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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


    I'd love you if I only knew how to // Any
    #1



    Sabra


    I'm back. The cliffs and chasms of Loess didn't hold me long, not when there was nothing to hold on to. I lingered among the sandstone and sagebrush as long as I could before the Voices drove me back out again. My grip on reality has long been tenuous, and I can feel it slipping from my grasp again a little more every day. 

    "Stop it, stop it, just SHUT UP ALREADY!" My yellowed teeth snap at the air over my shoulder where my daughter's voice taunted me. The shadow of her vanishes as soon as I try to catch it in my sight, intangible as my faulty memory. I've been wandering again, and I look up to realize I'm not so lost as I'd thought. I wish I was though. The river, always the river. The sound of it draws a claw of dread along my spine, flashes of terror gripping my throat. A scar there throbs, where reptilian teeth had gripped me once. Silver lightning marks the place now, flickering erratically along my heartbeat. 

    The awareness of my locale freezes me in place, the steady drip-drip-drip of my blood on the grass the only sound I make. My chest aches and it takes me a moment to realize it's because I've stopped breathing. My inhale is shrill and gasping, stuttering on the sobs I've been choking down. 

    I can go so long without crying, replacing the tears with acerbic words and aloof distance. Here though is where my life has find awry so many times though. Where I was once hopeful is now a shrine to my downfalls, and when the tears begin to flow I am helpless to rein them in. Snippets of sound as persistent as biting flies in summer crowd my ears. They call me weak, useless, helpless, hopeless. 

    I walk to the water's edge, hooves sinking in thick mud while I stare at my rippling reflection. My eyes are large in my thin face, and the fractured stone look has returned to them. If I walk into the deep part of the river and breath it in, will it save me? Will the Voices stop their ceaseless catalogue of my every flaw and failing? Or will they follow me beyond the veil and back again. Death itself seems powerless against this magic. The spear in my chest is stuck fast, blood stained and searing. I am alone, alone with only the Voices for company. And I am too weak for even death to save me.

    I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky


    I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die




    Photo by Kareva Margarita
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    #2

    She and Scorch have come to an… understanding. Aletta won’t call it friendship because she no longer uses that word. Friendship died with Brynn when she had offered the remaining half of her heart (the part not afflicted from the disease that wasted her soul from the inside out) to her daughter, Kalina. Aletta had promised her dearest friend that they would find a way to heal her, a cure. Brynn was supposed to live - long enough that the silver mare and her gold companion could enjoy the six grand-foals they shared together.

    Brynn was supposed to live.

    She hadn’t and so friendship is a word that Aletta refuses to use anymore.

    The pair are supposed to be heading North - to Nerine. The name Stillwater doesn’t seem to bring any recollection to the current Beqanna generation and the wanderer in her wants to see the grey ledges for herself. She has nowhere else to go, anyways. Keav had only said to go Beyond and so here she is, past Beyond and beyond it.

    If she is meant to find whatever it is the stars have sent her searching for, she won’t do that by standing still.

    The pale lady finds herself drawn one morning to the River. Walking beside it keeps pleasant enough company and Aletta enjoys the (rippling) one-sided conversation. There is no need to indulge a river. The river, though, seems to want indulging and reveals a startling figure: an opalescent pegasus who stares down at her reflection. As if looking down on herself should reveal something that the living, breathing image cannot.

    The small mare slows because the branch that juts from her chest is disturbing. Aletta stops and fixates on the troubling tree limb, wondering how a horse even survives with a wound like that. She has her fair share of scars (a jagged one on her left haunch from a fight with Sirocco, an indent on the same-sided shoulder from hurtling Murdoc off-course) but she has never seen anything like the spear that protrudes from @[Sabra].

    Her mouth curls as she fights the uneasiness settling tight between her shoulders. The mare is most likely alive because of magic.

    Aletta isn’t immune to the sadness that comes rolling the other mare (and what has she to be glad of with an injury like that?). But she has always had little time for such an emotion; it would have prevented her from doing what she needed to do. There have always been eyes looking to her, mouths to feed, horses that have depended on her and all sadness would have done is stifled her in place while those around her suffered.

    "I hope the tree looks worse than you do,” the former Regent starts. If she can’t offer comfort, then perhaps she might at least offer a distraction.

