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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]  you've been talking with your fists, we didn't raise you up like this
    #1
    Ask others about your family, the little creature had said.

    Blue has spent many days trying to remember everything he knows about the fae. They are fickle creatures, siblings of Fate and Chance and Destiny and children of Beqanna, capable of magics both great and small. The task they had set him was not a difficult one, and yet it is one that he has long-delayed in beginning. That changes today, he has told himself. The start of summer, he had promised himself, and summer blooms around him on the Island Resort. There is a distant storm building over the ocean in the south, the brindle stallion sees when he takes to the sky. It will arrive in Loess not long after he does; hopefully he can find shelter quickly.

    Who will be there? He wonders as he flies. Mother and Father for sure. But what about his siblings? Cloud Brother and Pied Sister? What about his wombmates, the wingless boy and the girl with laughing eyes? Will they still call Loess home like they did in his memories? Are they his age still, or has magicked separated them in time as well as distance? If he possessed his maternal gift, surely even the clouds would have felt his worry, his anxiousness, his concern. The pegasus does his best to swallow them down, and releases the invisibility he has been holding just before he lands directly in front of Lepis. 

    The mare startles, and Blue immediately regrets not giving a better warning. He has not often reappeared near other horses, and had never really paid attention to the early lessons in the necessity of announcing himself when doing so.

    His eyes are blue, so pale and bright they remind Lepis of lightning. Those are the eyes of another horse, the shade of them lying in wait for generations before resurfacing in her third son. The dun mare knows these eyes, just as she knows the blue and gold face that they rest in and the brilliantly white mane that stretches from a forelock hanging between the eyes all the way down to the base of his tail. Lepis often thought her sons to be crafted in the mold of their father, but it is most true for the boy in front of her now. This boy, despite the blue streaks in his cream coat, looks so like Wolfbane that her heart aches.

    Lepis, knowing that her son Gale is dead, understands immediately.

    “You’re sick.” Her voice is heavy, the weight of simultaneous realization and resignation. There is the faintest shaking of her head as her mouth becomes and thin and barely downturned line, one slow step back after another putting distance between them.  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Lepis asks, but she does not waste time waiting for an answer. They both know what drives the creature in front her, Lepis thinks, they both know it’s the Curse.

    Blue, with invisibility slowly creeping up his back legs in smoke-like wisps, lets out a quiet gasp. He has grown up without Lepis’ constant reminders to disguise his emotions and there is open shock in those electric blue eyes. He doesn’t know his family legacy, hadn’t yet been told of the arcane magic that tormented his ancestors. He was too young when he left them; too young to understand.

    But the pegasus mare is utterly sure she stands in front of her former husband, who is now wearing the likeness of their dead son. The Curse was cruel, Bane had told her one summer night early in their marriage, it was selfish and inconsiderate. Lepis, still young and wide-eyed, had listened to the story and the words of warning and been sure such a thing would never happen to the man in front of her. And yet it had, and her own-blue grey eyes tell the truth of it to her heart that had so longed to doubt.

    When Neverwhere had asked if Lepis had a plan to stop Wolfbane, the navy-haired mare hadn’t hesitated in dismissing the other woman’s concerns. And yet the truth is that Lepis has not the faintest idea what she is doing. There is no way to plan for the impossible. Her default is projection though, and just as she intends to cover him with dread and anguish and hopelessness, he flies away.

    It is done impossible quickly, she thinks; fitting for the monster that he has become.

    (Gale, manipulating his mother’s vision, moves at a normal speed, flaring his wings and taking off in the strong winds that herald the arrival of the thunderstorm. From the angle of his flight once he reaches the open air, the brindled stallion intends to return to the Island Resort.)
    #2
    Lepis remains on the hill for some time. The rains of the summer storm are what finally drive her to shelter, drenching her quickly and sending her back toward the nest she’s made in the side of a canyon wall a half-mile away.




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