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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


    [private]  all I know is we're going home; Tiberios
    #1

    all I know is you're here with me

    Time.

    Despite her many protestations and great disbelief, it marches on.  She has felt the pull of it deep down in the marrow of her bones.  But because she cannot die, cannot age, even, she does not cave to its calling.  She is like a pebble stuck fast to the muddy bottom of a stream, smoothed by the water that flows ever-onward over her.  She is forced to watch it change everything and everyone around her even as she exists outside of it.  Time becomes like an enemy she cannot defeat: she cannot touch it, she cannot staunch its spill, and she cannot even defect and join it (even if she wanted to).

    Instead, the years pass around her, impervious to her existence.

    She abandons Beqanna when it becomes more than she can bear, the pain.  It is more her companion than anything else in those many years after she leaves her last hoofprints on the Ischian sand.  She finds that she is not able to outrun it, even then.  That, like time, she is powerless against it.  She lets it swarm around her head like flies, each one a different part of her home that she commits to memory again.  She lets it fill her heart like water, each drop a different face that she will never forget.  She may not see any of them again, but she will not let the pain erase them from her.

    Time becomes all that is left.

    Knowing this, realizing that empty years will be all that will greet her, Talulah follows the path back.  The air is familiar and yet different all at once.  The meadow is not where it is supposed to be.  She rolls her metallic shoulders and presses on down another trail, the distant roaring a welcome sound drawing her onward.  When her amber eyes alight on the churning water glinting in the midday sun, the once-dulled pain sharpens to a point.  She closes her eyes and draws on those memories again, loses herself in them for a time.  The cool wind could be coming down off of bruised-blue mountain faces.  The spray misting her face could be that of the winding river, her son’s favorite spot.  The gentle touch on her back could be the caress of a lover, not a leaf spiraling down from the canopy above.

    All are lost, she reminds herself and opens her eyes.  It is only the River ahead of her.  Still beautiful, but not her beautiful.  Not the kind that her soul sings for.  Not the kind that wraps around her in soft golden light or sets her passion ablaze so that she burns white-hot with it.  These things are like ghosts now, moving on but passing through her, still.

    She makes to gather it all: ghosts, memories, and will, and almost turns away.  A moment longer, she thinks, staying her feet on the saturated, mossy bank.  Her face catches the sun through the branches arcing above and she sighs.


    Talulah

    Photo by Joanna Nix


    [@ Tiberios]
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    Messages In This Thread
    all I know is we're going home; Tiberios - by Talulah - 03-05-2023, 05:00 PM



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