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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


    [open]  Fé vældr frænda róge; Iris
    #1
    What am I supposed to do when I want to talk about peace and understanding
    But you only understand the language of violence?
    And so Death made good on His promise, Sol slept peacefully every night in The Chamber—aided by whatever other Gods took pity on her and her kinsmen by placing her in the path of Tatter.  She didn’t remember being picked apart by monsters, didn’t remember being stolen away; as far as the filly knew, her mother must have been extremely sick and had decided she could no longer care for her.  There was that nasty plague not so long ago.
     
    Sol sighed, knocking off an orange leaf that had fallen in the night and landed on her nose.  She stretched out her spindly legs, grunting, then rolled and pushed herself up to stand.  It was starting to get colder, even during the day, and she sucked in a deep breath before exhaling and marveling at the wisps of warmth billowing up from her nostrils.  It almost looked like smoke.
     
    Aside from Tatter, the roan child hadn’t really seen much of anyone else in The Chamber; she heard the wolves calling out at night, listened to the ravens squawk and squabble in the morning, and just yesterday she had huddled in a withering blackberry bush while a massive drove of elk made their way across the territory.
     
    Other horses, though?
     
    She pressed on through the forest, her dry mouth drawing her towards the sound of a rumbling river.  The water itself was cold and crisp, filling her empty belly with a strange chill, though she paid it no mind—her mismatched eyes remained fixed on the charred pine tree just on the other side.  There was something… different, about it.  She couldn’t quite place it.  It wasn’t the victim of some rogue pyrokinetic.  No, she was certain of that.  There was something special about the tree and the scaly girl needed to get a closer look.
     
    Though it took most of the morning and some of the afternoon, Sol found a short stretch of river that was narrow enough and not too dangerous to cross.  She shivered, her teeth chattering as she waded through the water, though she walked across boulders that lay on the riverbed and the water only came up to her knees.
     
    The filly pressed on, charging down the riverbank in spite of the cold; she wasn’t sure how far down the river she had to go just to make it across, but leaping over driftwood and weaving between rocks and shrubs felt like it took no time at all before she saw the old pine come back into view.  Grinning with childish delight, she slowed her pace and slowly crept toward her destination.  Though Nocturnal had tried to recall all the intricate twists and turns of their family history, her mind was befuddled with magic and decades apart from her older sister meant she knew little to nothing about her beloved sibling’s children.  Sol stared up at the charred tree admiringly, her mismatched eyes wide with awe.
     
    “What sort of magic made this?” She wondered aloud, carefully circling around as if she wanted to inspect this wonderful new anomaly in her world from every angle.  “They must have been very powerful.”
    sol
    No Crosses Count x Nocturnal


    [@ Iris]
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    #2

    iris

    The ravens. They were everywhere in the Chamber. Sometimes Iris could swear their eyes looked like her mother’s, like somehow Straia has been able to reach across the afterlife and still touch the land of the living. Perhaps she could with the power Beqanna had given her, magic that belonged to the heart of Beqanna herself. Was there a  tether between her mother’s tree and her mother. Was her lingering, not as a ghost that Iris could communicate with - at least, not in any way she’d yet figured out - but in some other way? Iris felt watched, which was both a good thing and unnerving all at once. Iris had a good relationship with her mother, who was never overbearing but rather sought to teach her children not to need her at all.

    At the same time though, it made her feel like a child, wondering if her mother would be proud of the mare she had become. Probably, for Straia asked for little of her children besides their own independence and their own sense of power, both of which Iris had in spades. Still, she was not her mother, and she wasn’t sure she would ever live up the legacy that Straia left behind. Did her mother want such a thing? Was her mother even watching her, or was she just watching the Chamber itself? After all, her mother had lived and bled and died for this land.

    Iris weaves her way through the pine forest, a place that has strangely felt like home to her since she stepped foot in the newly resurrected Chamber, but that is becoming more familiar with each passing day. The voices of the ghosts here are her constant companions, and she recognizes them by sound and they no longer need to give them her names. They whisper secrets at her, tugging at her attention, but today she wants to visit the burning tree. It had been nothing but a charred thing, a remnant of its former glory, until Iris had gone to the Mountain to claim her mother’s magic entity. Now it burned brightly, a never ending fire so long as the entity remained here. Strange that magic that belonged here could be moved, and yet it could.

    Iris apparently is not alone in her plans today, though she imagines the girl is not here for the same reasons. Iris wants to see whether or not she can somehow communicate with her mother here. She wants to see if her mother is in fact watching them though the beady black eyes of the ravens here, a few of which she can see perched in trees nearby. Some watch the two girls, some watch the fire, and some are clearly looking for their next meal. But it seems that, at least for right now, Iris would not be trying to talk to her dead (probably dead, it was hard to be certain) mother.

    Instead she catches the girl’s musing. Though she had not been here for it, Straia had given Iris plenty of history lessons, and so she is not entirely ignorant. ”Once the lands of Beqanna were magical. Each kingdom had its own magic - magic that could not be stolen or traded or given away. The Chamber had an ever burning pine tree that, for the price of a little blood, would tell you the future,” Iris says as she strolls lazily toward the filly, coming to stop near the tree. “Beqanna took all of her magic back though, for the horses of Beqanna had gotten too out of control. They had to earn magic back, but the lands were forever changed. They no longer had their own magic, but one day Beqanna brought back a few of its dead and they were given extraordinary power. The magic left in the lands is the remnant of their power. The tree burns now because of my mother’s magic, so long as her entity stays within this kingdom. It grants those who seek it their own small power and offers some measure of prophecy, though I gather it’s not quite the same as it once was.”



    @ Sol
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