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  • 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]  stagnant.
    #1



    It’s hard to believe just how much time has passed since she had crash-landed here, since her body had violently shook her out of the form of a mountain lion and back into that of a pegasus. She thinks that this form, this horse form, is her natural one – but what if it’s not? What if it’s just another form that she has taken? It’s easy to think that this is where she began because horses are everywhere here and it would make sense for this to be home.

    It kills her that there isn’t anything that she knows. It’s all assumptions, all echoes of a life she no longer remembers.

    Maybe it is a blessing that she doesn’t but she can’t help but feel that even knowing that something awful had chased her out of where she began is better than where she is now.

    At least then she would know her name, know who her parents were.

    She’s back where she first arrived, in the exact spot. Her scent and those of the two stallions that had come to help her are gone now but she remembers it all the same. Her storm-ocean eyes have their usual intense focus even though her mind is somewhere else.

    Once, she hoped that someone would be able to help her unlock her memories. But it’s been two years and now she’s not sure it’s even possible. She’s made almost no progress in her attempt to assimilate into this culture, to find a home and learn from others how to be a horse again.

    At least she’s stopped craving the taste of meat.

    The feeling of genuinely not knowing what to do or where to go from where she is in that moment is beyond frustrating.

    Would it be easier to shift again? She hasn’t touched that power since she arrived here, worried that she’ll lose herself in whatever form she takes.

    But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. She does not remember worrying so much when she was living in the foothills and hunting deer, raising cubs, fighting with rivals to extend her territory.

    “Shit.” She mutters into the cool morning air, closing those now-burning eyes as though simply shutting her eyes could shut out the turmoil in her mind.


    v a s t r a

    artwork by space1993


    @[Heloise]
    Reply
    #2
    A COLD WIND'S WHISPERING SECRETS IN YOUR EAR

    Settling into Beqanna was easier said than done, to put it lightly.  Heloise has never intended to come back here, but her god damn bird brain had different ideas, and here she was.  She was surprised to find that Beqanna was not as all as she’d left it. It’s like the land had purged itself of the past, consumed itself, and been reborn. 

    Some might be upset at the dramatic change.
    Not Heloise.

    The Beqanna of the past - her past - was worth leaving behind. There’d been nothing for her here back then. She was nothing but a blip on the radar - a smudge on the family tree.  Maybe now she could find her place.

    But in the few weeks she’d been back - she’d made very little progress with that.  She huffed, unhappily, at the thought. Fucking migration instincts. But there was something deep within her gut - something she couldn’t explain - that needed to be here. Coming to terms with the warring parts of herself was getting real old.

    Her equine form still felt heavy and sluggish and Heloise had yet to surrender her wings.  Her wings were her comfort - the skies were her escape. She wouldn’t feel like herself without them.

    She was having difficulty adjusting to be an equine fill time, so she’d been splitting the difference.  Today, she reached for a familiar form - a kingfisher - and she breathed a sigh of relief as she morphed into the lighter, nimble body.  She flitted off in the direction of the river.  Having lived as a kingfisher for such a substantial time, she quite enjoyed fishing.

    However, before she can make it to the river, she comes across something else. Someone else. Someone who looks even more confused and disoriented than she does. (No offense).  The kingfisher-mare doubles back towards the winged mare.  When she’s perhaps too close than what may be regarded as polite she shifts back to her equine form - still bearing her kingfisher wings and a smattering of teal feathers.

    She shakes off the momentary disorientation that comes with returning to this body and turns her gaze to the stranger.

    “Did you lose something?” she asks, genuinely curious, considering the girl’s whispered expletives, whilst looking around to see if she’d missed anything obvious.

      H E L O I S E


    image credit


    @[Vastra]
    wow these two idiots are the perfect pair.
    Reply
    #3



    She watches the bird, allowing the bright blue plumage to distract her, and she perks up a little when she sees it circling back towards her – until the bird shifts into a mare. The change is so surprising, so exactly on the subject of her thoughts, that a rather inelegant noise of surprise escapes her.

    And then, for a moment, the sand-coloured mare is just too dazzled to speak. Then, dazzled shifts into anger and jealousy, which she has to forcibly shove down. It’s not this stranger’s fault that she has been struggling with her own shifting for the last couple years since she’s returned. That she just shifted from bird to horse with no effort at all and meanwhile her last shift had involved a broken wing and so much screaming that others had come to investigate what had happened to her.

