• Logout
  • 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]  when your heart needs to break, just break on me; firion
    #1

    ”I’ve got the kerosene and the desire,
    I’m trying to start a flame in the heart of the night.”
    She awakes with the dawn, blinking her quiet brown eyes open to a gilded hillside in the distance. There is still a dark that stretches over top of her, but it is the promise of light sweeping across it that draws her in. It always happens so slowly, the sunrise, the light chasing away the dark in such a subtle way that she always found lovely. But shaking the sleep and the dreams from her body she turns her back on the sun, moving instead into the forest.

    There was something enchanting about the forest in the first light of day. The sun was bright and yellow as it strained through the tops of the trees, the leaves backlit with gold and the remnants of dew glittering on grass and brush. She steps lightly across the soft ground, her young body lithe and lean as she winds her way through familiar paths. She is young, but the copper coat she was born with has already grayed to a pale silver, and she keeps a matching pair of wings close to her sides. She preferred the solitude; preferred the quiet, and the ability to lose herself in uninterrupted daydreams. It was why she often chose the forest, since the trees did their best to hide anyone else that might be lurking.

    She is surprised when she hears something; something like a frantic heartbeat, something like unsteady breathing. Her own pulse quickens, maybe in fear, but mostly in curiosity. Stepping forward carefully, she follows the strange feeling – that instinctual pricking that pulls you towards something even if you cannot understand it.

    When she finds him, her heart somersaults.

    He looks confused, shaken, and she can see where sweat has dried on his skin. Worry floods her sweet brown eyes, and cautiously steps forward, caught off guard by an almost innate urge to pull him close, to fight off whatever has harmed him, real or imaginary. “Are you okay?” Is all she asks instead, her voice soft as the sunlight that floods between them.
    keepsake
    Reply
    #2

    that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried

    It has not gotten easier with time.

    It has not gotten easier with the passing days. He wakes each morning as though coming through a fog with the taste of death and decay on his tongue—dust in his throat. What he had hoped would be just a fluke of an evening has turned into the rhythm of his life and he finds that he cannot escape it. The pull of it underneath every move keeps dragging him back under, filling his lungs with the heavy weight of it.

    He stands this morning, golden sides heaving, eyes closed against the coming dawn.

    There is the sound of something approaching and he clenches his jaw, the muscle jumping. He wants to tell them to go away. Wants to tell them that there’s nothing for them to find here. He is as empty as the grave that he could be filling every night. But the words wither on his tongue when his golden eyes open and find the sweet, young girl staring back at him. He swallows them and buries it in his gut.

    A rough laugh escapes his throat at the sound of her question and it takes everything in him to pull on the cloak of casual arrogance to shield his vulnerable underbelly. It was a facade he knew well. The one that should have been the truth of him. It was his birth right, after all. Instead, it settles like a shell outside of the anguish that thrashes within him as he gives a cavalier, crooked smile that does not reach his eyes.

    “I’m just enjoying the morning,” he lies, feeling the wind prick at the drying sweat on his coat. He shakes and the dust escapes from where it had settled into the crooks and curves of his youthful body.

    “How about you?” He tilts his head. “Are you?”

    so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried

    Reply
    #3

    ”I’ve got the kerosene and the desire,
    I’m trying to start a flame in the heart of the night.”
    She has never known any kind of heartache or pain; no kind of hardship at all, really. She had been born to two parents that loved her and each other, and that was what she had grown up with. She has seen sadness, though. She has seen it in the golden tears that stream continuously down her father’s face. She has seen it hiding in her mother’s eyes for reasons she can never discern. She has seen it, and though she has never felt it, she has learned to recognize it.

    She sees it there, before he shields it away from her, and though it makes her heart clench she decides to not press the matter further. Sadness does not always like to be seen, she knows this already. And if he does not want her to see it then she will pretend that she didn’t.

    “Oh,” she says, in a kind of dubious acceptance, her brown eyes searching the gold of his for the truth. But she says nothing, and instead her silver lips turn into a smile. “I guess I am. I’ve always liked the morning. It’s quiet.” She looks at the jaguar spots that adorn his body, and how they stand so starkly against the gold coloring of his coat. She wonders what it would be like, to be colored so vibrantly – to not simply be the color of mists and fog, something easily overlooked. “My name is Keepsake,” she offers him, her voice still quiet, venturing on the end of shy, but in a rare show of boldness she tells him, “You have pretty eyes.”
    keepsake
    Reply
    #4

    that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried

    It’s easy to turn those like her away from prying further. Perhaps it is a kindness that keeps them from picking at what is obviously an unhealed wound—or perhaps it is simply a good learning that keeps them in the trappings of good manners. Whatever the true reasoning, he finds that he had no qualms about taking advantage of it. He knows that her curiosity has not been truly dampened (he can see it in the hesitant way that she drops it), but he doesn’t mind denying her further access to his anguish.

