"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
03-27-2023, 10:07 PM (This post was last modified: 04-07-2023, 11:30 PM by Ryatah.)
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
She should be used to changing by now.
Hundreds of years of existence, and never has she stayed the same. Everyone—everything—changes eventually; even the stone cannot withstand an eternity of water without transforming in some way.
But change is never quite so slow for her. Always it comes to her suddenly and violently, never giving her the option to try and sidestep it, or at least take some semblance of control of it. This change is different, though, and she finds it unsettling. Outwardly, she had not changed — still the same porcelain-white skin, the same wings trailing the same stardust, the same halo illuminating the same impossibly dark eyes.
The same, except it feels like there is something alive just beneath her skin, something both alien and familiar, something that is never should be hers yet belongs solely to her all the same. She knows magic—she has been killed and healed and destroyed and loved by it—but she cannot recognize it when it is her own. She was never meant to hold any kind of power, and always there would be a part of herself that is hard-wired to reject having it.
The change feeds the restlessness, lets it fester into recklessness, and she finds herself in the Dale.
She had told herself there would be nothing for her here. The Dale was a part of her past that she had left behind—bloodied crown and all—and there was little reason to come here again. Her love for the Valley had always been stronger than what she had felt for the Dale, and she knows herself well enough to accept that really the only reason any kind of fondness for this place had survived all these years is because it reminds her of him; he had given her the crown, and here he had started their game that didn’t appear to have an end.
But when she finds herself surrounded by mountains and staring at a mirror-glass lake it is not being in the Dale that makes her heart twist painfully in her chest, but the similarities that it bears to Hyaline instead.
She stands there staring at the lake—the same lake? She can’t be sure—as the sun sinks lower in the sky, unsure whether to leave or stay.
She’s lingered here in the Dale since that day she had wandered in. There is something about this place that sings to her of possibilities. Perhaps she would have felt the same if she had wandered into any of the other lands, perhaps it is just a coincidence and nothing even remotely resembling fate. Whatever it is, it is both exciting and calming all at once. It whispers to her of a life, that she can still begin any time she wishes and the past does not need to be all that she is.
Beyza does not need a reason to stay but she fabricates some anyway, as though expecting her presence to be questioned (though why she expects this, and who she expects to be interrogating her, she cannot say). The most common excuse for lingering ends up being spotted one day as the sun sets - and a genuine feeling of joy lights within her when she recognizes Ryatah down by the lake.
Seeing the angelic mare here brings the similarities between this place and Hyaline into sharper focus. The terrain around them is rockier than it had been but it is easier to believe that this place was somehow born of that other kingdom, easier to think that they are there now as Beyza moves with enthusiasm along the shore of the lake.
Although being blank-faced is her natural state, it is effortless for Beyza to maintain the smile as the distance disappears and it adds warmth to her voice. “Hi Mom.” That word comes naturally now, and is much lighter on her tongue than that first time she had spoken it - teleporting into Hyaline covered in Gale’s blood. She was so fortunate to have three parents who loved her and it is so strange now to think of how she had distanced herself from that fact.
When she reaches out to bump her muzzle against Ryatah, she gets a strange feeling - like something has changed.
But as they stand here, among so much change, she is not yet sure how to pull apart that sensation and voice it. So instead she lets it simmer in the back of her mind, and instead asks - “Have you been here before?”
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
She feels the presence of Beyza just before she actually speaks, and while there are a multitude of reasons for why she might have sensed her so easily—nearly a lifetime of blindness that left her especially attuned to her surroundings, or perhaps a side effect of the magic that she had unknowingly stolen—she likes to attribute it instead to a motherly instinct. Though she had never considered herself a particularly good mother, she loved all of her children fiercely, and Beyza is no exception, even if the circumstances surrounding her creation were unusual. She had not carried her the way she had all of her other children, and she had not been born of corrupted romance, but she is hers all the same.
When she turns to fix her eyes on her daughter’s familiar face there is already a smile fitted to her lips, relieved that for once they are finding each other under mostly normal circumstances; Beyza is not trying to solve the mystery of why Este was on the brink of death during the eclipse, nor is she covered in Gale’s blood. “Beyza,” she murmurs her name, a motherly caress around each syllable as she reaches forward without hesitation to brush her nose against her cheek. “It’s good to see you.”
“A version of it, yes,” she says in response to her question, once again taking in the rugged peaks, limned by an alpenglow as the sun begins to slowly sink behind the mountain range. “This is the Dale. It’s not exactly as it was back when I was queen; at least, I don’t think it is. It’s been so long, I’m sure my memory of it isn’t reliable.” For over half her rule she had been blind anyway—her memory of the Dale is fractured and bloodied, with most of it cast into shadow. She remembered the sounds and the smells more than she remembered the mountains and meadows.
Looking back to the lake, she cannot keep the almost wistfulness from her voice when she says, “It reminds me of Hyaline, now. I guess I’m surprised by how much I miss that place.”
With Ryatah, she is filled with both affection and an ease that tells her she can be herself - no monitoring her movements and blinks - and while she might have assumed these things would clash, they find an equilibrium.
So though her eyes do not blink, there is a warm-enough smile in them that helps to soften her would-be blunt response to Ryatah being surprised over how much she missed Hyaline. “That’s not so surprising.” Her gaze drifts up momentarily, follows Ryatah’s and traces the peaks of the mountains around them.
