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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]  if i only knew what i know, any
    #1
    heard your voice leading me on
    through the darkness to the dawn

    There is something odd about the wolf pup that loiters in the shadows.
    It is not a behavior or even a color (although, if you looked close, you would see a wink of gold buried in all that fur). It is the bright blue flowers at the base of the pup’s tail, spun in a ring around one ear, how it appears to be smiling even from a distance.

    The behavior is not odd, necessarily. Wolf pups are wont to sprint and roll and leap. But this wolf pup laughs to itself as it goes. And, when it gets tired, it collapses in a heap in the center of the playground and sucks in great, gasping breaths, each one punctuated by laughter.

    It’s not that the colt prefers to be a wolf pup, it’s just that it makes the sprinting and rolling and leaping easier. So he lies there in the grass, panting. He rolls onto his back and stares up at that bright blue sky. He grins secretly to himself and curls onto his side. It all happens so fast, as if the wolf pup cannot possibly keep still.

    And perhaps he cannot. Because there are so many things to explore. How far he can stretch the legs, how it feels to dig his spine into the cool dirt, how sharp the teeth are.

    When he shifts back into that graying colt, he does so with a heart buoyed by the fact that he can visit the wolf pup any time he wants. He is giddy with the knowledge that the wolf pup lives inside him.

    And he tests out these coltish limbs, too. He sprints and leaps, but the rolling is harder and he cannot lie on his back and look up at the sky like this. Unless he lays the wings out flat to steady himself. But this quickly tires him out and he promptly rolls back to his side before heaving himself to his feet, beating his little tail against his haunches with vigor.

    He stomps his little hooves, dancing in place, waiting for a friend.

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    #2

    c h e l


    Chel still wasn’t the best at controlling her shifts.  She was getting better, to be sure, but she certainly wasn’t as skilled as her mother slipping from skin to skin so easily.  Mama V said it would come with practice, but it gnawed at the girl that she wasn’t good at it now.  Patience wasn’t one of her strong suits, and after their conversation this morning, Mama V had sent her on her way to the playground.

    To make friends.
    Or something.

    So off she went, with Atzi in tow.  She knew she was supposed to be careful, but she hadn’t yet shed the body of the leopard and figured she might as well have some fun on her way. So the girl and her companion scrambled up the nearest tree and made a game of seeing if they could make it all the way to the playground without touching the ground.

    Three near-misses and a half-dozen broken branches later, the two sat on a wide branch that extended across the edge of the playground.  The girl let out a bored huff, stirring her ever-present butterflies. Atzi was the one who saw the boy first, and drew Chel’s attention to the scene below.

    The girl watched the boy from the trees with genuine curiosity.  She hadn’t met anyone her age who was, you know, like her. She waited until he shifted to his equine form before deciding come down from her perch.  Leopard-Chel leapt from the branch, while her ocelot companion took the safer route and slid down the trunk of the tree before rejoining her bondmate.  She allows herself a few steps to adjust before shifting back to her equine body and launching herself into a brisk trot to intercept the boy, tucking her wings to her sides as she goes.

    “Hi! I’m Chel!” She more announced than introduced.  Her mothers’ had been working on teaching her manners but instead of waiting for his name she launches into her line of questioning.  “Can you do other animals too?” she asks, wondering if he’d been experimenting as she had.



    @[lumineer]
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    #3
    She does not wait long after Set leaves to slip past her mother’s (not-so-watchful) gaze and makes a clean exit. Set had told me to stay put, but he did not say how long … she is not old enough, nor experienced enough, to understand that he knew exactly what he was telling her – and what he was not telling her.
     
    It is not that she does not like the cove the rawboned stallion had led them to. She certainly liked it better than the humid rainforest of her childhood. Here the air is clean, several degrees cooler than the sun’s rays, and the acrid smell of smoke and lava doesn’t cling to everything. Of course, the salt from the sea does cling to everything, but once Set had called a pod of dolphins into the shallow waters of the cove and they had spent the length of the night diving in and out of the silver waters, teaching her how to swim. She giggles, the sound closer to the clicking and squeaking of a porpoise rather than a wild, gray-eyed little filly. Trading her shadow-stained coat and equine form for that of the tiger cub, the animal that comes easiest to her and not in random pieces and parts, she lopes due south, the playground beckoning. 
     
    She has already begun to think of Set as her father. Though she is in fact his great-granddaughter, and he had spoken to her about  her heritage in depth, she finds it too difficult to reconcile her picture of a great-grandfather with the virile, larger-than-life, twinkly-eyed stallion who had come to fetch them. To her, the past he described, the old Beqanna, is little but a wild, tall tale; a bit of fiction to entertain her on the trek from Tephra. 
     
    Nearly failing in her attempt to sneak past Set and the small gathering at the river’s edge in Pangea, Dretch arrives in the fairy-protected playground unkempt and out of breath, long legs churning, wild laughter preceding her. She had tried to shift to a rattlesnake, like the one that had threatened to strike her when she had stumbled over it. She had mostly succeeded, a snake with long equine ears sliding along the ridge just above them. It took foreverrrrrrrr to cross the ridge and escape out of sight, and by then she was marvelously impatient. 
     
    She has not quite rid herself of all the snake’s accoutrements yet – her long-legged strides are accompanied by a rhythmic rattling. It is when she chances a glance over her shoulder that she blows through them. Surprised and wide-eyed, she nearly sits down in an attempt to stop, her body shifting on its own accord when she tips head over heel and flips several times, a black and orange blur, before coming to rest at the base of a large tree. Hissing and spitting, she is almost immediately on her feet, pale grey eyes stormy. 
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    #4
    heard your voice leading me on
    through the darkness to the dawn

    He is blissfully unaware of so many things, not the least of which being the leopard and its companion lurking in the trees. Or the rattlesnake on a ridge too far away from him to spot.

    He is too consumed by his own private delight that he doesn’t even hear the leopard drop back down to earth. He giggles at the way his shuffling feet make his heart beat even harder. He leaps in place, grinning.

    Until a voice distracts him and he goes still, eyes wide, mouth frozen in a beaming grin as he turns to face the girl. A girl with wings just like his and his eyes go even wider, the smile even brighter. She tells him her name and he wants to tell her his, too, but she doesn’t give him the chance.

    He’d never thought about it. The wolf pup had always come the easiest, so naturally that he’d never tried anything else. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to summon the magic that he knows turns him into the pup but nothing happens. He exhales a great big breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and shakes his head.

    I don’t think so,” he admits, an edge of disappointment in his voice. But it is chased away rather promptly by another figure that comes careening toward them. He doesn’t even have time to try and leap out of the way by the time she goes skidding to a stop, falling over backwards and shifting seamlessly from a foal to something else entirely. Something he’d never seen before.

    He lets out a gasp, murmurs a mystified, “wow!” He glances at Chel with that same beaming grin before he summons his magic again. He laughs through his own transition back to the wolf pup, something more the cub’s size. He looks up at Chel with a toothy grin and then bounds toward the cub.

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