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    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]  measuring heartbeats and miles away
    #1
    won’t you drag the lake and bring me home again
    It seems as though two of her children have fled the Cove.

    Clarissa has spent many hours obsessing over her missing children, even with her hands full of Phyx and Virgil and Frenzy. It seems as if the three of them have become clingier than ever with Gar and Ciri absent, as if they are trying to distract her from her distress, but nothing seems to tame the angel. She is furious at the thought that someone may have stolen them away, and terrified that they may have just… left on their own. What would have driven them from home? Clarissa has done nothing but show them love and affection, and though Ghaul is not the most tender father, she knows that he loves his brood dearly.

    It has only been a few days since they woke up one morning with Cirilla gone, the nest so much quieter without her babbling, but each passing hour feels like an eternity to Clarissa. Asphyxea is trying so hard to be stoic, she can tell, but she knows that the girl is fretful that she is the only one of the Three left. Frenzy seems mostly unbothered, but nothing seems to bother her Not-Daughter, and Clarissa mostly leaves her to her own devices. Virgil is too young to even realize that something is amiss - he had never even known Yadigar, as her eldest son has been gone now for nearly half a year.

    She just misses singing her clutch of eggs to sleep every night, wrapped up in the arms of her twin flame. So much has changed in the years since they decided to become parents, and Clarissa is afraid that even more change is on the horizon.

    It is not easy, loving a monster, but Clarissa loves him with everything that she is, and will follow him to the ends of the earth to keep him safe.

    She has taken the children to play on the beach this morning, as winter fades away into spring. Phyx and Frenzy are giggling and chasing one another, shooting small spurts of flames back and forth, while Virgil sleeps at her hooves, already tired out from the short walk from their nest.

    She cannot think of any reason to be here, with the water too cold for swimming and the seabreeze harsh and cold, but perhaps a reason will find the young dragoness.

    @[gospel]
    Reply
    #2
    BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS
    SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

    They have spent years flitting around each other without ever meeting.
    But Gospel knows who she is the moment she lays eyes on her.

    Gospel lingers by the sea because it is where she is the most comfortable. There is no nostalgia in it. She does not look upon the dark corner where she brought her own children into the world with any sense of warmth or longing. She remembers the impulse to rip them out of her womb with her teeth. She remembers how desperate the pain had made her, how she would have died to get away from it. How she would have taken the children with her.

    She has no maternal instinct, she so rarely tolerates her children’s company. She will wait until they are older, cleanly removed from their youth, to groom them. They are destined to be even greater than she, she knows. The boy, a serpent who makes the stars fall. And the girl, with her glimmer of her father’s power, the ability to siphon the life from others, a viper just like her mother and Gospel’s mother before her.

    But she feels nothing, certainly no softness, when she looks at Clarissa and her brood. She has moved beyond even whatever jealousy had consumed her in her own youth. Still, she harbors the belief that Ghaul chose wrong and the feeling is compounded by the scene that unfolds before her.

    Gospel would have sooner drowned her children in the sea than watch them play.

    She skims her tongue across a fanged tooth in annoyance but does not move from the knoll on which she stands, stoic. She has nothing to say to the mare, just watches, her expression passive. She thinks only briefly of the new mare and the mare’s son, how she’d said that Clarissa had sent her and how deeply that had irritated her. But not even this is enough to prompt her to move.

    gospel




    @[Clarissa]
    Reply
    #3
    won’t you drag the lake and bring me home again
    She has never met the woman that Ghaul named caretaker of the Cove when he took the Pangean throne, but she has always assumed that Gospel must be a strong, powerful woman indeed for Ghaul to trust her. She harbors no jealousy that Ghaul didn’t want her to rule over the black beaches; she has no ambition of her own other than to see her soulflame and their children rise to power. As a queen, she would be nothing more than a figurehead, someone to produce heirs, and she is okay with that. She has no desire to involve herself in Ghaul’s wars or deal with politics. She has no stomach for blood, no thirst for power.

    Perhaps others would see that as weakness, but it takes a certain strength to be a mother, and to raise up the next generation. Not many can do that, and so Clarissa accepts her position with grace and dignity. She adores her sweet children - they are her reason for being.

    Clarissa had never had a choice in Ghaul loving her - their paths had crossed at mere weeks old, and that had been that. The fire within him had glowed with the closest thing to love that he understands, and Clarissa had been inexplicably drawn to the eyeless boy who seemed to truly see her more than anyone else could. There was simply no choosing involved - they had been created to love one another, and even on the days that Clarissa feels like he is distancing himself from her, she loves him with every ounce of her being. She knows it is her duty to keep their remaining children safe, and strong.

    The teal mare quietly steps away from sleeping Virgil when she spies the bay mare on the grassy ridge, glancing backwards to count the children before she leaves them to their own devices. Phyx and Frenzy are old enough to watch their brother for a few hours, she decides with quiet confidence, and so she goes to greet the woman that must be Gospel. She watches Clarissa’s approach but says nothing, something that probably would’ve unsettled anyone other than sweet, ignorant Clarissa. “You must be Gospel,” she says with a smile, drawing to a stop a respectable distance away.

    “Where are you from, originally?” she asks, purely curious. “You seem to have settled into the Cove well enough, though we haven’t met yet.”

    @[gospel]
    Reply
    #4
    BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS
    SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

    She comes, just as Gospel had suspected she would.
    And Gospel watches and she does not try to hide it.
    The viper’s eyes follow every move Clarissa makes from the moment she catches sight of her to the moment she comes to rest before her.

    She studies the smile. Such a foreign thing in its inherent innocence.
    These are the things that Gospel has never understood, will never understand. This primal need to be good. She shifts her weight lazy, flicks her tail against her scaled haunches, watches.

    She does not return the smile.
    She delights in the dark things.
    She has not smiled since Stave took her life force in his iron grip, since he took her to her knees, since he showed her how sweet death could be.

    She does not smile at strangers. Certainly not this one.

    She merely tilts her viper’s head.
    Must I?” she asks, her tone a razor’s edge. She almost asks how the teal mare came to such a conclusion, but she doesn’t. It doesn’t matter and she doesn’t care.

    Where is she from?
    Her mother’s womb. Born in the forests of Taiga, if one wanted to get technical. But she was too young to leave her mother’s side when she’d slipped out from beneath their noses and made for the forest. It was there she found Ghaul or he found her. And she had murmured the name into the heat of his skin, giggled with the thrill of it. How effectively he had torn her away from her mother, the only thing she had ever loved.

    Again, she rakes the tongue across her fanged teeth and exhales a slow breath.

    Should I have introduced myself when I arrived?” she asks, failing to see any correlation between how well she’d settled into the Cove and their meeting. “Ghaul asked me to look after the Cove, I didn’t realize that made me subservient to anyone here.

    gospel
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