• Logout
  • 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]  hiding in plain sight; adna
    #1










    Okay, so things are going pretty well, right?

    Granted, my measuring stick of “things going well” is pretty flawed. Anything where I’m not being hunted or tortured or chewed on by my family falls under the category of “pretty well”. I know that my mother and sister are lurking around because I’ve smelt the acidity of their blood in the forest, which of course encouraged me to steer clear of that area. Of course they would hunt there, where their bizarre armoured bodies are shielded by the dense trees.

    If they are around that means my other mother is around as well, and her silence is more alarming to me than her presence.

    Which is all a round about way of saying I’ve been avoiding the forest with all of my abilities.

    Although I feel very naked and exposed in the meadow, I feel like it is my favourite place so far. For one, I’m easy to spot so if no one wants to come over and say hello they really don’t have to. And for another, I can feel the sunshine on my whole body here. Feel it between the cracks of my bones where they jut out through my skin and feel it on my hollow face. The sun makes me feel alive.

    Which is very, very important when you look like death.

    It’s a sunny autumn morning and autumn has this funny habit of not making me feel so bad about myself. The world is full of colours but not in the way spring and summer are with their vibrancy. Somehow I match this season pretty well. Right now I’m just standing in the middle of the meadow, away from the trees and where the long autumn-gold grass reaches past my knees and can almost tickle my belly (if I had one).

    Although I feel the urge to run and play, I just pause and close my eyes for a few minutes and focus instead on breathing. What a wonderful thing to be alive.




    photo from unsplash


    @[adna] LATE but I hope you still don't mind me starting a thread for them!! <3333
    Reply
    #2

    and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
    ‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

    Adna keeps to herself most days.

    Mostly because she doesn’t trust the hunger that has continued to grow. Some days it feels physical in the way that it rumbles through her. She can barely think around it; she can barely think around the way that it grips her stomach and causes her entire body to clench. She imagines the look in her father’s eye when the body was crumpled at his feet. She remembers the lessons that are now branded int he back of her throat and she hates herself for the curiosity that has begun to blossom in her chest day by day.

    She avoids others because she can’t stop imagining what it would be to sink her fangs in them.

    She imagines what it would be like the watch the poison take hold.

    She imagines, she imagines—

    She wants to scream until her throat is raw. She wishes the darkness would take her because it would be better than admitting she is not as good as she thought. This world is not as kind and she is not as gentle and she is not destined for the sweetness of her mother. She is her father’s daughter. She is the cursed.

    It is all she can think about until she runs into the wendigo.

    He is alien and unfamiliar and she pauses, her scaled leg rising and then falling back to the earth. She angles her head toward him, serpentine eyes narrowing in thought. On the outside, he is everything that she feels on the inside and she has no way of knowing that the sunshine of his heart was far too good for hers to ever comprehend. All she knows is that she looks and sees a mirror reflected back at her.

    It sucks the air from her lungs and leaves her motionless, enraptured and alive with it.

    adna

    we're setting fire to our insides for fun
    collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home



    @[Velkan]
    Reply
    #3










    I can hear someone moving nearby but I don’t open my eyes just yet - the moment I’m experiencing is just too perfect, and I don’t know that this someone is going to even stop. Maybe they’re looking for an excuse to stop and stare for a minute before moving on - I’ll save us both the embarrassment that would come if their gawking was caught. It makes my insides churn like worms to think about it because I can imagine the look well - a look of pity touched with a flash of fear.

    It’s what my appearance inspires and there’s nothing I can do to change it. So sometimes it’s easier to pretend to be asleep until they move on.

    But the hoofbeats stop and don’t start up again, so I sneak a look.

    As soon as I do, the mare standing there has my complete and full attention - and my black eyes snap wide open and I turn to face her more completely. I’m a little sunblind from having my closed eyes tilted towards the bright sun for a while, so there’s pink dots dancing in the air around her. It takes me a second to realize that the scales on her body aren’t another side-effect of the sunblindness and my fathomless, shadowy gaze lights up in a brilliant smile.

    “Oh hey there! I love your scales!”

    And I did - holy crap did I ever. Those scales are easily the coolest things I have ever seen.





    photo from unsplash


    @[adna]
    Reply
    #4

    and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
    ‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

    The second that he opens his mouth, all hopes are dashed in the kindness that floods out from him.

    Her serpentine eyes narrow and she exhales, letting loose a breath she didn’t even realize that she had been holding. For a second—a beautiful and brilliant moment—she had thought that maybe she had been able to find her counterpart in another. She had thought that she had found someone who reflected the darkness in her own heart and who could maybe understand the poisonous shadows that wrap around it.

