03-15-2020, 08:53 PM
<div id="beryl"><style type="text/css">.beryl_container {background: #76635E; width: 500px;border: 1px solid #F9ECD5; color: #F9ECD5; font: 14px 'Times New Roman', serif; padding: 15px;text-align: justify;box-shadow: inset 0 0 0px 0px #000;}.beryl_name {text-align: center; color: #DEDDDE; font: 26px 'Times New Roman', serif; padding-top: 10px;padding-right: 10px;}.beryl_quote {text-align: center; font-style: italic; color: #F9ECD5}</style><center><div class="beryl_container">"Is it worth it?"
In the end it isnt a dragon or an army or anything of the sort that drags her down. In the end, it is a desperate struggle in the shadows of her forest, grunting and thrashing, but the lion's hungry jaws are around her throat, thinning her air, stopping the blood from reaching her brain, blood beat by a tired heart, oxygenated by weary lungs, and she dies scrabbling in the dirt. The natural order repairs itself in spite of her magic and her power and she, no more than mist, than shade, stands ephemeral beside the memory of the painted mare. She is white-faced with age, the once bright sun on her shoulder red and dark and small, its galaxy frozen. She is not immortal, she was always going to die, eventually, but it did not have to be like this, alone with no-one to mourn or care, no-one to defend her when her arthritic bones could not shift fast enough, when her age-dull mind couldn't call the friendly Shadows to her aid. She frowns in silence and watches as the lion's kin gather 'round her corpse.
Her powers grew strong after the death of the Dragon King. Word spread and more dragons came. She was young, then, and rash, and stupid, and the power snapped her up easily, whisking her away like a riptide. She was lost long before she knew it, but the dragons still came - some for revenge, some to try their luck (and her patience) - but their massive shapes held no fear for her any longer, and the golden warrior accepted each challenge without question, without stopping to ask if she should, if it was right. So many deaths at her feet and so little reason to any of it. They came, they fought, and she felled them, because to do otherwise was to die. So she told herself when they came to her in other shapes. When they came to her with words of love, words she was desperate to hear and too far gone to accept. Halcyon pleaded with her to stop - there had only ever been one dragon that deserved her ire, that had truly gained her hatred, yet she cuts a swath through them all without mercy.
Perhaps it was Alcinder's death that drove him to it, she thinks, as the lions quarrel over the bloodied remains of her. It was no surprise when Alcinder came, son of the Dragon-King, though not one himself. His blood drove him to it, drove him to seek revenge for his father, to put an end to senseless murders, as his mother surely would have tried. He had called the animals out of the forest <I>she</I> had built for them, that <I>she</I> had protected from dragon-fire. He called them out and asked for their help, and for it, they died one by one, some splitting at their seams, others choking on the shadows she balled up in their throats, until the semi-circle of death held only her and the pewter-eyed tobiano.
He was immortal, as it turned out, but it hardly mattered. They discovered that day that you can die without dying. The shadows tunneled through his brain like worms and his deathlessness became a prison.
She remembers when her tiger came to her. He was leaving, couldn't follow her anymore, wouldn't watch her keep on this path.
"I never needed you, anyway." She had spit at him with a lioness' growl lurking in her voice. She didn't <I>need</I> anyone. Not anymore. Not ever again. Ironic words, when even one friend beside her might have kept her alive another day. Halcyon left her that day, but he came back, didn't he? She had felt so happy, so <I>unnaturally</I> happy - to have him there again, felt her heart break with joy, but as the lioness fell into him, he disappeared and threw his weight against her. Heavier and invisible, he had the advantage of her, heartbroken, confused, furious. The shadows did not easily find him and he had none within him for her to call, so completely bared to the sun as he was.
So she ran.
Bloody, broken, enraged, she ran, and for a few years, there was a tentative peace. The shadows filled her wounds, vicious scars down her belly where he had raked with deadly hind claws, ready to maul. Just another dragon, in the end. Even in death the mare feels the twinge of scar-tissue there when she shifts her incorporeal weight. Three years later she blinded him as he leapt for a water buffalo and the beast crushed him. Nobody but Beryl knew it was anything other than a terrible accident.
There is no redemption arc to her story. Not to this one that comes before her death in the dream-weaver's dimension, and it would be so easy to blame the other mare for it, but the aged palomino draws herself up, brown eyes leveling into the nothingness cooly as the world reverberates with the question. It would be easy to lay blame somewhere else, but the ice that sits heavily in her stomach, in the deepest pit of her <I>soul</I> reminds her of the darkness that was always within her. As she peers into the shifting cloud and shadow, figures appear, and she knows them. Dragons and tigers and horses, coming as if to find justice they were unable to mete out in life, a life she spent chasing a dream that, ultimately, she could never attain. The Dragon Slayer had, in the end, needed someone's help as much as she had all those years ago when Leilan found her nearly dead in the snow. Was it worth it?