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    #3



    Sabra


    I am still staring at my own face, until I no longer recognize it in the shimmering water. It's a stranger's face, one that belongs to someone brittle and lovely, spun of glass and eggshells. I am watching from the outside, and so don't realized I am no longer entirely alone until the voice breaks through my reverie. 

    The scream is choked off quickly, but I have already leapt to the side, the spear shaft swinging sickeningly in my breast as I jolt to face the newcomer. Her voice had been quiet, but it felt like a physical blow, and I'm quivering all over when I look at her. Simple. Refined. And with revulsion painted across her face. Breathing ragged, I shake my head viciously from side to side, trying to rid myself of the vision. She remains. 

    "Not a tree," I whisper, throat husky with my recent tears. "A monster. The dead. You're not dead, are you? Because I must say I've had quite enough of the dead and I wish they'd just leave me ALONE!" The words climb until I'm shrieking, snapping at the shadows on the corners of my sight. "Go away, little girl, go away!" I hiss over my shoulder, the childish giggles of my dead daughter ringing in my ears. 

    Other voices mingle with hers, spiteful murmurs. They build in my head with migraine pressure. I stamp the wet earth violently, wings shuddering. It's bad bad bad today. Its not always this bad, but I can't shut them out forever. Sometimes it's like the inexorable path of a sandstorm. Powerful, painful and I can't outrun it. Can't fly fast enough. Can only hide myself away until it passes, and the Voices give me a moment's rest. 

    She's there. I remember she's there, and she's said nothing bitter. Not yet. Only watched as I bite and rage at the ones who claw for my heart. It's already broken beyond repair, can't they see that? But they won't stop. Not until they've devoured the weeping organ from the inside out, or forced out back down my own throat.


    I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky


    I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die




    Photo by Kareva Margarita


    @[aletta]
    Reply
    #4

    (She’s thinking of you, Brynn, as she looks at this opalescent woman. There is nothing of your sweet gold on her; there is nothing of your desolation in her lovely blue eyes. She is as different from you as you are from her. She’s thinking of you, though. Remembering a night when your green eyes bled to red, when your pretty mouth was stained with the blood of a (rightfully) murdered man and you painted it on her silver skin.

    She’s remembering you, the way you drawled out a confession: ‘I am a killer, Aletta.’

    Remembering the way she never thought it would happen and knowing the way she never doubted what she would do if you did: ‘And yet you still stand beside me.’
    )

    Aletta remains where she stands - she doesn’t balk or shy away when the blue mare turns. The gray mare claims the ground she stands on and even if @[Sabra] were a hurricane, the mountains in her blood won’t allow her to yield. She is unmovable but she is not unfeeling to the tears streaming down her cheeks, wild and turbulent as any summer rainstorm. The dappled woman blinks but says nothing as the pegasus rants and raves - rages about monsters and death and a lost girl.

    "I am very much alive,” the wanderer clips, as if the sharpness of the words would give her a more definitive shape (in case Sabra had wanted to doubt that Aletta wasn’t a corporeal thing). "As are you,” if the railing woman doubted herself.

    Her dark eyes drop to the spear again - wondering if the injury might have lead to the affliction of the other woman’s mind - when the pegasus is snapping behind her, railing at the emptiness of a child that Aletta can’t see. That she doubts exists. (Which is worse?)

    (She’s thinking of you again, Brynn. About your broken smile and your sad green eyes the first time she met you. She’s remembering the little girl you hadn’t asked for at your side.)

    "Where should she go?” the gray mare asks, the mother in her prompted to inquire. Aletta asks this like she can see the phantom child hovering (and she certainly hears something, whispers she can’t quite make out that force her ears to almost pin) behind her, "Where would the girl go, if not with you?”
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    #5



    Sabra

    I grin haphazardly at her assertion that we are both alive. To tell you the truth, I've begun to lose track of which side of the veil I stand on, I am not sure if I'm really seeing color or if my damaged brain is simply showing me what I want to see. Except that I want you see my dead daughter. I don't want to see faces fall when I approach, to see them twist in disgust and pity. 

    So. Really, how can I doubt that I am alive? There is nothing on this earth so cruel as life. 

