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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]  i've never fallen from quite this high | anyone
    #1
    and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
    ----------------tell me: who do i run to?

    Though the tobiano stallion’s invitation for morning runs had been extended to nearly everyone he comes across, he is rarely taken up on the offer. This does not tamp his enthusiasm in the slightest, and when Asena asked to join him he’d gladly agreed.

    So they race down the white sand beach, two pale horses against the rising sun. Pteron’s wings are held close to his side and Asena’s violet tail stretches behind her like a plume. She must take several strides to match her father, but her drive to do so does not fade until they have both reach the imaginary finish line in the sand.

    “You’ll be faster than me, someday.” The winged stallion tells his daughter, who beams proudly. Someday, but not yet. He has never been the type to let his children win on anything but their own merit, something he had learned from his own father. The reminder causes a sharp pained expression, one that Asena notices, but does not comment on. Dad has told her that Papa is mourning, and that he needs more patience than sometimes short-tempered Asena might think. So she waits, and looks around at the forest. There is a movement just there, and the filly steps forward just as her father calls out.

    “Good morning! Hope we didn’t wake you!”

    @[anyone] who wants to be disturbed

    -- pteron --

    Reply
    #2

    give my all just to watch you fall

    Ischia has been a fucking delight. 

    Titanya creeps through the dense undergrowth, relishing the silky feel of the banana leaves on her orange and black fur.  Her luminous yellow eyes are trained on a small flock of parrots that are earthbound on the jungle dirt, sheltering from the late spring storm.  They do this sometimes; strut around on the ground like they own the place, like they are the kings and queens of the island, like they are safe.  Aside from those in the ocean, there aren’t any other predators they have to worry about on this spit of land.  No other predators besides the tiger amongst the trees, that is.  The tiger that is hungry and ruthless and bored.

    She leaps at the brightly colored birds with her claws outstretched.  She’s already salivating, already tasting the avian meat she’ll have to pull from a puff of feathers.  Most of the flock pushes into the air immediately, their plumage like jewels glittering in the air.  But one bird, perhaps an elder in their ranks, has a bum wing.  It looks like something has already hunted this one with his ripped and tattered feathers.  “Have we met?” She says between gritted teeth, swatting at the parrot’s slow rise. It squawks at her noisily in reply.
     
    In the next moment, she knows her jaws will close around the old bird’s hasty back end.  He’s slow, so slow to flap out of reach!  But just as the tigress feels the tip of his tail feathers brush her nose, something collides with her head.  Titanya blinks away her confusion as she sees another parrot gliding away into the trees.  And with a sinking heart, she turns to see her target ungainly flapping off to some safer perch as well.  She swings her head back at the almost invisible speck of the attacking bird who saved his buddy from certain doom.  “He may have been your friend but he was my breakfast!”  She shakes off the tiger skin and sulks off towards the beach, hoping to fill her belly with some seagrass.  It doesn’t compare to warm, fresh meat, but it will have to do this time.  Next time she’ll get the little birdy bastard.

    The sandy stretch of shoreline is oh-so-dull in her opinion.  Like sea oats to parrot meat, it doesn’t compare to the earthy, humid jungle that she so prefers.  The crashing waves are uninspired when an entire universe exists within a square foot of jungle dirt.  Her amber eyes turn to the work at hoof: breakfast.  She moves closer to the forest’s edge as she becomes fuller, intending to dive back into the trees as soon as she possibly can. As she’s munching on the driest, worst food to ever grace her mouth, she tries to ignore the pull to move on from Ischia. 

    Her feet are not used to staying in one place, and while this place has suited her more than most, she’s loath to get too attached.  She has no idea that her blood helped raise this island.  It wouldn’t really matter even if she did know; she had been the black sheep of the family and she doubts any of them have ever come looking for her.  All that mattered was her brother and his bones are now bleaching pale on some other beach far away.  All that matters now is that she stays true to herself.  Herself, and the seal of war that thrums madly alongside her own heart.   

