the fire remains; oceane

[breach]

for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

She comes, but she doesn’t come quietly or come kindly. 

How she’s spirited away still remains a mystery to her, but when she ends up in Loess, having been successfully stolen, she feels something like a dam breaking in her. She can feel her mother’s expectations on her shoulders. Can feel the fragile dream in the palm of her hand. Can feel everything she is meant to do slipping away and any tenuous hold she has on the kind young girl she had been slips away. 

When she puts two and two together as to who had done the stealing, it just lights the match. 

She considers shifting again into a snake, comfortable being able to see the thermal reading of the mare, but she opts instead for her mother’s tigress form. If she could not see the Loess leader, she would settle for being able to track her event—and it felt fitting that she would wear her mother’s form here. 

“Bold,” she says simply, commenting on the successful steal as she flicks her tail and sitting on her haunches to lick a massive paw, her feline eyes never leaving the area where she believed Oceane to be. “It’s kind of Castile to have given you this place,” a pause as the rage simmers in her. “Did he give all of his mistresses a kingdom to lead or were you simply the preferred one?” Her mother had never been exactly open about her past with the dragon king, but neither had she hidden it from her children with Risk—and Breach was curious enough to have pieced everything together over the years. 

The pain it had caused her nearly unbreakable mother.

The shame.

The scars.

She had never thought kindly on the dragon stallion for breaking her mother’s heart, or the woman who had been involved, but she would have been fine leaving it lie quietly.

Now though?

Now that that same woman had taken her from the kingdom where she bore the weight of her mother’s dream? The dream Sochi had carried as a single source of comfort in the wake of Castile’s betrayal?

The fire lights.

Breach’s eyes sharpen as her predatorial smile spreads slowly.

She may be Loess’ prisoner for now, but they would be the ones who felt trapped by the end. 

though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth

Let me know if any of this doesn’t work for you!

I was v excited when I realized the connection and chance for drama.

[Oceane]

a little white light in a
sea gone black

≋

Oceane had been acutely aware that the person whom Ghaul personally handed his crown, the one given the responsibility to look over the wasteland that was Pangea from the throne in Hyaline, would not come quietly into the night. She had expected nothing less than vitriol from Breach. But any hopes that Oceane had reserved for a civil conversation on her own turf fluttered away with Breach's first words.

It only takes Oceane but a moment to make the connection to Sochi as her imperceptible amber eyes stare into the face of the indignant tigress before her. The implication that Castile had given her Loess without merit draws a cold grin, reserved for herself in her current state, across Oceane's lips. With no desire to stoke the fire Breach attempts to ignite, the Loessian Queen offers a long sigh before settlings herself more comfortably, muscles loosened, in preparation of whatever verbal poison was soon to be spewed.

“I've no intention of keeping you here beyond tonight,” she begins steadily and without disdain, “To be candid, I don't want you here. But Loess has a problem and you are our best chance at eliminating it.”

Oceane watches the feline's face closely as she speaks, hoping to find interest but expecting to see something that combines disgust and rage. She is no fool. “I don't expect that any attempts on my end will appeal to your... better nature, but despite that, I will tell you this:

The Loess you stand in now is not the same Loess led by the Dragon King. This is not a Kingdom on the offensive. No wildfires, plagues, or wars will befall Beqanna because of this Loess. If your Kingdom views that as a weakness, we will need to recognize the difference of our opinions, but this Kingdom has experienced enough wickedness in the time since Castile breathed fire across the North. We have paid our reparations.”

She pauses, her blunted teeth clenching and unclenching as she takes a brief moment to rein back the anger that has begun to rise hot in her chest.

“This Loess wants to live peacefully. And so I ask you, politely, that you now tell your Kingdom and the territories beholden to it to take your hooves off our fucking throats.”

@[Breach]
“”

n | r

[breach]

for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

That Oceane does not acknowledge the verbal bait does not dampen the rage in Breach’s belly. It only serves to harden it into something cold and flinty. Something sharp-toothed that rattles against her ribcage. This was the woman who lit the spark that had hurt her mother. This was the woman who had torn her first marriage apart. This was the woman who had ripped her from her home. This was no friend.

Her lips peel back over her teeth, but she doesn’t say anything further.

Not at first.

She just watches, listening, taking every word that Oceane offers and dissecting them carefully. Breach pulls them apart. Studying the entrails and the meaning behind each trapped syllable.

When Oceane finishes with her threat, there’s a pause—a breath.

And then the cracking of thunder as Breach laughs.

It’s short-lived but it comes from the depths of her chest. At once heavy and quick to escape, the laughter fades into the air around them as swiftly as it had burst from the gun barrel of her mouth.

“You’re a fool then,” she shifts again. Shedding her mother’s form and rising as herself, young and lean. Hardened and twice reborn, her dual-colored eyes so much sharper than they had been in her youth. “I would have been content to leave Loess alone. I had no designs on your abandoned kingdom. I had no interest in this echoing shell of a land.” She sniffs, glancing around them, as if to prove her point.

It is perhaps the first moment Breach does not feel like just an Alpha of the pack but Queen of the East.

“But you chose to start peace negotiations by ripping me from my home. You chose to introduce yourself by removing me by force.” It was a law of the land—a law that ran even deeper than Breach’s endless fear of letting down her mother. It was the natural order. The will of survival. “And for that, you have my attention.” Her gaze levels. “I will not tell my Kingdom any such thing, least of all when ordered.”

A step forward, the movement as graceful and feline as when she was a cat.

“And I happen to like the pressure on your throat.”

She can still smell Oceane, the faintest scent of her and she peers hard in the direction.

“So the next time your people, as few as they may be, complain of the lack of air—remember it was your decision that kept the East planted firmly on your neck. You’re the one who made me your problem.”

though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth

@[Oceane]

[Oceane]

a little white light in a
sea gone black

≋

“Oh, please.”

She holds her tongue until Breach has finished her impassioned tirade, her own succinct response punctuated with an exasperated sigh. Oceane is familiar with the show-strength-to-get-respect type - and if Breach had inherited anything from her mother aside from the tiger skin she now sheds, the Loessian Queen suspects it's that constant need to always be strong, resilient, unyielding.

“This is as polite as I get after five years of assault from the wastelands. I hardly believe a nice conversation by the lake would have done me any good, Breach. Something tells me you lack the compassion required for that.”

She sees Sochi's disdainful gaze, can feel the iciness of her glare, as the memory of their meeting in the Forest rises to the forefront of her mind.

From a bad crow, a bad egg.

The impasse they have reached is concrete. Oceane expects no more from Breach - nothing useful or productive, in any case. Not when her nature is to rise to this brief moment of supposed weakness, torn from her home to leave it unguarded, with fire in her belly and the intent to harm. Her ears are deaf to the request presented before her. Oceane knows better now - how could she expect the Queen of the East to return home having agreed to such terms?

Tchh, not a daughter of Sochi.

And in Oceane, there is no option to concede. Loess has endured too much. Its people and its nature feel the resounding pain of the past few years, and it's in this new boldness, prompted by the hand of the Fairies, that she declares no more. Breach will leave the foothills tonight - Oceane will not cage a ruthless tiger in the land inhabited by her own people - but that will not be the end of their correspondence.

“Leave. You and the East are not welcome here.”

@[breach]
“”

n | r