    Instead he straightens, dons the arrogance like a clock and watches her with his sharp eyes. There is not much that he misses when he is not too busy looking inward. “I prefer the morning to the night,” he says before he can stop himself, but he doesn’t flinch from surprise at the way the truth forms on his lips.

    “Keepsake,” he repeats her name, mostly to himself, and then looks back to her. Studying the quiet of her eyes and wondering why they look so familiar. “It’s a nice name.” He rolls his shoulder and then flicks his tail behind him, letting the sting of it touch his haunches. “I’m Firion.”

    Just a name, but it certainly wasn’t anything that he had ever minded.

    There’s a strange tension, and he knows that he is the source of it. He knows that she would be the kind to have a lovely conversation—someone who would gladly slip into pleasantries and gentle exchanges. So the tension is clearly radiating from him. He shifts his weight. “Thanks,” his lips quirk into a crooked smile. “They are like my father’s.” He pauses, thinking of his father’s yellow eyes. The way that they sharpened to knives when they looked at you. The way they shifted between apathetic and fatal.

    “Well, sort of.”

    Another pause as he considers her.

    “What brings you to the meadow today?”

    so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried

    Reply
    #5

    ”I’ve got the kerosene and the desire,
    I’m trying to start a flame in the heart of the night.”
    She feels so plain standing before him, the boy colored like a wildcat with sharp golden eyes. There is something predatory about him, but it does not make her afraid. Instead it makes her more curious, makes her want to step forward for a closer look, as though jaguar spots might feel different than plain dapples. But she remains where she is, hugging her silver wings tighter to her side. She still cannot tell if he seems annoyed at her presence, or if he is just mildly irritated at whatever was weighing so heavily on him. She wonders if he knows he does not hide himself terribly well, but she is afraid if she were to point it out that he might double down and close himself off further.

    She wonders if he knows that sometimes it’s easier to break and let light in, then to shut himself in the dark.

    “Firion,” she tries out his own name, and likes the strength of it on her tongue. “I like it. It sounds…fierce.” And then a shy, but pointed smile, and a tilt of her delicate head when she says, “It suits you.”

    “My eyes are just boring brown,” she offers even though he hadn’t asked, and he could clearly see for himself what color they were. She didn’t speak much to anyone besides her parents and siblings, and she was realizing that maybe she wasn’t all that good at it. “But they do their job, so, I suppose I can’t complain.”

    He asks her what brought her here, and truthfully, she doesn’t have an answer. Keepsake didn’t really do much of anything with purpose. She traveled as she saw fit, she drifted wherever she felt like. Usually she kept to herself, even though she found everyone around her fascinating. It was difficult to feel like she had anything to contribute, being so young and without anything unique about her, and so she rarely interacted. “I was just bored. I was born in Tephra, but I like seeing the rest of Beqanna.”
    keepsake
    Reply
    #6

    that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried

    One day, perhaps, Firiona would be better at hiding the things that live under the surface. Perhaps he would be able to tuck away the demons until they do not shine out from his impossibly bright eyes. Perhaps he could truly slip into this facade—pretend that he’s just the arrogant, young son of the panther and the angel. The boy of old blood, of old royalty, raised to be wild and free and untethered.

    But that is not today.

    Today, his eyes still darken and he still shifts as though trying to adjust the weight on his shoulders.

    It is worse because he knows his own weaknesses. He knows that anyone would be able to look through his own shield. Knows that anyone would be able to see the truth of his own devastation beneath it.

    “Thanks,” his voice is sharper than intended and he almost regrets how he has snapped at her. There’s something like an apology that runs like a wave across his features before it smooths out again. “I like the brown though,” he says simply. What she says next though surprises a laugh out of him and, for the first time, it is a genuine emotion that he shows her. It comes from his chest and his smile tilts upward.

    “No, I suppose you can’t complain,” he muses, and although the laughter dies quickly, the remnants of it remain in the shadows of his eyes. “I’ve always wanted to see Tephra.” It wasn’t exactly true but he wasn’t exactly being honest with her about everything else, so the white lie didn’t bother him much. His father always spoke poorly of it. Firion knew better than to pry and thus dismissed the land entirely.

    Still, he is interested in seeing it now.

    “I was born in Hyaline.” Another shrug. There was nothing entirely special about the lake to him.

    “I prefer seeing the rest of Beqanna too.”

    Another white lie, but who was counting?

    so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried

    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)