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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


    [open]  saints preserve us; brunhilde
    #1
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    He saw a sliver of redemption, and it haunts him.
    He’d been in the deserts, had seen her again, had changed the sequence of events. She did not die.
    She did not die. That means there is a timeline where he did not rend the eyes from his skull, where he did not come close to dying, there on the sand, where there was no gray magician to act as savior and slaveowner. Where he never bore that magician’s son, where he never met a black mare, where there was no boy, lost and trembling on the shore –
    It is too much lost history, glorious and terrible both, and he drowns in what-ifs and might-have-beens.
     
    He will never know, of course. But he does know that there are rumors, that Craft has been spotted. He has looked, but has not found her, and perhaps he is glad for this. He is unsure how such a meeting would go.
    If she tried to hurt him, he would let her. He knows this. He deserves this.
    Still, his eyes look for the golden sheen of her coat. He does not see her, but he does see something else, a mare of orange and yellow and red, a sunset manifested, wings of fire at her back. Striking, even in a world where many of the horses are multicolored, a rainbow of them strewn about Beqanna (and he, black and boring, save for those blazing orange eyes).
    He should move on. He does not start many conversations, does not want to inflict them with his presence, his ever-present despair.
    But oh, how he sometimes longs for light.
    “Hello,” he says, careful, the flicker of her flames reflected in his orange eyes.
     


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #2
    The sad glimmer of Garbage’s orange eyes is so similar to Brunhilde’s unkempt coat that when she finds them, she almost thinks they must just be reflecting her. She pauses midstep, pulled from the assumption that the pair would pass in silence. His simple, quiet hello is enough to draw her attention, if only because she rarely meets men that do not exude at least faux confidence.

    Brun likes the way he does not impose, even with an unwelcome introduction. And that sadness—oh, that sadness, something she just knows.

    “Hello,” Brunhilde murmurs, almost perfectly matching Garbage’s intonation. She does not know him, but she immediately claims to know why he is careful; she knows what it is like to walk upon miles of shattered glass while praying to not make a sound. Some melancholy, twisted affection forms a lump in Brun’s throat. She wants to curl around his suffering and commiserate, to know how small he feels and to feel even smaller.

    “My name is Brunhilde,” the flame whispers even lower than before. “Why did you stop?”


    @[garbage]
    Reply
    #3
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    He is half-surprised when she stops. A part of him had been sure that she would simply walk on, pretend not to hear him – for why would she want to stop and engage a thing such as he? True, he looks better in this iteration – reborn, he is no longer swaybacked, gray doesn’t speckle his muzzle, he is dark and strong, but still, he doesn’t
    matter.
    But she stops. She replies. There is something in her voice, an undercurrent – of understanding, perhaps? – and he exhales, a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He notices, now, the butterflies that do not seem to stray far from her side, another small enhancement. He is plain an unadorned, his only power invisible, and more a curse than a blessing.
    (For a man who is so willing to die, rebirth is a particularly cruel joke.)

    She shares her name, and he nods, committing it to memory. It’s an interesting name, tumbling off the tongue, so different from his own, which he shares with her, now.
    “My name is Garbage,” he says. He has never considering lying about his name, or changing it – it was the one thing Craft gave him, and so he keeps it with him.
    She asks, then, why he stopped. He wonders how to answer without frightening her, without sounding too strange.
    “You’re a living sunset,” he says, “I had to stop and see if you were real.”


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.




    @[brunhilde]
    Reply
    #4
    Brunhilde would burn until the end of time, if she could. Immortality does not strengthen her bones, though; and, now, she grows older and older. It shows in the somber dimness of her eyes and the lines permanently curved around the ends of her lips. How sweet she once was, delicious to the taste and insufferably irresistible. She had her barbs then, yes, but men sung her name to a yearning moon even as she lashed their backs.

    Standing here, before Garbage, Brunhilde is exactly the opposite. She is whipped by thin chains of her own design.