    There’s dual sound coming from just inside the trees now.  Voices, neither Aquaria nor Halcyon.  New blood, then.  “I wake with the sun,” she says in response, her words working around a last bite of sea grass, her gaze resting on the older male and then the younger female in turn.  “Hunting is better when the animals are still rubbing sleep from their own eyes.”  She fails to mention her own hunting fail from this morning.  That is obviously not important. What’s more distressing is how enthusiastic this greeting is. “Who are you guys, the daybreak committee?”

    Titanya

    Photo by Keyur Nandaniya


    @[Pteron]
    Reply
    #3
    and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
    ----------------tell me: who do i run to?



    She mentions hunting, and Pteron does his best to not think of the end result of a successful hunt. His nausea at learning of his eldest’s carnivorous tendencies had not been exaggerated, after all. The thought of eating meat turns his stomach, and he is grateful that the horse in front of him has not brought with her the remnants of her early breakfast. Pteron takes in the stranger, from her gold tipped ears to her white-stockinged feet, in a single quick look. Asena’s observation is longer, the young filly either uninterested or uneducated on the rudeness of staring. Pteron, noticing this, flicks his tail at her as if to scold her, but says nothing.

    Instead, he turns back to the black mare, who asks if they are the daybreak committee. She’d not been woken by their arrival, it seems, but the grazing on dry sea-grass suggests a hunt that had not been enough to satisfy her hunger. (Pteron doesn’t blame her, the seaoats here are not the best this time of year).

    The pegasus stallion opens his mouth to speak, when Asena breaks in.

    “Do you have another shape?” She asks, her pale head tilted curiously. Today she’s added a garland of cherry blossoms about the twin tines of her antlers, and one falls as she steps closer to the stranger. A perfectly crafted illusion, even down to the floral waft in the air. “Something like a hawk or a dragon or a bear?!”

    “Asena”, Pteron says softly, his smile somewhat thinner than before. It’s not quite a reprimand, but with a roll of her violet eyes and the sigh of a dramatic adolescent, adds: “I mean Hi my name is Asena. And this is my dad, Pteron.”

    @[Titanya]

    -- pteron --

    Reply
    #4

    give my all just to watch you fall

    Titanya remembers being a young hellion running wild and reckless in the Dale.

    She has fond memories of disobeying her mother.  One memory in particular of wading out into the river and into water too deep out of Talulah’s reach.  She had almost drowned herself several times by going out too far, but the thrill had always been worth it.  She remembers venturing out into the between-lands hours past both sunset and curfew, egging her brother on and encouraging him to be just as rebellious as she.  It hadn’t always worked out as she planned it; Terran was the golden twin through and through, whereas she could hardly elevate herself to bronze in her mother’s eyes.  And there wasn’t even another sibling to take silver, they were only twins.
     
    Looking at the girl in front of her, she thinks youth is not wasted on the young.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.

    It is all in how one’s youth is spent.

    This filly seems rather precocious, though Titanya’s not really been around enough children to know if that is true for all children or not.  She seems like the type who would have gone cavorting around and gotten into all kinds of trouble with the tiger-woman in her younger days (or her first younger days, that is).  Sometimes she wishes she could have had a friend like that when she was a kid.  Maybe she’d have stuck around instead of abandoning Beqanna and setting off on her own for the wilds of the Outside.  Maybe her mother would have let loose her tight hold on her daughter if she’d had someone else looking out for her.  Maybe Titanya would have had a better relationship with her dam.  Maybe.

    She’s doesn’t like living in the uncertainty of maybes.  It makes her skin crawl, not having an easy answer for things. 

    At least the questions this girl – Asena – poses for her are not complicated.  

    But instead of verbally responding, the sabino turns black and orange and begins to shrink down.  Her fluted ears soften and round and her black tail turns striped and tubular-shaped.  Finally a tiger, she grins her sharpened canines at the young girl.  “Not a good-for-nothing dragon or a stinky bear,” her grin turns into a scowl at the thought.  She sees the girl’s antlers then.  Her yellow eyes gleam and her tail slaps on the sand at the memory they conjure.  “I hunted a bull elk with antlers three times the size of yours’ once.  It took me two days to track him and when I found him, he was stuck in mud and all I had to do was – “   
     
    Titanya stops herself short of all the gory details, remembering who she is talking to.  She closes her mouth with an audible snap of her jaws and looks – for the first time in her life – abashed at Pteron.  Shit, that was close.  She looks back at Asena.  “Well, he got away anyway, somehow...”  She digs her claws into the soft sand and looks into the darkened jungle for inspiration.  “So, do you guys live here?  I’m somewhat new to – to Ischia myself.  My name is Titanya.”  The name of the place almost escapes her.  It’s an island, isn’t that all that really fucking matters?

