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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


    give my all just to watch you fall; any
    #1

    give my all just to watch you fall

    Ischia begins to smother her, so she escapes the island and heads to the mainland.

    It is temporary, she knows, because her life is not only her own.  Not anymore. She feels the other life stirring within her, a sensation she had hoped never to experience.  She wasn’t meant to be a mother, wasn’t meant to harbor life and nourish it and be responsible for how it grew up.  She wasn’t destined for any of it.  Titanya is a selfish creature at heart.  She is meant for the wild places and the constant movement of her feet or paws over ever-changing earth.  She is meant to be an outsider, to live on the fringes and coexist with others as infrequently as possible.

    This baby will ground her and tie her to a place and its people.  This baby will make her forever linked to the other one responsible for its creation.  And though it’s not the baby’s fault, she knows she can’t let any of that happen.  Titanya will go back to Ischia for a time, at least, but not now.  Not now when it is still a secret between her and the rare fluttering of her sides that she knows is a growing child of her and Halcyon. 

    She skulks through the trees around the meadow as a tiger.  Blood stains her muzzle and her belly is full (the baby quieter than ever as it seems to similarly enjoy the spoils of a successful hunt).  She eyes the milling horses through the bare tree branches with a marginally lessened level of disdain than normal.  Something about being pregnant has made her itchy for companionship.  Or maybe it is from all the time she is spending with the islanders, catching their need for kinship like an inevitable virus. 

    Titanya pushes her snout through the last layer of dead foliage, remembers herself, and rises into her black and white equine form.  No need to cause a stampede even if it would be delightfully chaotic.  She moseys through the dried out grasses, taking a bite here and there to blend in even though she is dreadfully stuffed already.  She is hungry for something else, though.  Hungry for something different, anything to take her mind off of the inevitable thing that will be happening come spring.

    Titanya

    Photo by Keyur Nandaniya



    @[Colby]@[Cassi]@[hanna] : or whoever! I know you guys wanted a post at some point  =)
    Reply
    #2
    rapt
    rapt.

    there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail
    the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream


    He is, as always, drawn back.
    He is unsure what to do with himself, now, his children long-grown and gone from him. He is a thing who was made to worship, made to fall upon his knees in wretched devotion; yet he lacks an idol, now.
    He moves into the meadow with some hesitancy, an unheralded return. Rapt did not make the acquaintance of many, and his name certainly was not one that would echo in Beqanna’s history. He lacked the power, and more so the desire for power, and thus he moved through this world with little in his wake. He does not mind this – never has – but there is still a strange tightness in his throat as he looks around at the unfamiliar faces.

    The sun is warm on his face, though, highlighting his own gold coat. Rapt is, if nothing else, beautiful.
    Movement catches his eye, colors shifting and blurring. Orange that’s there then gone, a shape changed. He had not looked directly at her, did not know the nature of the transformation, only that something had occurred.
    He is looking now, though, and sees fully the patterned mare. For a moment, he considers drawing back, letting her pass on unheralded.
    But Rapt has so long been idle, and he has not returned to do nothing but skulk in shadows.
    “Hello,” he says, then, “did you change color? I saw…something a moment ago.”
    Not that she owes him any explanation. He is a stranger, and a rather useless one, at that.
    “I’m Rapt,” he adds, as if giving her his name mattered.

    but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever



    @[Titanya]
    Reply
    #3

    give my all just to watch you fall

    The creeping sensation of being watched sends a tingle along her neck.  It starts at the base and rises along the crest of her neck until she is turning her head towards the source.  Her ears flatten, just a little, just like old times.  He is a gilded, striking shape even amongst the new spring-bloom, but something about the image isn’t quite right.  He looks uncommitted to where he’s at or where he’s found himself; she wonders if he wants to run.

    She sees the lines of hesitancy etched across his body and wants to exploit them, she finds, as she might have a lifetime ago.  That same need to messily unpeel and dismantle to locate the meaty center of him still lingers within her.  It is surprising, this need.  She thought the wild parts of herself had been straightened and civilized by her time with Halcyon and the Ischians, or at least marginally.  Instead, the predator has grown sharper on the rare times it is freed.  Titanya takes a purposeful step towards the other. 

    She’s never been one to withhold her own secrets, so when Rapt asks, she is all too eager to oblige.  Letting loose the tiger is always like coming home (moreso than any place she’s ever been), but this time, she only shifts parts of herself.  Her eyes switch from deep amber to bright gold when she blinks.  Her fur ripples and grows longer and becomes painted with orange stripes by an invisible hand.  Sharp canines poke out of the corners of her mouth and pull it into a feral grin.  She looks like she’s either keen to wish Rapt a good day or ready to devour him on the spot.

    She decides to wait and see how the conversation goes before she makes any rash decisions either way.

