"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
12-02-2020, 02:10 PM (This post was last modified: 12-03-2020, 12:57 AM by 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
Breach never had any intention of being a model prisoner.
She had no intention of serving her time quietly—counting the days until she was deemed able to travel back to her home, her kingdom, and her pack. Certainly and especially not once she learned the true identity of who had done the stealing. The fact that she was now held hostage in her mother’s old home—the place where Sochi had been ripped apart by personal betrayal—did nothing to soften her.
As she walks through Loess, she shifts fluidly, once again wearing her mother’s tigress body. Once upon a time, it had been a familiar sight on these borders—patrolling the land constantly. Now, her mother lay comatose in the corner of Hyaline with her father wasting away by her side.
The thought causes her mind to nearly snap, severing in two, and she snarls as she leaps forward, bounding through the fairly empty kingdom. It takes everything within her to rein in the aggression, to hear her mother’s voice as she was being taught the art of the hunt. She wants to lay waste to the kingdom but instead she stalks quietly. She observes with a twisting in her belly, an aching in her bones.
Until she sees the silvery stallion on his own.
Then, all thoughts of decency flood from her—and nothing but the pent up aggression remains.
(Was this, perhaps, what Ghaul saw in her? Was this why he named her his heir?)
She thinks about attacking blindly. Thinks about leaping onto his back and sinking her teeth into his flesh. Thinks about shaking him like a rag doll into all of his bones break and he falls limp.
But she wants to see the look in his eyes.
And she wants him to carry the message she has for his fellow kingdom mates.
So she approaches him dead-on, her eyes hard and cold.
“Do you live here?”
If only he could know why she asks.
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
12-02-2020, 04:50 PM (This post was last modified: 12-02-2020, 05:14 PM by Mesec.)
The wonders of Beqanna fascinate Mesec and he’s been enjoying the small ways this place is different than anywhere else he has been. He had known only a small handful of shapeshifters in his life, and his own experience with that ability is clouded with guilt and pain. On this warm summer morning, those memories seem far away. They belong to another lifetime.
So he watches the tiger approach with obvious curiosity and interest, pausing in his wandering and if he thinks it strange she approaches him - it is only because he does not think himself very worthy of being approached by anyone at any given time.
As she comes over, he is not sure why he is so sure that this is a shapeshifter and not a feral tiger that he should fear - some odd combination of naivety and experience, perhaps. And then the fact that she asks a question as she stops in front of him seems to cement the idea in his mind (though he wonders, in the back of his mind, if perhaps other animals in Beqanna could speak and he had never noticed…).
It is a simple but wonderful joy to be able to say he has a home again.
His silver eyes warm with a smile and his answering tone is friendly and open. “I do indeed! My name’s Mesec. Can I help you with anything?”
12-02-2020, 05:53 PM (This post was last modified: 12-03-2020, 01:00 AM by 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
In her younger years, his kindness would have given her pause.
Would have stayed her hand.
In her younger years, she would have never dreamed of doing that which she does now.
But she is older now (old enough—hardened enough) and the world has stripped her clean of any softness that she may have truly called her own. Instead, when she looks at him and sees the same silver of her mother’s eyes peering back at her, she does not feel warmth bloom in her chest. Instead she feels the dull ache of the cold—the reminder that her mother had been nearly ripped to shreds and was but a breath away from dying. The knowledge that this death was easier than the metaphorical one Sochi had in this kingdom.
So she just smiles. The corners of her lips pulling tight.
“Good,” she says on a snarl, ignoring his question outright. Without waiting any further, she lunges forward, paws outstretched. She falls upon him heavily and feels his body collapse underneath the weight of her tigress body. All she hears is the heaviness of her breathing, the ground shifting beneath her, the thudding of her own pulse in her ears. It’s different from her hunts, but close enough that her mind snaps into that zone immediately. He is just prey. He is the deer on a foggy morning. The antelope on a hill.
She doesn’t go in for the kill, but she flirts with it.
Her jaws snap as she bites at his face, ripping the pieces she can get access to. Her claws sink into his flesh. There is the taste of copper on her tongue. The thrill of hearing bones crunch.
She sees red.
She vibrates with the anger that pulses through her.
(Is this how Ghaul felt when he tore her apart? Does Mesec feel like she did during her first death?)
When she is certain he is close to death, she stops herself. Her face is stained, her body trembling, and she pulls back just enough to catch her breath. “Tell them,” she spits as she stands over him, making sure that he was still awake. “Tell them,” she snarls again, making sure that he was conscious enough to hear what she had to say. “This will be the fate of any soul who dares call Loess home if they ever raise a hand against the East ever again.” She finds his bruised, torn gaze—searches the depths of it.