    (Live with your guilt, forever)

    Lavender-pink blurs my sight, blinding me momentarily. I scream at it, vicious and violent. Striking at the girl who's blood I carry in my own veins. On my teeth and embedded in my hooves. Thin air is all that meets my slashing feet, and the vision fades as quickly as it came on. Then she's standing beside the grey mare, grinning as if this is all a grand game we're playing. 

    "Leave her alone, you little bitch," I snarl to the apparition. My jaws flex and release, chewing on my own teeth until she vanishes again. "Back to her nice comfy grave, where I left her." The first time. The second time, I left her in pieces. A violent tremor wracks me from beginning to end, feverish and sickening. Can magical wounds become infected? 

    There's panic in my eyes. The agitation of knowing something is wrong, of knowing that reality and what I'm seeing may not be lining up. But I can't for love or money separate the threads. I'm strangling on memories real and false, and some in between. My lips peel apart in a rictus grin, then I lunge at my own chest. 

    Castile offered and then took back the offer of trying to remove this lance from my breast. He was afraid and so was I, but I can think of nothing else at this moment. I do what he was too cowardly to do, and savage my own breast to tear the spear out. My teeth snap and clench at the unyielding wood, harder than any wood has right to be. Blood and saliva drip from the haft as I haul at the length of it, despite the pain, despite the thickening flow of red red blood from the wound in my chest. 

    Where the wood meets flesh I can feel it pull, my very heart shifting behind my ribs with every jerk. The Voices egg me on, jeering at the hot blood and hotter tears, at the dizziness in my head. Until my blue skin is dappled crimson, and I've fallen spasming to my knees. A torrent of fury, and all I've accomplished is the worsening of my wound. I've forgotten her, the grey mare. Forgotten her in my wrath against myself, until her pale coat is swimming in my eyes. 

    "I'm sorry-" the words crackle in my throat, a cough peppering my lips with more ruddy drops. And I'm not sure why, but I'm sorry and ashamed and I'm bleeding into the grass at her feet. "-I'm sorry, please. I- I don't know what's happened to me. Help me." I stare empty eyed at her, desperate and afraid of myself. Of being alone, and of being near others.

    I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky


    I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die




    Photo by Kareva Margarita

    @[aletta]
    Reply
    #6

    Aletta’s dark eyes flick to the emptiness, to the uninhabited space beside her that seems to be occupied in Sabra’s mind. The gray mare continues to frown as one jet eye remains on her companion and her head turns, glancing again to the vacant air beside her. There is only the shadows casting from the trees, the sunbeams that break through the branches above them.

    There is no child.
    There is nothing.

    When she turns to fully face the winged mare again, she is snarling. There is something untapped in that grin, something displaced and it makes Aletta all the more cautious in her rebuke of Sabra. Her ears pin and the pale woman flashes her own teeth, a warning to the pegasus that her proximity was close enough to the former Regent. A warning that if she came closer, her teeth would gladly serve as a reminder of that proximity.

    Back to her grave, sings the blue mare and Aletta doesn’t bother to hide the deepening of her scowl. Children do not belong in graves before their mothers. It is against the natural order of things. It storms across her face and flashes across her eyes like lightning strikes - a reflection of the turbulent emotions raging internally.

    Her neck snakes out, thinking for a moment that Sabra means to lunge forward when her neck arches. Surprisingly, the blue mare reaches down to clasp the wood that obtrudes from her chest with her teeth. She pulls and tugs at something that doesn’t move. Blood starts to run away from the violent action - down her breast, her long legs, to the green spring grass where it basins between the two of them. Aletta should move away and she knows her expression; shock at the disturbing display she has just witnessed and her immediate distrust of the Magic that has tainted the air.

    Despite Sabra’s best efforts, the spear remains firmly lodged in place and the mare is (somehow) still alive. Aletta’s weight shifts to her haunch as she looks down to the fallen woman and she turns to leave. Nothing good will come from helping the blue mare. (And what can she offer anyway?)

    Best to leave to the ground and her Gods; maybe they will hear her and spare her the misery she currently carries around. It is not her problem, she tells herself. Her children are grown. Her mares are gone. She owes nothing to this one. The dappled woman sighs and gives the first shake of her head until the dead eyes of Sabra trickle through the hollow defenses of Aletta. The vacancy there - the absence of anything - reminds her of fragile-eyed Brynn and all the ways she had failed to keep her friend together.