“It was your home amidst all the chaos, was it not? Through eclipses and death and birth.” And whatever else her mother might have lived through - because of course Beyza only knows pieces. She assumed it was normal to feel an attachment to a place where you lived once - despite the fact that she had done her best to purge herself of all sentimentality towards Pangea or Ischia. They were simply places to her, they held no magic - or at least none she wished to revisit.
She wanted something different now, even if she was still working out just what that was exactly.
“I can’t imagine how strange it would be to somewhere that is somehow both the Dale and Hyaline.” Beqanna always seemed to be in flux, but in the history that she has experienced that must be a new one.
“Ischia is gone so I’ve actually been thinking of living here instead. But maybe that is just your blood in my veins.” She says and her grin brightens a little more at the half-jest as her bright eyes meet Ryatah's once more.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
Much like her heart, she has made her home in too many different places, and not all of them inspired a lasting fondness.
There had been the shore and the jungle in the world before here—so long ago she hardly remembers it—and then of course the Valley and the Dale, and later Tephra, Taiga, Hyaline, and the Pampas. It would come as no surprise that nearly everywhere she had lived she had been led there by her foolish heart.
The Valley and Dhumin. Tephra and Skellig. Taiga and Illum.
And of course, Hyaline and Atrox.
“Hyaline felt like home because of Atrox,” she answers with an almost melancholy kind of smile. It had not mattered who had led the land; it had always felt like theirs, and theirs alone. Hyaline was beautiful, but many places were beautiful. The Valley had been where her roots first planted in Beqanna, where she had first learned what it meant to belong somewhere, but Hyaline is where her heart had finally learned a new, unbroken beat. “Which means he can make somewhere else feel like home just as easily, but it’s hard to let go of something I had let myself grow accustomed to. Which is my own fault; I know what this place is like.” Getting attached to anything here was dangerous; unless you were addicted to heartbreak.
When Beyza mentions Ischia she reaches to once again touch her nose to her shoulder. She is not sure just how attached Beyza had been to the island territory, or if she even harbored any kind of fondness for it still at all; perhaps the memory of the place was now tainted with blood and her daughter was glad for it to rest beneath the sea forever. “The Dale is a beautiful place, and it has always been an admirable kingdom. I think you would like it.” She herself did not plan on staying. Perhaps for a little while, but the Dale had never truly felt like home —not even with her blood spilled across its ground—and seeing the similarities to Hyaline only seemed to twist the knife lodged in her chest. If it was not coming back, it would be easier to not see pieces of it everyday.
“I haven’t really decided where I might go,” she muses aloud. She does not want to admit that she is still clinging to the fragile hope that the Valley or Hyaline might return, and that because of this she is hesitant to dedicate herself to any one place just yet. “But it’s nice knowing I have old and familiar options.”
Ryatah explains that her sentimentality about Hyaline was tied to someone else, and Beyza nods as though she, too, understands. She listens, and wonders just how many times Beqanna has reshaped itself so that Ryatah has learned not to grow attached to somewhere that physically exists and, by all reasonable accounts, should therefore be unmoveable.
With the sort of attachment Ryatah and Atrox have, they do not need to settle anywhere at all - maybe they would be just be content with themselves, wherever that might be. But Beyza feels like she needs a home, she needs to find new soil to dig her roots into and find out how she might blossom anew.
Instead of asking more about the lands, her curiosity about her mother’s relationship gets the better of her. A general sort of curiosity, that is - she feels no need to pry into the details. “What’s it like, having someone who can turn anywhere into home?” She isn’t sure whether it’s something that can even be described but Beyza sees no harm in asking Ryatah this. She knows the same can be said of her other parents, and she could ask them as well. There has just always been a closeness with Ryatah - likely born from sharing a secret with her from a very young age. Agetta still, as far as Beyza knows, is not aware that Plume is not biologically Beyza’s father (even if it matters only in a vague sense, the trio of them have always collectively been her parents).
And it’s been on her mind, lately - that absence in her life. The type she cannot just conjure with her magic, the type that requires socializing in a manner she just has not been bothered to in quite some time. She is not even sure whether she is capable of a love that could feel like home - tethering herself to someone else had not worked out well for her as a youth.
who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?
The question that Beyza asks is not one she had ever expected to have an answer to.
Not because she did not think she would ever find love—that has never been a problem for her. She has lost more love than others could ever dream to even find, and as insatiable and selfish as she was, she so often continued to look for more.
Atrox had proven himself to be different. Not just because he stayed—there had been others willing to stay, but like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, she was the one that had not lasted, her attention always drifting to someone else. When you have been broken beyond repair it is nearly impossible to find a singular thing that can fix you, and there has always been a part of her that knew that. She took pieces of what she needed from each of them, and never had she expected to find anyone that would render it all useless.
Atrox had stayed, but more importantly, he had convinced her to stay, without actually trying,
“Truth be told, I’m still not used to it,” she says with a disbelieving shake of her head. She had not known it was possible to have such unshakable faith in someone while simultaneously always expecting them to leave. “But, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Beqanna never stays the same, but it’s nice knowing that despite it all, Atrox doesn’t change.” She pauses, taking a moment to look closely at Beyza, before adding gently, “If that is something you hope to have one day, I promise you will find it.”
Beyza