    Titanya

    Photo by Keyur Nandaniya


    @[Pteron]
    Reply
    #5
    and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
    ----------------tell me: who do i run to?

    Pteron takes a step back to give her space to shift, and another as her skin ripples and takes on irregular stripes of black shadows atop a shade of orange he almost recognizes. Asena copies her father’s actions, though her steps are smaller and her pale head tilts with undimmable curiosity.

    The shape that Titanya takes on is not an unfamiliar one to either horse. Pteron suspects that it is only because they stand this close that he can tell the feline in front of him from the feline shape his young charge often takes in their sparring lessons. She is a large and imposing creature, and he is grateful that his previous steps back have put a more comfortable distance between himself and the Siberian tiger in front of them.

    He is immediately equally grateful for the practice he has had at hiding his distaste for the carnivorous proclivities of some of Beqanna’s residents. He is dubious that the story Titanya tells them had ended the way she’d described, but he is not going to question her on it. Asena might have, were she not busy trying to imagine what her own antlers might look like at three times their size.

    “Halcyon invited me here about two years ago,” Pteron answers. “My family, including Asena here, came with me.” The pegasus considers adding more – that he had come to mentor Halcyon and the other young folk in the ways of battle, or something like that, something to ground him here in Ischia – but instead is interrupted by Asena, who inquires: “Do you know Hal? You should, if you don’t. He’s a tiger, just like you!”

    @[Titanya]

    -- pteron --

    Reply
    #6

    give my all just to watch you fall

    Titanya notices the way they step back, even as her eyes are lightening from raw amber to luminous gold.  As she sinks into the sinuous shape, she understands why they retreat.  There is indomitable power in the form.  There is primal courage in the beast she wears that blurs the line between it and her, bolstering her own uncaring boldness. She never forgets it herself, is never ungracious for the ability to become what has always lived formless within her.  She only forgets the way it affects others when they stand in the presence of the tiger.  

    Seeing the reaction of the father and daughter in front of her would normally make her grin (in fact, she can’t help as one corner of her lips quirks just slightly upwards).  But now that she’s trying to be more civilized, she takes a mirrored step backwards herself to give them some space for their possibly fragile sensibilities (pretending that she’s simply itching a spot just behind her shoulder blades and just happens to shift herself backwards simultaneously).  She supposes she doesn’t really want to get tossed out of Ischia for terrorizing the fresh blood.  Not yet, anyway.

    “Halcyon?”  His name is a pleasant purr in her throat, she realizes.  Her ferocious predator’s gaze even softens unconsciously when she says it.  There is something like relief in her voice, too, when they bring up a familiar topic.  She’s not the best at casual conversation – or conversation at all, really, she’d rather be killing something.

    “I know him,” she says simply, looking again into the jungle as if she might summon him by thought alone.  Titanya realizes there is a frustrating anticipation that accompanies his name, especially when he’s not around.  He understands her more than she thinks she’s ever been understood before.  Finding him here on this island has meant finding a part of herself, in a way, through the critical lens of a stranger turned more.  He hasn’t run from her, yet.  Not far enough away that she can’t catch him and drag him back.

    “Halcyon is a friend,” she expands on her earlier statement.  My first, she adds silently, but even I know that sounds like some sad shit.  She’s never been good at friends.  “We hunt together.  Fish, mostly,” she says quickly, smiling at Asena a little too brightly.  “You should come with us once, the both of you.  There is a secret grotto deep in the jungle.  When the light hits the water pool just right, there are a hundred rainbows and a fish just as colorful to match every one.”  Even she can appreciate it, this jewel of Ischia.

    Titanya

    Photo by Keyur Nandaniya


    @[Pteron]
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