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    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


    She walks the night, how many hearts will die tonight [Spark]
    #1

    Bound for trouble from the start
    I've been walking through this old world in the dark

    Magnus beckons. He stands chest deep in the water, waves crashing around him but seeming to miss him altogether. Salt sprays against his buckskin figure, as he reaches for Ledger. For his son. Wearily, the broken chestnut steps into the surf. Step by shattered step, he moves towards his father. Head bent, neck curved downwards. Adaline continues to fall in slow motion from the volcano behind him, a video on constant repeat. Ellyse’s words of “I’m Sorry” stirring nothing in his cracked glass heart as they whisper through his ears. He didn’t believe her. She was nothing but the Head of Lies and Broken Hearts.

    Once he reaches where Magnus had been, he finds that he is alone. Swallowed by the sea. However he can still hear his voice and it begs him to release himself from this agony. This pain. He continues forward until his hooves can no longer touch the sandbar beneath him, his legs flail and his head sinks beneath the dark gray surface.

    The bear won’t allow it. Fighting against him, fighting for it’s life. Forcing him into the shift and instinct makes him swim back to shore. As soon as he is in the trailing surf he is back into his equine form. Drenched and spluttering seawater, gasping for air. Knowing that all he has to do is look behind him and see that Magnus is still there. This had been the fifth time today that his father had tried to drown him but it never worked. The bear was stronger then his desire to die.

    The soft sound of hooves against grains of sand makes him finally look up. A familiar face that he has not seen since Ellyse had claimed to love him. The anger moves swiftly through the caverns of his chest, remembering. The memories of the sharp pain he had felt against his heart (not beating, glossy and still) keep the flames of his rage from it. Not wanting to ever feel that sensation again. ”She lied to me.” His voice flat and his good eye dull, not looking to Spark but at the tide that swirls about his hooves.

    The wound over his heart beginning to mend but the skin is curled and ugly in it’s X formation. ”She took it. It’s gone.” Assuming that the weirdness in his breast was because of her, forgetting how the Dark God had always wanted to claim his heart. ”I tried to find it you know.” Slowly looking up at her. ”The spark.” And he laughs softly but it sounds more like a moan.

    ”Why does a man do what he mustn’t? For her. To be hers.” The words full of misery and it’s unclear exactly whose benefit they are for. Hers or his. Slowly he moves towards Spark, drawn to her heat and her flames. He does not stop until his head has pressed against her neck, the bear within too afraid of her fire to even resist. He does not pull back, wanting to burn. As Adaline’s screams fill his head. As he closes his eyes and see’s Dahmer nestled and embraced with the one he once thought was his. ”Can we rest now?” Ellyse, please. ”Can we rest?”


    Ledger



    @[Spear + Spark]
    #2
    the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
    “I don’t think you’re naive.”
    Oh but she is! Despite his gentle contradiction; she is far more naive than she cares to admit and she’d do just that, as she had with him, admit from sunup to sundown because it made no difference to her except that he knew it even if he didn’t agree with it. But she knew she was because he loved someone and she loved someone, but there was something undefinable between them that felt a little like love did.

    “What are two fools like us to do?”
    Spark had laughed then; knowing they were fools, both of them for the things that they’d said to each other that they’d likely never said to another. It was that attraction of fire and ice, opposites and extremes. As much as her heat infuriated the polar bear in him, his ice kept her flames extinguished most of the time. But the mention of fools stuck with her, long after their embrace ended and life took a sad downturn for them.

    Time passes.
    Like it always does.

    Spark spends most of her days in the company of the volcano. She grows lazy amidst it’s spewed ash and infernal heat, and much of that same ash blankets her skin so she is less a medicine hat mare and more a pale gray hump of flesh against the landscape. Spark dreams, but the dreams hold as much haze and lack of clear definition as the very air around her does. She is no seer and cannot discern meaning from the dreams she has. They are just there, companions to the murk she seems mired in.

    Something makes her stir from the murk and shrug the ash off her back.
    A scent she has not smelled in days, as if he’s been absent and elsewhere.

    “Ledger,” she murmurs to herself as her hooves carry her towards the soft sand of the shore. Spark thinks that he has not heard her because there is a look on his face that was not there before, he’s harder than she remembers him being from the last time his face bent to her neck in friendly tenderness. He spits a sharp accusation that makes her pin her ears flat against her poll as she stares at him but he refuses to meet her mismatched gaze, staring at the tide swirling around their feet.

    She knows who he refers to; his beloved but she finds it hard to believe that the mare lied to him. Except she has no idea the things that transpired elsewhere, as she is rather sheltered the longer she refuses to leave the Tephran lands. (She tells herself it’s because she might miss Giver coming back again if she goes off to the meadow or forest, or even the field for a short trip. Spark knows better though, deep down, in the marrow of her bones that she just doesn’t leave because she’s afraid of going.) She cannot even begin to ask him the how or the why of it as he goes on about it being gone and her having taken it. Then he mentions looking for the spark, and she thinks that almost was a joke if not for the pained moan that left his lips.

    Spark meets his gaze but holds it only for a moment before her eyes drift down to the big X marking his chest. It concerns her, for it mimics the jagged lightning bolt of knit flesh that formed a scar where the buffalo had gored her mother. She knows the tale of it, that Scalped had died that day then came back to life hours or days later, immortal ever after. It had been a pivotal moment for the original medicine hat mare that Spark bore resemblance to out of all her siblings, half or full. It is how she knows that something pivotal had occurred to him, besides the manner in which he talks, as if crazed.