    “Garbage,” Brun parrots, the ghost of an intrigued smile on her face. She doesn’t question him like she once would, nor does she laugh. The strange names and faces of Beqanna tend to grow on an individual, the sunset mare not immune to such an effect. She thinks he looks like the kind of abused that suits the named Garbage, such thoughts she keeps tucked quietly in the back of her mind.

    For now, she is content to commiserate.

    Sunset, he says, and Brun’s heart begins to thump wildly in her chest. Bub? she thinks, gemstone eyes flicking out and beyond the surroundings behind Garbage. Little sunset, her abuser hisses in her ear. It takes every bit of her self control to keep her reaction to a panicked flicking of ears.

    “Sunset,” Brunhilde echoes, eyes glazing for the one second she pictures Beelzebub’s face. She quickly comes back to reality, settling an only slightly uncomfortable gaze back on Garbage. A butterfly lands gently between her ears as a weak smile turns her mouth.

    “Yes, unfortunately, I am real. But not a real sunset,” she murmurs as her weak smile turns into a rueful one, and then turns into nothing. “Who named you Garbage?” She shouldn’t ask, maybe—and she hadn’t planned to, but that sliver of upset leaves her desperate to turn the attention away from herself.


    @[garbage]
    Reply
    #5
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    It is strange, for he still thinks himself an ancient thing. He spent so many years gray-haired and swaybacked, persisting and persisting and persisting, that it became all he knew. And he died that way too, aching bones walking into the ocean once and for all.
    And yet.
    And yet.
    A new body had emerged – he had been reborn, entirely against his will. A new body, primed, dark and sleek and knowing nothing of the aches and pains of old age. It had been strange then, and it was strange still, even as he has inhabited this new body for years now, and it, too, has aged, though there is only the faintest hint of gray at his muzzle to belie such a thing.

    He watches her, not privy to the things that take place in her mind. He notices the ears shift, the butterflies flitting about her, and he knows he has done something, but he does not know what. He does not dwell on it, though, for her next question comes, and it is his turn to have panic claw at his ribcage as his thoughts usher forth the image of her narrowed amber eyes, of the words spat on the sand.
    (“You’re nothing. You’re filth. You’re garbage.”)
    “My mother,” he says. A stronger man would make a joke here, something like
    she didn’t like me very much, but Garbage, of course, is not a strong man. He is a rather stupid one, as more thing pour from his lips, confessions to a woman he barely knows, who needs to know exactly none of this.
    “I don’t think I was meant to live long enough to have a name.”


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #6
    Brunhilde’s aura blankets her movements in the encroaching silence of a soft snowfall. Where there is elegance and exuberance, most can only see pretty and bright-eyed. She feels plain, to say the least—not that being plain is the most terrible concept in the world, but the princess Brun grew up as leaves tangled, dark roots.

    Perhaps those roots are the catalyst for her mourning aura.
    Perhaps they are what is holding the funeral veil over her eyes.

    Gemstone and glittering, the sunset glows with her natural warmth, finds comfort in the lie her appearance whispers so smoothly. She places golden eyes upon the orange ones before her, digging deep into her desire to know why those eyes don’t crackle with fire—why their dimness turns them to dying embers.

    Mother, Brun thinks when Garbage responds. The hint of a bitter smile turns her eyes. How mothers exist as so much else and as mothers—she cannot fathom such a concept, not even now.

    Hum,” is Hildy’s initial response, followed quickly by a flitting of her gaze to the landscape beyond. She is soft now, typically sharp edges rounded by prickling and persistent melancholy. “And yet you’re here. Now,” she murmurs on a low breath. She thinks it funny that he is here, funny that he seems so sure that he was not meant to live and yet is still suffering here, next to her.

    A laugh does not escape her, though—no, this humor is saccharine and nauseous. It ties a tightly coiled knot around her stomach.


    @[garbage]
    Reply




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