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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]  just like the days we'd burn
    #1

    Summer is in full swing in Taiga. The air is hot as the sun goes down, humidity hanging over the trees post-summer rain. It’s steaming, the pine needles and verdant leaves pungent amongst the gelatinous air. Elio thinks the jello air is immense overkill: why must a peaceful summer rain be punished by the anger of heat?

    Still, the golden boy presses through what feels like a world desperate to keep him still. He sighs and shuffles over damp pine cones and intrusive mud. Where the forest’s debris scatters, his hooves squelch, and the noise makes him so uncomfortable that he makes a game of hopping between patches of leaves.

    “Celina!” Elio yells, suddenly impatient. He doesn’t know he is looking for her until this very moment; but the second he knows, he also knows she needs to show her face immediately. Going too long without seeing her leaves a sour taste in his mouth, and it had certainly been too long.

    “CELINA!” This time he bellows her name as he lands with a soft thud. Dark brown soil flecks the red and gold of his legs as he stands still and absolute. A break in the canopy of leaves allows a sliver of dying sun to land directly on his head.

    He looks like a prince, leader of the trees, a crown of twigs and thorns upon his head.

    Now where is his damn sister?



    @[Celina] @[Tiercel]
    [Image: elio-by-dozymare-ddo34i6.png]
    Reply
    #2
    stifled the choice and the air in my lungs;
    better not to breathe than to breathe a lie
    His navy legs are darkened with mud when he reaches Taiga. It had begun sprinkling in the late morning and the sparkling droplets had felt cool in comparison to the humidity of the day. By midday, the hesitant rain had turned into a downpour. The storm seemed to be heading in the same direction as Tiercel, soaking him to the bone until it finally passed him in speed and moved elsewhere. The humidity of the air causes steam to rise from his damp shoulders and back as the golden stallion comes to a stop just past the border of the territory.

    The scents of his family are strong in the redwood forest, though Tiercel notices the absences of Marni and Eyas. He wonders if they had flown the nest as he had, throats tight with grief. Pteron’s scent is strong along the border and the smell reminds him of his childhood. There had been times when Pteron would take Tiercel out on a special trip while Wolfbane and Lepis doted over Eyas and Gale learning to use their wings.

    The muscle of his shoulders shudders, a reminder that Tiercel’s own sides are naked in comparison to his nest-making, high-flying family. For a flickering moment, isolation radiates from him like a tendril of sunlight winding between shadows. The golden-and-navy stallion harnesses the emotion before it can travel too far and he is placing that black-sheep feeling back where it belongs when a young voice rides through the air.

    “CELINA!”

    Tiercel’s ears twist toward the depths of the forest, where the dying sunlight illuminates the edges of the trees in strands of gold. For a brief moment, joy fills him like a white-hot lightning bolt. The voice sounds almost identical to Gale and Tiercel wonders if his brother is alive after all. It might be impossible, but the stallion quickly moves deeper into the redwoods. It doesn’t take long for Tiercel to spot the shape of a colt, but the dark red and gold points are a dead giveaway that this is not Gale.

    Tiercel allows himself to fade into the background of the forest, becoming invisible among the shadow-and-light. His cerulean eyes scan over the boy with a serious expression, observing the aardwolf markings and feathery wings. Although he is not Gale, this is a son of Wolfbane and Lepis. The markings are Wolfbane, while the faint scent of Lepis lingers on the boy’s skin.

    The squelch of the ground beneath his hooves should alert the colt that someone is nearby, but it is only once the boy’s eyes land in the direction of Tiercel that he allows the colors of the forest to fall off his body. Now in the open, his eyes look over the red-and-gold face again. “You look like you belong in this forest,” he says plainly. Tiercel almost laughs to himself at the irony — this brother must have never experienced Loess, whereas he himself has never experienced Taiga. “I’m Tiercel.”
    tiercel.


    @[elio] @[Celina]
    Reply
    #3
    Like most every afternoon of the past few weeks, Celina wakes up on the beach. Grey sand clings to her cheek when she lifts it suddenly, and her twitching white ears search for the sound that had woken her. Her seafoam-green eyes are narrowed against the bright morning light, and her pink tongue picks at a bit of fishbone trapped between two protruding teeth. Falling asleep after gorging herself is a fairly recently developed habit, but it is one that Celina thoroughly enjoys. This morning had been no exception, and she’d risen before the sun to lure in the red snapper that are most active in the shallows at dawn. After a morning and afternoon of hunting, she’d eaten more than her fill and then fallen asleep.