    She looks at Sabra and thinks of Brynn.

    Nothing about them is the same. Outwardly, Brynn had been flawless and whole. Outwardly, Sabra is bleeding and broken.

    "Don’t apologize,” says the silver mare, aware that her hoarse voice sounds more severe than intended. They are all plagued by death, somehow. The immortals drag the dead around with them in their memories and for the mortals like her, they have long begun the process of dying. There is no sense in apologizing for being haunted; Aletta does not and she doesn’t expect it of Sabra, for all her rambles and poltergeist daughter.

    Her reality is altered but the ground beneath her hooves is firm enough, the gray mare knows. "Can you stand?” Aletta asks, deciding that getting @[Sabra] to rise seems like the safest place to start.

    Reply
    #7



    Sabra


    I roll my bloodshot eyes skyward, the Voices crowding out my own thoughts. 

    Coward, poison, hell-bent bitch

    My ears are flat against my skull and still the words echo in them. Pearly tears stream down my face as I stare at the empty sky, wondering just exactly when my world became so fractured. 

    I've tried. I've tried so many times to resurrect the pieces of my life, but they keep. Falling. Apart. 

    They keep. 

    Breaking. 

    And it is so hard to fight for myself when They keep screaming that I'm not worthy. I was a Queen. I was a Mother. I was Loved and alive and had hope. There is none of that now. I am hollow, home to ghosts and nightmares. 

    My tongue runs across my blood speckled lips, bubbles of air fighting through my lungs as the world spins around me. Around us. My wings lay like a ragged skirt on the grass, faded and soft. My feathers. My blood. My tears. I choke out a quiet, hiccuping laugh. 

    You're heart is broken beyond repair

    Tear it out 

    It's hasn't done you any good, anyway

    I can't look at her. My eyes stay on the sky, my one true love. It's blue as blue can be, and I reach for it with all my dwindling strength. Trance-like I rise. The motion, slow as it is, makes me gasp at the pain. But I get my feet under me. I sway where I stand, but it's okay. It's okay. It's got to be okay. My head swings drunkenly in her direction, a puppet with cut strings. 

    Stiff legged steps carry me towards her, and then past her. I don't know where I'm going. But I'm tired of being here.

    I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky


    I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die




    Photo by Kareva Margarita

    @[aletta]
    Reply
    #8

    If Aletta was a mind-reader, if she heard Sabra speak of herself in the past tense, that is where the argument would start.

    Was a Queen.

    The pearlescent mare might not be one any longer but that does not mean she is no longer a leader. (What is the word Queen besides a title? Titles can be usurped and stolen. They can be altered and engineered to be whatever is politically needed.) A leader is still a leader, regardless of what path they tread. A shepherd keeps their staff even when the flock is lost; the staff means that they will come again, they can be found.

    Was a Mother? Aletta has been many things - a daughter, (tentatively) a friend, a lover, a mother and grandmother as well. These are things - like Sabra - that are behind her but the silver mare would argue that they are still a part of her. Regardless of where she goes, they are defining parts of who she is. She is as sure of this as she is Mountain-born. It is something set in stone.

    If only the gray mare knew of what those whispers were saying inside Sabra’s broken mind.

    (Be louder than the cracks.)

    The pegasus is looking up to the sky, as if the answer might be up there. Aletta’s eyes darken with disapproval (like onyx) but she says nothing. It isn’t her place to make judgement on a mare who has her head in the clouds.

    Slowly - oh, so slow - Sabra rises.

    Aletta reaches out slightly, as if she might offer support for the injured mare. She rises and then walks, one careful step after another. The winged mare sways but finds her support by looking ahead, by walking forward. The former Regent watches her go, left with the sinking acceptance that there is nothing she can do to help.

    @[Sabra] is suffering but there is something to admire about that. If she is still walking, then she is withstanding the pain. If she is withstanding the pain, then there was the chance she could overcome it. Keep walking, Aletta thinks to the retreating figure.

    The pale mare softly snorts and takes to the opposite direction. She doesn’t get far before a glint of gold catches the sun that breaks through the tree cover. Tucked safely off the trail - like a doe might might a fawn - is a girl.

    Not in a grave. Sleeping, but very much alive.

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