"Stupid children make foolish, impossible wishes, but I will not regret my life."
<div class="beryl_name">Beryl</div><div class="beryl_quote">Litotes x Mehendi</div></div></center>
In the end it isnt a dragon or an army or anything of the sort that drags her down. In the end, it is a desperate struggle in the shadows of her forest, grunting and thrashing, but the lion's hungry jaws are around her throat, thinning her air, stopping the blood from reaching her brain, blood beat by a tired heart, oxygenated by weary lungs, and she dies scrabbling in the dirt. The natural order repairs itself in spite of her magic and her power and she, no more than mist, than shade, stands ephemeral beside the memory of the painted mare. She is white-faced with age, the once bright sun on her shoulder red and dark and small, its galaxy frozen. She is not immortal, she was always going to die, eventually, but it did not have to be like this, alone with no-one to mourn or care, no-one to defend her when her arthritic bones could not shift fast enough, when her age-dull mind couldn't call the friendly Shadows to her aid. She frowns in silence and watches as the lion's kin gather 'round her corpse.
Her powers grew strong after the death of the Dragon King. Word spread and more dragons came. She was young, then, and rash, and stupid, and the power snapped her up easily, whisking her away like a riptide. She was lost long before she knew it, but the dragons still came - some for revenge, some to try their luck (and her patience) - but their massive shapes held no fear for her any longer, and the golden warrior accepted each challenge without question, without stopping to ask if she should, if it was right. So many deaths at her feet and so little reason to any of it. They came, they fought, and she felled them, because to do otherwise was to die. So she told herself when they came to her in other shapes. When they came to her with words of love, words she was desperate to hear and too far gone to accept. Halcyon pleaded with her to stop - there had only ever been one dragon that deserved her ire, that had truly gained her hatred, yet she cuts a swath through them all without mercy.
Perhaps it was Alcinder's death that drove him to it, she thinks, as the lions quarrel over the bloodied remains of her. It was no surprise when Alcinder came, son of the Dragon-King, though not one himself. His blood drove him to it, drove him to seek revenge for his father, to put an end to senseless murders, as his mother surely would have tried. He had called the animals out of the forest <I>she</I> had built for them, that <I>she</I> had protected from dragon-fire. He called them out and asked for their help, and for it, they died one by one, some splitting at their seams, others choking on the shadows she balled up in their throats, until the semi-circle of death held only her and the pewter-eyed tobiano.
He was immortal, as it turned out, but it hardly mattered. They discovered that day that you can die without dying. The shadows tunneled through his brain like worms and his deathlessness became a prison.
She remembers when her tiger came to her. He was leaving, couldn't follow her anymore, wouldn't watch her keep on this path.
"I never needed you, anyway." She had spit at him with a lioness' growl lurking in her voice. She didn't <I>need</I> anyone. Not anymore. Not ever again. Ironic words, when even one friend beside her might have kept her alive another day. Halcyon left her that day, but he came back, didn't he? She had felt so happy, so <I>unnaturally</I> happy - to have him there again, felt her heart break with joy, but as the lioness fell into him, he disappeared and threw his weight against her. Heavier and invisible, he had the advantage of her, heartbroken, confused, furious. The shadows did not easily find him and he had none within him for her to call, so completely bared to the sun as he was.
So she ran.
Bloody, broken, enraged, she ran, and for a few years, there was a tentative peace. The shadows filled her wounds, vicious scars down her belly where he had raked with deadly hind claws, ready to maul. Just another dragon, in the end. Even in death the mare feels the twinge of scar-tissue there when she shifts her incorporeal weight. Three years later she blinded him as he leapt for a water buffalo and the beast crushed him. Nobody but Beryl knew it was anything other than a terrible accident.
There is no redemption arc to her story. Not to this one that comes before her death in the dream-weaver's dimension, and it would be so easy to blame the other mare for it, but the aged palomino draws herself up, brown eyes leveling into the nothingness cooly as the world reverberates with the question. It would be easy to lay blame somewhere else, but the ice that sits heavily in her stomach, in the deepest pit of her <I>soul</I> reminds her of the darkness that was always within her. As she peers into the shifting cloud and shadow, figures appear, and she knows them. Dragons and tigers and horses, coming as if to find justice they were unable to mete out in life, a life she spent chasing a dream that, ultimately, she could never attain. The Dragon Slayer had, in the end, needed someone's help as much as she had all those years ago when Leilan found her nearly dead in the snow. Was it worth it?
"Stupid children make foolish, impossible wishes, but I will not regret my life."
<div class="beryl_name">Beryl</div><div class="beryl_quote">Litotes x Mehendi</div></div></center>