"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
Old kingdoms have risen – is that why she’s here?
She, child of queens-turned-entities, is an embodiment of kingdoms. Or she is supposed to be. Craft said as much, telling tales of the Deserts. You’re like them, she said, you’re good.
Is she?
She hasn’t had a chance to be anything but good, kept in her sterile life, as it’s been. She’d left Beqanna, when she’d had the chance, but had returned – as most of them do – pulled back by some magnetic field, the way monarchs migrate, pulled by something so deep and intrinsic that even generations who have never seen their homeland know what path to go.
Old kingdoms have risen – but not hers. Not the one she is supposed to be meant for.
You’re good, she thinks to herself. And she certainly looks the part, gold as she is, able to shift herself into something even more beautiful. An angel in her bones, the sands at her beck and call, she’s a thing made for a dead kingdom and now adrift.
She goes to the river. She likes the abundance of water, likes the richness of it.
She steps in, the water splashing at her ankles, her knees. She imagines stepping in further, letting the current take her, carry her somewhere else – all the way to the sea, maybe, where she could be lost in its vastness.
But she doesn’t go further. Not yet. She stands, quiet, and lets the cool water soothe her.
i'm torn from the truth that holds my soul i'm down in the grave where I belong --
It’s a strange thing, to be both a monster and invisible.
There is no shortage of fearsome creatures in this land, he has learned; he is hardly unique in that sense, and he tries to find relief in that. There are just as many beautiful things as there are horrific ones—a demon for every angel, an antidote for every poison. It’s the balance of Beqanna, to overflow with all things wonderful and strange, and because of this so few notice the peculiar boy (hardly a boy anymore, though; he has grown tall and his face has lost the softness of adolescence, but in his mind he is still young and lost) that clings to the shadows.
He has been alone now for longer than he can remember, having long since been cast aside by his mother. He was not enough like her—in appearance, yes, but not enough in the mind. Only half a hunting machine, and half wasn’t good enough. Where Ripley mostly only craved the hunt, Fret craved companionship; when he was not hungry his mind wandered to other things, often distracted by the sounds of conversation.
Unfortunately, he has never been able to shake the feeling of being an outcast.
Unable to keep pace with the monsters, unable to blend with the rest of the crowd.
Self-imposed isolation had become his norm.
He is standing just down river when the sound of someone entering the water drags his attention from the current he had been absentmindedly staring at, and immediately he goes rigidly still. From where he stands he can just barely make out her figure between the leafy limbs of the trees that shaded this side of the bank, and that familiar longing in his chest flares to life. He follows that feeling, cautiously pulling away from the river to round the other side of the trees, until she is in plain sight. “Hello,” he say, the simple greeting sounding rough on his little-used tongue. He does not come any closer, his knife-tail lowered and still, as if that could somehow make his overall appearance less threatening.
She sees him in the distance, dark and tall and strange, and she is intrigued. They are nothing alike – not in appearance, at least – and she likes that. She is sick of herself and her own tiresome company, and something in her longs for a sharp edge to test herself again.
So when he calls out her ears flick eagerly to catch the sound of his voice, the words just audible above the sound of the current. A simple greeting, but enough of an invitation for her to shift her body, to better face him, waiting for a moment to see if he will come closer.
“Hello,” she calls back, and still, he does not move, so she moves instead. She steps out from the river, water dripping from her ankles, and she walks toward him.
She takes him in as she moves closer, curious by the new planes of him – she was built as an embodiment of some old kingdom, and he was built as…as what? A monster, maybe, but Sacrifice has so little experience with monsters that the word doesn’t come to mind.
“Hello,” she says again, in case he hadn’t heard her the first time – she’d been so far away – and then, with the guilelessness of the young and sheltered, she adds, “you’re very beautiful.”
i'm torn from the truth that holds my soul i'm down in the grave where I belong --
To him, they are all beautiful.
Maybe some more than others, but it’s not just that they are beautiful—they are right, acceptable. He had been very young when he first realized that he and his family were the outliers—the strange creatures that did not behave the way the others did. The language his mother spoke was entirely different from everyone else, which only further set him apart. He remembers how clumsy words had felt on his tongue when he had first learned to speak, how it confused him that everyone else seemed to grasp so easily. He looked different, he was raised different, and he did not speak like the rest of them, and to him, that rift felt impassable.
It is still there, in his mind at least, between the two of them. Even when she turns and leaves the river, even when she steps towards him, the distance between them never disappears. She speaks her own greeting, says the very same word he had said, and somehow makes it sound entirely different; smooth and clear, like the word is spun of silk, and not the coarse gravel that his tongue turns it into.
She calls him beautiful, and he does not know how to fill the silence that builds.
His thoughts seem to tangle around each other, and even if he had been better at speaking he is not sure if they ever would have made it into sensical words. He wants to argue with her, or thank her, or maybe deflect and tell her that no, she is the beautiful one. “I don’t think so,” he finally says, the sentence halting and uncertain. It is not really an insecurity; he just knows that he is harsh-looking and strange, and not at all like the things he has been taught are beautiful.
“My name is Fret,” he tells her, studying her face perhaps a little too closely. He always does that, when he actually works up the nerve to speak to someone. “Why were you in the river?”