    She is irritable about being wakened so unexpectedly and abruptly.

    The sound that had roused her comes again – louder now – and her angular head snaps around to where Elio is shouting her name from the woods. Celina frowns, her iridescent markings bright with the angle in fading sun, and the stripes of them furrow deeper. She’d been having a good dream. She considers ignoring him, tucking herself more tightly between the grey boulders and continuing her nap unseen. Her flaring nostrils catch the scent of a stranger, and before the realization of it truly reaches her constant mind, the slim creature is on her feet, her muscles tensed and sandy wings half-flared as she positions herself to face the unknown creature.

    The muffled sound of voices comes from the same direction as the stranger’s scent and Elio’s shouting, and she wonders if perhaps that is the reason her brother is calling her. Has he found a stranger in the woods? Has a stranger found him?

    With her father’s recent admonition to protect your home at all costs, the two-year old filly forges ahead and into the woods. Her younger brother stands in her line of sight when she reaches the pair of them, illuminated by a beam of sunlight. The stranger is in shadow, and as Celina steps up beside her crimson brother, her green eyes narrow in an effort to identifying more about this newcomer than just her nose and ears can tell her. In the end, it’s her ears that help the most, for the stallion that looks like Father and Pteron freely identifies himself as Tiercel.

    Rather than brightening with excitement as she might have a few months ago, Celina’s earlier frown returns. He could be, she decides, he certainly looks like Tiercel should look, but all she has to go on are stories.

    “Prove it.” She says sharply, glancing over at Elio, trying to ascertain how he feels about this stranger who claims to be their long lost brother. “Prove you’re our brother. ”



    celina
    i'm that bad type, make-your-mama-sad type
    make-your-girlfriend-mad type, might-seduce-your-dad type




    @[elio]
    @[Tiercel]
    Reply
    #4

    Prove it. Prove you’re our brother.

    When Tiercel arrives, Elio is first struck by the markings his family wears, and then by a similar awe he felt when he first met his father. What he doesn’t feel is suspicion, and Celina’s demands teach him a hard lesson—

    But what is another hard lesson on top of the pile already weighing down his shoulders? This could be an imposter, he thinks, blinking hard at his sister as she tries to gauge his reaction. For a moment, his emotion magic stretches its frustration out to his two siblings—a moment too long before he realizes what is happening and reels the anger and irritation back to him.

    Elio gulps and then says, almost wistfully, “You look just like our father.” It is a faint whisper, weak, one that indicates maybe this is one too many shocks.

    Little Elio, always so small, raging against a world that wishes to age him too quickly.

    “I stand with my sister. Prove it.”

    The growth begins, twisted vines and locked forests now desperate to fill the cavern in his chest. He hardens, like the steel of his sister;s words—sharp and unforgiving.



    @[Celina] @[Tiercel]
    Reply
    #5
    stifled the choice and the air in my lungs;
    better not to breathe than to breathe a lie
    Their parents have strong genes, it seems. Even as a young mare approaches with a frown decorating her face, Tiercel can identify the fact that they are family. In the shadows of the growing twilight, the three siblings are each a varying color of the sun. Unique markings cut across their shoulders, legs, and backs like a family crest flying on a flag. It appears to be undeniable that the three are closely related. And yet the pair demand for evidence of their shared blood, as though he were able to produce a blood test revealing his parentage from thin air.

    Tiercel is impressed — surprised, even — by their suspicion. He wonders if Wolfbane and Lepis had taught them to be cautious of strangers in a way that he, Eyas, and Gale hadn’t been. Would that extra lesson have saved Gale? Or was their hesitation a product of harder times on their family? Living in Loess had provided Tiercel with security that he had taken for granted. Were Taiga’s borders less respected among Beqannians?

    Cerulean eyes hopping from one face to the next, Tiercel allows quiet to permeate the forest in the wake of their demands. Their family has a few signatures of their heritage, the distinctness of their markings being one of them. Their supernatural capabilities are another — the way their mother can use emotions like paint, the way their father can disappear and reappear, the feather-and-flight of both their parents — and he wonders if this will be enough.

