"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
A new day has barely begun, the light pale and blue, but it is enough for what needs to be done. Beyza arrives on the borders of Tephra, healed and in possession of her magic again though it sputters and stalls as she stretches it and settles into her skin again. It is only now, a few days after the beach, that she lets herself think about Jamie. Now when she has her magic back again and she is ready to face him in whatever form he chooses.
Now that she’s seen what lies beneath the surface. It felt too real - she cannot believe it a hallucination.
She cannot say with complete certainty whether the fog surrounding the borders of Tephra is of her own making or if has naturally cloaked the land on this cooler-than-average morning as if Beqanna itself is blessing her mission. Beyza doesn't belong to the fog but it is a close thing - the cool droplets blur her edges and she lets them dissipate a little more as she waits until she is just a mirage of herself, a pocket of pure white fog in the shape of a mare.
Then she sends a message out on the whisps of air to him. A beckoning request for a reunion.
She’s ready to begin repaying her debt and she wants him to be here with her when she does.
@[jamie]
I give myself ooc permission to do a private thread in Tephra (they're on the border anyway it's fine). Also this is set before Nerine went up in smoke
09-11-2020, 06:59 PM (This post was last modified: 09-11-2020, 06:59 PM by jamie.)
from the destruction, out of the flame
He had been reborn in mourning.
Kicking wild at the fish hook in the pit of his belly.
The thing Carnage had used to drag him from his home, spitting him out on the beach again.
The grief and the pain of it all had compounded into something else entirely.
Something he does not have a name for. Something that has changed him.
How violently he starts at the sight of the fog. Because he remembers. Remembers the pain. How it had devoured him. How he had lost her in it and could not call her back. A pain that had nearly driven him mad. (Sometimes he wishes even still that he had succumbed to it, because the pain of being ripped from his home is worse. And he has not called on his own fog yet. Does not trust it. Cannot trust it.)
But this fog does not bring pain. It brings an invitation.
He summons a portal of darkness and it delivers him to her there on the Tephran border. And he knows that it is her, of course. He would know her anywhere.
He studies her soft edges and feels no sharp stab of remorse for leaving her. For not looking for her. For being so keen to forget all about her. He feels no impulse to apologize for the decisions he had or hadn’t made.
“Hello, Beyza,” he rasps, wary of the fog that shifts around her.
09-11-2020, 07:30 PM (This post was last modified: 09-11-2020, 07:30 PM by Beyza.)
B E Y Z A
remember me when i’m reborn as a shrike
It does not even occur to Beyza to be wary of the fog after their trek through it in the afterlife. It did not end so terribly for her, after all. And it feels right to be reunited in obscurity once more.
Her voice has not yet returned to her - despite her attempts to heal it with magic - so instead she pushes thoughts out to him “Jamie.” His name is said with more familiarity, more affection than it would have been before they had died.
“It won’t harm you.” She speaks of the fog, her thoughts calm though there’s a particular thrill sparking like electricity through her too. Beyza thinks she can see it, even now - see the face of Death lurking beneath those yellow eyes. It makes so much sense that she does not even question it. Of course Anaxarete of the shadows would birth the grim reaper in a flesh form, of course the vampire Livinia would have Death as a brother, of course it would be dangerous for him to reveal himself and to lose the tethers of his pain.
But dangerous no longer seems like a bad thing, and now she feels even more like she was in the right to want to take those shackles off and set him free.
“I saw you, in that other fog. Saw what you keep hidden.” A gliding step forward is taken, her eyes focused on him and nothing else. “You’re magnificent.”
She speaks directly into the chamber of his chest.
The electric current of his thoughts.
Her mouth does not move, but he hears her all the same. It is her voice, certainly, but even it is something Other. Or perhaps the Otherness is in the tone in which she injects his name into his head. It conjures up a shark-tooth smile. Ink-black mouth, the points of his teeth catching the light.
He relaxes by degrees. Lets this natural fog touch him. It is not as sweet as his fog. It does not curl thick around his legs, climb tenderly down the ladder of his spine. (The spine that had splintered and cracked in the unhinged jaws of those to whom he belongs).
He draws in a wheezing breath and knows that the ribs that expand around it are real. He is real. Even if he does not belong here. He does not belong to them. She must know it, too.
He thinks of the fog and he does not know to what she is referring. His ability to trudge through it, perhaps. Despite how desperate it had been to devour him. How it had sunk its teeth and its claws into his skin and sinew and muscle and, as a result, his psyche.
She comes closer and he does not move away. There is nothing for her to save him from anymore. Magnificent, she says, and the shark-tooth smile deepens.
“You left me there,” he tells her. A statement more than it is an accusation. He does not blame her. Not when he had left her, too.
Beyza watches him relax, watches him breathe, still feeling that same sense of annoyance that he did not have to deal with so much pain if he did not want to. This time she does not say anything. It will come in time, she thinks, the desire to be whole. He is here but a ghost and she wants dearly to believe that part of why he haunts these lands is because of her and the bargain they struck in the afterlife. It would be a wonderful thing, to mean so much to Death as that.
When he replies, it is not something she expects and although there is a small twinge of both regret and anger at his words - she remains calm and keeps those reactions in check. It is wrong, what he says, but maybe not. She had left the beach without looking for him, had not sought him out in the days afterwards as she healed and became whole again.
Even if whole meant she had carried a demon with her from the other side.
There is a quick shake of her head and she solidifies a fraction - coming back into herself. Enough so that her smile can be seen as it matches his own.
“No, I did not leave you. How could I - you were already home.”
She smiles, Beyza.
Makes herself semi-solid to do it.