    In this very spot, no less, so the wound feels a little extra raw.

    Her ears had flattened in annoyance but she takes a breath to calm herself down, not really thinking about how crazy she probably looks.

    What had this blue-feathered mare asked? What had she lost?

    “Everything.” She grunts out finally. How much is too much to share with a stranger? What is it about this damn river that makes her interactions with others involve vulnerability and a weakness she wishes to cut out of herself.

    But, though there isn’t much common-sense in her brain there is enough to keep her from elaborating on that ‘everything’. It wasn’t fair to just spill that, right? There’s so many rules about conversations.

    Instead of trying to figure it out, instead of admitting she’s not sure what to do with the conversation, she changes the subject rather bluntly – though her curiosity is obvious now as it takes over her expression and calms the burning fire in her gaze.

    “Is it always that bird?” 

    With her heavy, dumb tongue she's not sure how else to phrase it, but hopefully the other mare will pick up on what she means. Does she always shift into that particular bird?

    v a s t r a

    artwork by space1993


    @[Heloise]
    Reply
    #4
    A COLD WIND'S WHISPERING SECRETS IN YOUR EAR

    Heloise tries to read the expression on the other mare’s face, but there are entirely too many emotions in the other mare’s eyes for her to decipher.  For a moment, the avian mare wonders if she has been foolish to even approach the mare. However, Heloise can’t possibly fathom what she’d done to piss the mare off already

    But, she was undaunted.
    Whether or not that was going to improve the situation was yet to be determined.

    She shifts her wings unconsciously - ready to get as far away as possible as quickly as possible just in case things hit the fan. She’s not sure what she had expected the other mare to say in response to her innocuous question, but it certainly wasn’t everything.  She hesitated a moment, wondering if the cream colored mare was kidding.  But after a few moments it became painfully obvious that this was no joke.

    “Well shit,” she muttered, as the message sunk in.  A heartbeat later she realized that this was perhaps not the response that the stranger was looking for.  So she immediately backpedaled and tried again.

    “Usually I’d call you out for being dramatic, but I don’t think you’re kidding,” she added, because in her mind this was somehow an adequate explanation for the awkwardness.  “That...really sucks,” she added as an afterthought.

    Clearly she was a little rusty at this whole conversation business.

    She was, however, instantly relieved when the mare redirected the conversation.  Ah yes. Shifting. This she could talk about. Hopefully. She figured she could leave out the bits of living the majority of her life in avian form to the point where she’d developed avian instincts.  Avian instincts that had demanded she migrate home. So here she was.

    “The kingfisher? No, just a personal favorite,” she says, matter of factly, to the other mare’s question. Her kingfisher body was, well, where she felt at home.  But her equine body was becoming more familiar to her again. Especially now she was, you know, back here.

    “Only birds though,” she added, assuming that maybe the other mare would want to know. However, it only then registers that this is a somewhat odd direction for this conversation to have taken.

    The avian mare narrows her eyes, having grown suspicious at this particular line of questioning.  “Why do you ask?” she asked, making absolutely no effort to hide the suspicion from her voice.


      H E L O I S E


    image credit


    @[Vastra]


    DONT HATE ME. I finally feel like i'm getting a feel for her.
    Reply
    #5



    Having a personal favourite form is something, one of the few things, that the sandy mare understands. She wonders if she had ever experimented, or if the mountain-lion shape that she sees in her mind chose her.

    The question that is asked of her this time unlocks her tongue. Well, as much as anything can. Her words are still halting and slow, as though she needs to think about each one before she says it, but the more she talks the easier they begin to come as though she’s loosening them up from where they have been trapped in her mind. “I used to…” Only she doesn’t know the proper word for what it is she and this other mare can do, so she just gestures with her head to fill in the blank. “But as a cougar. Until one day I was this,” Again, a gesture to herself. She’s not sure whether she’s a horse, since she has wings at her side, but that term probably counts close enough. “And I think I was this before my other shapes but I… don’t remember.” It’s such a simple phrase ‘I don’t remember’ and yet it encompasses so much. The words are heavy in her mouth as she says them, her expression much the same as when she told this stranger that she had lost everything.

    Including her memories – so, really, she had no idea what she has lost but she has been mourning it all this time all the same. It must be worse not to know than to know the very worse, right?