    “Our mother is known for her ability to use emotions.” He doesn’t have to expand more upon that… If they are truly his siblings, Tiercel knows they will have felt the tenderness of their mother’s peace in the midst of a nightmare or the unnatural fear when they do something reckless or the longing when it is time to come home. “I’ve inherited her gift, same as you.” Tiercel nods toward the younger of the pair, indicating the fact that he had felt the colt’s unbridled frustration.

    The swollen love of their mother floods all three of them in a sudden rosy glow… He’d spent many years practicing, replicating Lepis’s adoration so that he could reproduce it in those days she flew with Gale and Eyas while he sulked on the ground. He’s developed his skill so delicately that the love that bundles around them feels almost exactly like Lepis. With the ease of Bob Ross painting happy little trees, Tiercel blends the love with the longing. If Lepis has mothered them as she had mothered her triplets, the emotion will bring the memory of playing dragons or kings or fairies and the desire to run home and snuggle among the feathered nest.

    The golden stallion lets the longing fade away so their natural emotions might take over (though he wonders if they would understand the sharp, constant, aching, heart-wrenching pain of losing a brother — would it break them?). “Do you believe me now?” he says in a tenor tune, his gaze skipping between them as dusk begins to darken the redwood forest.
    tiercel.

    @[elio] @[Celina]
    Long overdue, but it's here!
    Reply
    #6
    She is still, eerily so, as she waits for the man to prove that he is their brother. It’s the same way she waits for fish, and there is no more emotion in her sea green eyes than when she’d hunted down the snapper that fill her belly. That changes at Elio’s wistful whisper, and Celina looks over (when had it become over and not down? When had he grown so tall?) at her red brother. The stranger does look like father. Or at least, how Father had looked when Father was Father and not just Wolfbane. When Elio stands with her though, Celina’s sharp-toothed mouth parts in an open smile, and she glances back at the black-haired stallion with renewed certainty in her demand.

    Maybe-Tiercel tells them of their mother, and when he speaks of inheriting her gift, he glances at Elio. Celina knows he has it too, and realizes belatedly that the frustration she had felt might not have been of her own making. Celina does not share their gift and has not paid enough attention to the intricacies of emotion to be able to distinguish the love that Tiercel emanates from the genuine thing. Had she not been quite certain that mother was far from Taiga, the girl might have even looked around for her.

    The longing that he adds is one that has grown stale in her own chest, and the reminder of childhood – of stories and fun and the warmth of being tucked between her parents – leaves a warm glow in her chest. It simmers there, and the sharp-toothed Celina nods. Yes, she does believe him now.

    “Where have you been?” She asks, and at last there is curiosity rather than caution in her voice. She moves more easily too: a flick of her tail, a shuffling of her feet as she settles more comfortably on the soft forest floor. “Were you with Eyas? Or Marni?” Celina is the only Lepane girl in the woods, and she has felt that more frequently of late as she grows ever nearer maturity. She has sister, she knows, but they are elsewhere, but perhaps that is where Tiercel has been too.



    celina
    i'm that bad type, make-your-mama-sad type
    make-your-girlfriend-mad type, might-seduce-your-dad type




    @[elio]
    @[Tiercel]
    Reply
    #7

    Elio wishes he could be more unfeeling. Even as the poison of his pain wraps strangling vines around his heart, he cannot help but to feel an immense amount of suffering. There is so much about his family he does not know or understand simply because their father went missing. The thought how convenient of him always sits in the back of his mind.

    Perhaps Elio truly is an inconvenience. Something to be avoided.

    When Tiercel sends them their mother’s peace and love, Elio wants to rear against the emotions. While he knows of the magic’s authenticity, there is a portion of him that always feels insincere when concocting sensations that one might not otherwise feel. Of course, their mother’s love was always meant to be true, and it is that inarguable fact that keeps him from snapping at his newfound brother.

    Celina jumps into questioning again and Elio cannot help but to feel a warm affection for her. She has always been blunt and wild. He loves her for it, for being his opposite and always reminding him of what lies outside his mind.

    Without waiting for a response from Tiercel, Elio trots up to him and wraps him in an embrace. Their necks are warm when pressed together. The pulse in the pegasus’ throat feels like it is pounding in his ears.

    “My name is Elio,” he murmurs as he steps back, offering his brother a genuine smile. Elio’s wings shuffle pleasantly against his back. He cranes his neck back to peer at Celina. “I am curious about our other siblings, as well,” he adds, then turns back to level Tiercel with a steady gaze.



    @[Celina] @[Tiercel]
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