    “Oh,” she breathes and can barely hide the bitter disappointment that seeps into her voice. It doesn’t make any sense and she knows that. She knows that it makes no sense for her to be so disappointed with the fact that he is kind and cheerful and so quickly embraces her into a conversation.

    “Thank you,” the words are right but they are stiff and stale in her mouth and she forces them out. “I don’t think I’ve ever been complimented on them,” this is more genuine and she glances down, frowning at the way the sun catches off them. When she had been young, she had loved the fact that she looked so much like her father but he had been so quick to inform her that it was a curse—and who was she to disagree?

    “I like…” her voice trails off and she gives a weak smile, “well, I like all of it.” She just gestures to all of the darkness and blackness that makes him up and then sighs. “You’re unlike anything I’ve seen.”

    She frowns and then looks to the ground, unsure why she was here and why she was bothering him.

    adna

    we're setting fire to our insides for fun
    collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home



    @[Velkan]
    Reply
    #5










    Luckily for everyone, or maybe just luckily for me, I haven’t been allowed to interact with a whole lot of other people in the past before so I miss the hints of disappointment in the scaled mare’s voice when she replies back to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong – for a brief second there she reminds me of my mother – but the moment passes and I don’t connect the disappointment in one voice with the disappointment in another from my pass.

    I just focus on her other words. I’m a little sad to hear that no one else has complimented her scales before – it makes me want to go up to everyone she has ever met and ask them why. Didn’t they see how totally cool she looked? Why wouldn’t you want to tell someone that?

    It’s my turn to be startled when she gives a small smile and says that she likes all of me. Poor kid, must be a little blind. When she says I’m unlike anything she’s ever seen, I grin a little crooked smile at her. “Well I sure hope so. Could you imagine what this place would look like if there were more than one of me running around?” I lapse into silence for a minute because I am picturing it, and it’s pretty awful.

    “Thanks for saying you like it though.” I glance backwards at my self, frowning a little as I do so. There isn’t much for anyone to like, but I suppose she was just being nice. “I’m not a big fan.”


    photo from unsplash


    @[adna]
    Reply
    #6
    ADNA

    I wish I could take the hands of time and turn them in reverse
    I'd take back every long goodbye with venom in my words

    If she had known just how different the two of them would be once trapped in this conversation, perhaps she would have run in the other direction. But there’s not much she can do when she’s standing here before him and she realizes he has sunshine pouring out of his veins, his heart so much larger than hers.

    “I don’t think that would be so bad,” she says with a half-smile, her fangs showing briefly behind her lips. She can imagine worse things than a world filled with monsters and the things that make others jump. Maybe she wouldn’t feel so alone if she knew she could look in each direction and find someone like her.

    But he clearly has other things in mind so she doesn’t push the subject.

    It’s easier for her to fall into silence anyway.

    She nods at his thanks, just shrugging her shoulder in her way of saying no problem before her frown deepens—something like understanding flashing across her features since the first time he began to talk.

    “Why not?” she asks before she shakes her delicate, scaled head.

    “Nevermind. I know exactly what it’s like to not be a fan of yourself.”

    She knew what it was to wake up in the morning and hate the reflect—to stare at it and wish that it would change. To wish yourself into a different body, a different life, a different story altogether.

    “I wish you didn’t have to know that too.”

    the only way to being found is getting lost at first
    but all I find are more bridges to burn



    @[Velkan]
    Reply
    #7










    I catch sight of her fangs, but it’s so brief of a glimpse that I wonder if I have hallucinated it. Could someone else out there really be a horse with a set of fangs? My tongue gently touches the edges of the shiny black teeth that my own mouth houses, teeth made for flesh, not flowers.

    I want to ask her about them, but how do you even go and bring that up? I’m sure I’ll blurt it out with no tact later on.

    “Right back at you.” I smile, though it’s small and sad. “But…” I don’t have the right words to say exactly what I’m feeling right now. It’s strangely comforting to know that this scaled mare is also of a similar mind to me. I’m not alone in not embracing the so-called gifts that I was born with. I wonder if she’s embraced hers more than I have, or if she simply uses them out of necessity like me as well. “Well, it’s nice to meet another monster.”

    The word is gentle on my tongue with an almost-joking turn to it. I would never in a million years use that term to describe a friend (and, like it or not, this snake-girl is now a friend). Still, it echoes so often in my mind when I think about myself. About the parts of me that I shove deep down and ignore whenever I make a new friend.

    My smile widens a little more, hoping to show her that I really don’t mean anything cruel by my word choice. This time, my own fangs show a little – gleaming and midnight-black like everything else about me. As if they could say ‘see? Me too.’

    “I’m Velkan. What’s your name?”


    photo from unsplash


    @[adna]
    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)