    “Ledger,” she tries again, just as soft as before but more pointedly.
    Except he goes on and on, and she can feel his pain tenfold as he talks. Spark doesn’t fully understand, nor does she pretend to as he moves to rest his head against her neck. She can feel his eyes close against her skin, the lightest fluttering of motion like a butterfly coming in to rest and he then asks that very thing - “Can we rest now?” and there is something childish and alarming in his plea that makes her heart go out to him.

    “What happened?”
    She tries to ask, knowing that she is about to touch upon a hurt greater than the one she has known. Spark cannot imagine what he has been through, what malicious turn of events has unfolded to leave him like this - this was not the Ledger she knew, the gentle one-eyed stallion that had swallowed her own hurts as much as she had swallowed his. She knows this will be a hard tale for him to tell - if he tells it, and she thinks to snatch back her question but her neck bends round to land her nose against his shoulder. Warm breath after warm breath is blown out upon his skin as her lips press chaste kisses to the cracked skin.
    Spark
    #3

    Ledger

    His words are meaningful but lost on her. She does not understand (cannot understand) and yet he presses his face against the warm supple flesh of her neck. Breathing her in and for a moment… For a moment… She is Ellyse and he shudders into her fur. Breathing her in, his lips finding warm skin with a soft kiss of longing. And then it comes rushing back and he rolls his head against her, a soft moan grumbling from deep within his chest.

    ”It’s gone. It’s done.” He tries, tries to grasp the thin spider web of his thoughts and memories. Memories of the Dark God and his cruelty had reached new heights this time. All the magic that had befallen his fate was nothing to the casual way he had pulled the wool from his eyes. The way he had exposed his love for what it was… Nothing. A joke. Tainted.

    ”Love is nothing. Nothing.” He hisses into her jaw, pulling away sharply as the anger grows once more in his chest. His whole body vibrating with rage as sharp claws break through solid hooves and teeth slip from beneath his upper lip. Half bear, half equine. All anger and disjointed thoughts. ”She will come for me…. She will come for me…” He whispers to himself, mumbling low as he turns back to the ocean. As the salt and sea spray against his open chest, closing his eyes and sighing softly. ”No she won’t.”

    The childish laughter falling from his lips, giggling at his pain. At what he has become. ”I keep trying to die but they won’t take me.” He laughs, laughs at the absurdity of how the ocean spits him back out. As the bear refuses to be beaten. Even now he sees Magnus, beckoning to come to a peaceful sleep that he can’t find. ”Do you see him?” He whispers, the good eye bright only for a second. The swirling emptiness of his glass heart making him ache with a longing he can’t put a finger on.

    ”She won’t have me. Death won’t have me.”  A pause as he turns back to her. ”I see them. I see showers. I see stars.” Leaning back into her, searching the warmth of her body as if she holds all the answers he can’t unearth from his scorched mind. ”I see sparks.”

    No sleep tonight
    I'll keep driving down these dark highway lines



    @[Spear + Spark]
    #4
    the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
    Spark cannot even begin to understand all the events that have transpired since she saw him last. Rumor has it, because there are always rumors of course, that he had been involved in something momentous and dark that had not only torn the heart from his chest but torn him from his beloved’s side. She cannot help the little thrill of knowledge that licks along her bones like tiny flames that he came to her; he could have chosen someone else to bring his broken and battered self but he came to her - to Spark.

    The press of his face to her neck is glorious, and she cannot help how she delights in it. She can feel him taking in a breath and part of her is smart enough to know that he doesn’t see or feel her against him, he feels his beloved as much as Spark pines for her own disastrous first (and what she had so foolishly hoped would be her last!) love. Ledger is not Giver, no matter how much she wants to believe it as he thinks of Ellyse and his lips find her skin in a kiss.

    It feels as if the kiss of longing he left in her fur had sunk deeper than that through the layers of hair and epidermis until it laid like a balm against her own cracked heart and began to heal it. She may not be Ellyse. He may not be Giver. But there has always been something between them; the polar bear’s cold and her hot, hot fire. Opposites, and attraction. She thinks of this as he groans, comes back to himself and she senses a small thread of disappointment - Spark was not who he had been thinking of and strangely, she is okay with that. She is whomever and whatever he needs in that moment, she can give him that much at least.

    “It’s gone. It’s done.”
    Spark has no idea what he is referencing but the pain in his voice is unmistakable. She is hesitant to answer him as he blazes on, all the pain and the hurt that he has suffered manifesting itself in a rage that works along his body until bits of the polar bear begin to break free of his horse-skin. Spark thinks it is wise to back up a step, feeling the swift kick of her fire mimicry inside her as it rolls along her bones, begging to burn the skin off them and set her free. She fights it, tries to tamp it back down into a low simmer as he shakes her off to stare out at the sea and mumble to himself.

    “Maybe because you are not meant to die at the moment? Maybe there is more for you here…” it is a light suggestion that falls from her unsmiling lips. She cannot smile at a time like this, in the fact of his lunatic laughter and babbling. Then he asks her if she can see him and she sees nothing in the sea but the waves and the spindrift atop them. “No, I don’t.” she murmurs sadly, because she is at a loss as to how to help him further - Ledger is broken in a manner that is beyond her, but he comes back to her, nestles into her side and she’s not sure if he feels as small as a foal beneath the weight of the things that he sees, or if he’s coming back to himself as the stallion.

    She decides that it doesn’t matter; her slim nose finds his skin, is mindful of the tears in it, as it skims along his neck with all the weight of a tremulous untamed bird. Spark can give him this much - she can give him all that she is, herself and that alone should count for something. Hearts be damned, she thinks.
    Spark


    @[Ledger] sorry for the wait! <3




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