heartbeat would lull me to sleep. Now, nearly a century later, it’s a silent shell of its former self, but, it’s still home.

I wake at the sound of stone scraping the earth. Rolling over to my side, I take a few seconds to stretch out my cramped muscles. The nights are cool in the Chamber, even in the height of summer, and I slept hard last night, curled into a tight ball in one of my favorite hollows. I roll toward the opening, and stick just enough of my head out to search the clearing a hundred feet or so below, whiskers twitching. At first I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, the clearing below devoid of life save a handful of small birds. Sniffing, I narrow my focus on their excited chatter. You have to be patient with the smaller songbirds. They’re not as intelligent as the corvids, though most are just as fierce as the raptors. Something about particularly scrumptious beetles someone had been unearthing in the forest … I can hear rock being pushed along the ground again and I lean further out from the tree, gripping the edges of the hollow with small black paws, my bushy tail held out behind me for balance. Someone comes into view a moment later, nudging a stone across the ground to join several others.

I frown. I’ve not seen the stallion before, that I can recall at least, nor do I recognize the spiraling pattern of rock he’s building down below. Resisting the urge to use my magic to satisfy my curiosity and potentially give my presence away, I yawn and stretch again before settling back down into a comfortable position, chin resting on the worn edge of the hollow, content to watch the unusual scene play out. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened since I threw those fish at that sour-faced queen.

Exciting may have been an overstatement. I doze off.

This time I wake to the smell of smoke and the unmistakable roar of flame. There was a time this tree burned unnaturally, without ceasing, without succumbing, and for a moment I think the magic has, for whatever reason, returned. However, a quick glance locates the rock-pushing piebald down below, his form slightly distorted by the heat coming off the fire, obviously admiring his handiwork. I shout a string of obscenities down at him but I am sure it comes across as nonsensical squirrel jabber. A spark catches on one of my whiskers, singeing it and spurring me into action. I need to get out of this tree without expending too much energy. I am a seasoned magician but fire and I are begrudging acquaintances. While I’m familiar with jumping bodies to travel, but the inferno must have scared away the birds I’d spotted earlier and I’m loathe to use the stranger’s body, even for a moment. It’s not impossible but it’s more difficult to jump into the bodies of equines who have been touched by Beqanna’s magic, and equally uncomfortable to leave them.

So, I run straight down the trunk toward the fire, momentarily disappearing into it. There’s the familiar drain of energy as I grasp the flames immediately around me, wrestling them into submission and shaping them into two small wings. It only takes a few moments, but the sensitive pads of my feet are burned nearly to the bone when I push off the trunk and take flight, a plump black squirrel on fire wings who scolds the fire-setter all the way down. I swoop past his head, my paws numb with pain, ignoring the rosetted girl who emerges from the forest with a sly smile on her lips and firelight in her eyes as I head for the lake that shares the clearing. Above the shallows I release the hold I have on the wings and they disappear in a puff of smoke, plummeting me beneath the water's cold surface.

[Chemdog]

❤

The cackle and roar of the devouring fire satisfied him somewhere deep in his chest – maybe somehow even deeper. The long licks of bright orange and sharp yellow dance in his teal eyes as he watches. He is completely enveloped until the gentle padding of her hooves alerts him to her gentle approach and then her body stepping into the warm glow to reveal her shimmery rosettes and rose-gold eyes. Without knowing she has other forms he can still identify that there is something inherently feline about the dark mare.

When she goes to speak, he is already smiling, offering a nod to her declaration. “That’s wonderful to hear.” his voice comes through a wry twist  of his lips, a cunning grin, delighted to have drawn anyone in – let alone a pretty girl. No time to bask in that because the disgruntled chatter of a squirrel interrupts, casting obscenities and curses down to the speckled stallion that he can’t technically understand, but the tone is clear.

“Oh.” he sucks in a sharp breath through clenched teeth, “Whoops.” he doesn’t look away from the cursing little mammal, but still it disappears. Dead? No, no. It’s very alive, swooping out of the fire and diving straight for him. The stallion ducks and still gets his hair singed. His serpent hisses, striking from her coiled position around the braid slung Chem’s shoulder. In a swirl of smoke and flame, and the prominent smell of burning hair, the stallion spins around to sound of the squirrel hitting the water.

If he had eyebrows to raise and then crinkle unevenly, now would be the time. He remembers the girl who had arrived before; shooting her a bewildered look before stepping cautiously closer to the disturbed body of the water the flaming squirrel vanished into.

What in tarnation?

CHEMDOG

omg i love this XD
not the pissed flaming squirrel burning off the top of his hair while he's trying to look REALLY cool
BAHAHA

@Iliana @ Set