“Swear to me you’ll pass the message along.”
A pause.
“Tell them Breach sent you.”
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
Slowly, he is beginning to learn that borders mean precious little unless you say otherwise. No one tries to bar him from entering their homes and he never has to sneak his way into kingdoms. Perhaps this will change with time and a changing of thrones, but today he has chosen to explore the southern region from a comfortable altitude. He is easily spotted from the ground, in case they object to his presence, as he makes his way over the rolling hills.
Loess begins to lose his attention just as the scent of blood grows thick in his nose. He angles his wings to curve his path gently to the left until his eyes fall on the eastern queen and her prey. Crowns has gazed long into the abyss that is death and he has learned to give it more respect, but there is a certain curiosity that swells and bursts in his chest now. The temptation grows palpable in his chest.
He surrenders as he tucks his wings and dives neatly into a descent that plants him on all four hooves before the duo with hardly a sound. The bright blue of his eyes studies the torn pegasus before roaming up to the shifter. Her claws, her fangs, and her feral eyes tell him all he needs to know. She is precisely what he’s been searching for: a terrifying thing.
“You should put him back together and do it all again if you want to really send a message,” he says with an eager grin. “Or we can make him a puppet!”
Crowns exhales a plume of blue flames, then, which curl in on themselves to form the approximate outline of Mesec in miniature. Its tiny wings flap once, twice, and then the little copy vanishes in a wisp of smoke. The boy looks down at the unfortunate man, still smiling.
“What do you think? Do you want to be torn apart again or be a puppet? We can take a vote, that way we’re fair.”
Right up until it happens, Mesec isn’t expecting it. He’s had some bizarre encounters before but he has never been attacked - at least, not without cause. He tries to scramble backwards, silver eyes widening in confusion and fear, but it is too late to have any sense of caution now.
He doesn’t scream - or, at least, he tries not to. He doesn’t want to draw anyone else to them, doesn’t want to bring this pain to anyone else that calls Loess home. There is some part of his brain that tells him this is not personal, that she had only attacked when she found out he lived here. Nevermind that it had not been for very long.
When he collides with the ground - a soft cry that he immediately clamps down on all that escapes him - it feels personal enough.
The wing he lands on breaks, sharp pieces of bone protruding from the feathers and splintering his side as he lays on it. Half of his face nearly comes clean off when she bites at it, one eye going dark and blood seeping up and into the other one so that for a time he cannot see anything - the world is red and pain and he can tell where she is by what pieces of him she carves.
He stops cataloguing the damage, he cannot focus on it anymore.
All he can think about is whether this is what it was like for the young boy he had hunted. His friend, his son, who came face to face with the monster Mesec tried to keep hidden from the world. A monstrous creature, not quite bear but not quite wolf either - a warg with a wicked set of teeth and a hunger that could not be satisfied. He hadn’t been aware of his actions at the time but when that magic left him the memories were unlocked. He remembers the fear in the colt’s eyes as they fought and ran through the dark woods, remembers how he still would not stop trying to carve up that innocent boy even when Mesec's jaw had been so severely dislocated so it swung with his frantic movements. He remembers the bloodlust that flooded him and every memory of his claws and teeth tearing into flesh is paired with the feeling of what is happening to him now.
And he knows that even though this isn’t personal, that does not mean he doesn’t deserve it.
Consciousness is a slippery thing and Mesec fades in and out - coming to when she stops and speaks to him even though the pain has almost completely taken over. Her words register but not as she might have intended. A wash of sadness creeps through his mind like a tide. For his past sins and for the sins of his new home, then, and somehow it feels right. “I’m s--sor--ry.” He croaks out the words, his one working eye looking up to find her but even then the tigress is a hazy figure. He blacks out for a moment and misses the arrival of someone else, a young boy, and when he comes to he thinks it is his son. Thinks the boy he had tried to tear apart has come back to haunt him in these final moments.
The words this phantom speak don’t register with him - perhaps a small blessing. And he knows better than to ask for help from someone who he had hurt.
Mesec remembers what he was trying to say and inhales a ragged breath. “Whatever… we did. Whatever Loess did to you.” Another shaky breath, his remaining silver eye filled with more than just pain. There is a depth to it that make no sense, really. But he means the words all the same. As much as he is hurting, as much as he is alone and afraid, he cannot find it in himself to hold this act of revenge against her. It must have been terrible, what had happened, to deserve such a message. And if Breach will look, she will see sympathy in the eye of the stallion she has torn apart.
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