    She feels as though she is getting off-track, and all of these words are making her feel weary, but she nonetheless continues to explain. Circling back to the main point, folding in the reason why she had been annoyed at the display this mare had given – how easily she had changed form one form to another when that’s been what she has been struggling with. “I lived as a cougar for so long and I have been afraid to try since I have been back... in case I get stuck... again.”

    Sometimes she thinks it would not be so bad to lose herself in the forest again, but she knows deep in her heart that this strange place is where she's supposed to be. This is where the family she doesn't know was from, where she was born, and anything else won't feel the same.

    Her storm coloured eyes watch the other mare, wondering if anything she has just said makes any sort of sense. She hopes it does – it’s always been easier for her to feel a kinship with those with wings and she wonders if that feeling will be enhanced with someone else who can take the forms of other animals.


    v a s t r a

    artwork by space1993


    @[Heloise] LOOK AT US GO we're basically as speedy as Sam and Megan now
    Reply
    #6
    A COLD WIND'S WHISPERING SECRETS IN YOUR EAR

    Heloise watches - equal parts suspicious and curious.  But the suspicion melts away as the sandy mare attempts to explain her predicament. Heloise can understand, to some degree. She had lived in various avian forms for far longer than her equine body.  However her memories had never been trapped in another body.  Perhaps that was because cougars had more going on between the eyes than a bird. Who knows. (Heloise didn’t.)

    But to the avian mare, she got the distinct feeling that the other shifter quite liked her life as a cougar.  Heloise had no qualms about living the rest of her days as a bird, but it seemed her body had another idea entirely.  Sometimes she wished she could go back on a full-time basis. Life was so much easier then. Maybe this girl could do what she could not. 

    “Would it really be so bad?” she asks, tentatively.  Clearly the woman had enjoyed her life in a cougars body more so than her confused life in this one. Would slipping back into that familiar skin and the life she so clearly enjoyed be terrible? “If you do get stuck - would it really be terrible?” she asks, inclining he head in a very avian sort of way.

    “Maybe your memories are locked in that body, since you lived in it for so long. Sometimes if you linger in one body, the instincts can sort of...take over.”  Or so Heloise had assumed. Seeing as migration is a vary un-equine impulse, and here she was.  But maybe shifting back was the answer, which seemed like a sort of cruel joke seeing as that was exactly what the sandy mare had been avoiding.

    “Maybe you should try. I mean - can’t I just tell cougar-you the predicament once you’ve shifted?” It seemed stupidly simple to Heloise. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t just stupid and not so simple at all. Oh well. She did have one fleeting thought before stepping back and allowing the sandy mare to try to shift back.

    ”Just, uh, promise not to eat me, okay?” She says, in jest. Yep. Definitely just in jest. She wasn’t at all afraid of being devoured by a cougar. Nope. Not at all.

    (Lie. Big lie.)


      H E L O I S E


    image credit


    @[Vastra]
    Reply
    #7



    The blue-feathered mare does, of course, make a point – and it is something that this sandy coloured mare has considered. Every time she thinks about it, however, it feels like she’s taking the coward’s way out. Like that life wasn’t actually hers she was just pretending.

    She tries to find the words to explain how she both wants to disappear back into the life of a cougar, and doesn’t. “I think I was hiding from something in that shape. And I do not want to anymore.” Obviously, she has no idea what she was hiding from – no idea if it would be smarter to continue hiding. That is, of course, a decision that can be made if she ever gets her memories back. So she offers something else, hoping she can make some sense. “And... what if I have a family like this? And they have been waiting for me.”

    The idea that her memories could be locked in that shape is intriguing, however. It did take her a long time to shake the impulses to stalk, to seclude herself in mountains, to eat the flesh of herbivores. Which, although it’s been a couple years, she’s not sure how quickly she would snap back into those habits. Which is a thought that this other mare seems to have had as well.

    There's a ghost of a smile in her eyes, though it is a little sad. “I didn’t… think when I was a cougar. I’m not sure I would know you. Or understand you.” If she concentrated, maybe, but last time… maybe that’s why she had been lost. Because she had given up herself until she was just a cougar.

    Aka - I'm not sure I would not try to eat you.

    So an idea comes to her. A small idea, and not exactly original, but it could work. “Maybe something with… duller teeth to start.” She tilts her head, in much the same fashion that the mare before her had a few moments ago, and closes her eyes. She is quiet for a long moment and then with a flash – she becomes a kingfisher.

    v a s t r a

    artwork by space1993


    @[Heloise]
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