And he remembers how she had passed through him, how their soft edges had created the most glorious color. Some deep fog. He remembers what he had felt then, too, but does not call upon the memory of it now. There is no sense in it.
He merely watches.
And he understands that there is more to their smiles than either of them are saying. They each know things that they had not known before. He can sense the darkness in her. They had traveled through it together.
But the darkness has always lived in him. He has always known it was there. And his home had shown him exactly what he is capable of. Destruction, absolute ruin. He does not understand it the same way she does, though -- she understands that he is Death while he understands that he merely belongs to it.
“I have known pain my whole life,” he muses, though she already knows this. She, the only one who has ever tried to save him from it. “But the pain of being ripped from my home is perhaps the worst I have ever felt.” There is something wistful in his tone when he turns his gaze to the horizon, like he might see the shimmer there, too.
Her smile softens when he speaks, a note of sadness in the gentle way her thoughts brush up against him when they come again. “I’m sorry.” She says the words and means them. Not that she feels any blame for him being taken from his home but she is at least a little saddened by the presence of pain in his life - that he might have found peace there.
She never wanted him to be in pain, not from the first time they met and he could not so much as look at her. She just also had not wanted to diminish herself to ease his pain - surely there must be a world where they can coexist. Light and dark and both strong because of and in spite of the other.
Beyza can feel whatever is inside her like a black hole, small but present and decidedly Other, and it encourages her to speak. To give a voice to all the wild and wonderful and terrible thoughts that followed her back from death.
How does she tell him that she carries a piece of his home within her, that she will gift it to him when she is ready? Is it out of kindness she wants to share that information or a selfish desire to tether herself to him with another thread, just one more thing they have in common?
“If I knew how to send you back, I would.” A lie, but a kind one. “But…” She trails off for a moment, picking her words carefully as she regards him with her unblinking gaze - tilting her head just slightly to the side. “What if your home comes here instead?”
She is sorry. He hears her say it. But he does not know how to acknowledge it. And he feels no remorse in the absence of his response. He feels no guilt in letting her apology disintegrate in the space between them.
It is unclear if he has deduced exactly what the hungry thing had taken from him. Perhaps he would get his answer were he to contemplate what she had offered him once. Relief. He had thought it was fear that stopped him from letting her take away the pain that hindered him. Were he to contemplate it now, he would surely come to a different conclusion. He would think himself foolish for not accepting her offer to help. If the pain still plagued him, perhaps he might have even asked her now to absolve him of it.
But there is no pain and it was not fear that had prevented him from letting her heal him. It had been the conscience. The understanding that he would be dangerous to others. It had been the thought of what the consequences might be for the innocent.
He cares naught for such trivial things anymore.
He knows that she is lying. He knows that it would take a magician to kill him, that she is perfectly capable, but he does not challenge her. He listens to her offer instead, blinks his own freakish yellow eyes and tilts his own peculiar head. Mirroring her without meaning to. The shark-tooth smile fades as he considers it.
There’s changes in the young stallion before her, that much seems evident. Beyza can tell something has changed, but she thinks little of it. After all, she has changed too, has she not?
And it is so easy to convince herself that he is different because she knows his other-self. Knows the power and might that lurks beneath his shadow-skin.
In response to his question, at first her thoughts just breathe out a single, quiet word. “Together.” If he is who she thinks he is she’s sure that this is something he can do on her own, but there is such a strong drive for Beyza to be helpful - like a tide pulling her to him. She’d offer anything just to get the chance to linger near his shadows and show him what she could do with her light.
The parasite (demon, monster, alien, whatever it was) within her is a weight she cannot ignore. She knows her body so well, knows the pulse of her magic, and carrying something Other within her is not a fact she can ignore for even a second. “I think brought something back with me. I can feel it now, in my core. A piece of your home.” She wonders if the others would have brought something back too - if even now, scattered across Beqanna, a whole host of these creatures slumbers in wait to grow inside those that carried them through the veil. “If you can survive here, they can too. Like will call to like and a new world can be built within this one.” Although she wears their scars across her neck and on her legs from where she had been torn, she does not fear this future.
Beyza doesn’t have the tendency to destroy, but rather to create. Beqanna does not need to be burnt to the ground to be rebuilt, it can change and evolve from where it is now. She can see it so easily - this possibility - and she watches him now so carefully to see what these words might spark in him. A sliver of her old fear, the memory of the pain that comes with rejection, squirms inside of her though she does her best to not let it infect her.
Whatever his response, it will not change what is going to happen - nor will it change what she has called him here to witness.
It takes her mentioning the thing trapped inside her for him to realize that he had felt it, too.
Because the lungs had rattled and the ribcage had ached for so long that it had not occurred to him to think it anything other than the old, familiar pains.
But the things he feels - the separate things - stir in the pit of his gut. In the darkest part of him. He had spent so long excusing pain that he had not thought to entertain it.
He tilts his peculiar head to a stranger degree still, blinking past the soft edge of her face to some dark horizon. He can feel it there, even now. He can feel it whittling away at its cage.
But he does not tell her this, not yet. He merely forces his focus back to her, the things she says, the possibilities she dangles before him. How glorious it would be, he thinks, to bring his home here. Not for his own benefit, but for everyone else’s. He would have preferred to return to that dark place where he felt no pain and the breath did not rattle in his lungs. Where he did not feel so fragile. But there is that shark-tooth smile again, as he thinks about how different the world would be shaped if they brought it here.
He is no monster, Jamie, although he looks like one.
He is no monster, Jamie, though he is finding it harder to convince himself.
“It was drawn to you, just as I was drawn to you,” he rasps and he believes it, certainly, but there is something detached about his tone, too.
jamie