    “Titanya.”  The need for formalities is irritating; she swishes her dark tail against her hocks before shifting that, too, into the tiger’s longer appendage.  With it, she increases the density in order to behead several wildflowers behind her.  “I was trying to blend in and not scare the locals.”  She gestures over one shoulder with her head.  “But why should I change who I am for their sake?”  Titanya steps closer to the stallion, her gold eyes drinking in his gold, watching the lines of him for any reaction.  “You’re not scared, are you?”  She growls, close to him now, the sound low like gravel in her throat.

    Titanya

    Photo by Keyur Nandaniya



    @[Cassi]
    Reply
    #4
    rapt
    rapt.

    there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail
    the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream


    He is easy takings for a predator. After all, did he not fall to his knees before one, bear an impossible child to him? Rapt is so quick to love monsters, so quick to cast aside whatever notions of self-preservation may linger.
    So he watches, enthralled, as her body ripples and hints at the predator inside – whispers of orange and black, of claws and sharp teeth. A shiver runs over his body at the sight of it, and perhaps it is a horse’s instinct to run, or perhaps it is whatever horrid dark thing lurks inside him, the thing that wants.
    He listens to her, the explanation of not scaring the locals. He nods, as if this is something he can relate to, although Rapt has never struck fear into anyone’s heart.

    “You shouldn’t,” he breathes, observing her, this part-feline thing. He is reminded, terribly, of Bruise – the cloven hooves and curling horns, the monstrous and beautiful beast he had been so quick to worship.
    She steps closer, tail twitching, and he does not move. He looks at her fur, takes in the strange scent of her, and yes, his heart has sped up, but he doesn’t move.
    “No,” he says, “the things that frighten me are far less tangible than predators.”
    A cryptic response, but fair – Rapt’s fears are elusive things, the fear of being left, the fear of not being enough.
    “What’s it like?” he asks, “to hunt?”
    What’s it like, he wonders to himself, to be hunted?

    but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever



    @[Titanya]
    Reply
    #5

    give my all to watch you fall

    “You’re right,” she says, the tail end of the growl a pleasant vibration on her tongue.  She hasn’t tried to bend to normalcy until recently, not until after the fire turned her to ashes which then reassembled and reattached her body to her soul.  There had been something about dying that had given her the desire to look inside herself for the first time.  She had thought death was her punishment for living a selfish, solitary life.  She had thought that this second life was a chance for redemption at the expense of her own freedom.  But becoming alive again stoked a new fire within her, too.  She rebels against her self-made bonds at every turn.

    Today is no different.

    Back on Ischia, her family waits.  That sweet, sweet man that had given her children that she never wanted waits on the island shores to try to appease her and make things simpler. But things with Titanya will never be simple; nothing will ever be straight-forward, as well-intentioned as any might be.  She loves them – dangerously so – but she cannot and will not forsake her wildness for the chains they would bind her with.  Rapt here is easier.  Rapt shivers like the prey he is, and the tigress knows all too well how to handle things that are inherently weaker than she. 

    “Maybe a ghost, then?”  If he wants less tangible, she will oblige him yet again.  Her own density decreases all over and she feels lighter, insubstantial, like the air around them.  She moves so close to the stallion that she can see the individual lashes curling away from his eyes, can see her own wispy reflection in his gaze.  Then she steps forward through him and out the other side.  There is no chill, however, when she passes harmlessly through his body.  She is no ghost, only a woman that does not know her own limits.  A woman that sees the lines she shouldn’t walk across and bounds over them anyway.

    Titanya curls back around, comes to full density again, wonders if the champagne-haired man will still be there when she makes the turn. 

    To her surprise, he is.  She wonders what he has seen to be so unmoved by her stunts.  She relents, at least long enough to answer him.  “Hunting is power and the exchange of it,” she says, as her eyes soften from their predatory glare.  “Hunting is being stronger, faster, and smarter than your target.”  An elk in the woods, a rabbit in the brush, a stranger in the meadow.  “Hunting is a pleasure, but killing is a necessary side-effect.”  Some like to draw it out, she wagers. Some revel in the slow anguish of life-force bleeding out instead of ending the suffering.  She may be a thing borne for the rough and ragged places of the world, but she follows the rules of the wild.  “Don’t worry though, I make it quick.”  She smiles again.  "When I'm hunting, that is."




    @[rapt]
    Reply
    #6
    rapt
    rapt.

    there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail
    the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream


    Rapt hasn’t died – not yet – nor has he been particularly close to death, either in his own doings or in those around him. He wonders, at times, about his mother and father – surely, by now, they’re dead – but he never found any affirmation one way or another, so it is a mystery he will carry on with him for lord knows how long. This used to bother him, but time, as it does, has dulled that wound, and Rapt found himself distracted well enough, falling for a variety of monsters and bearing children his body was not meant to carry.
    (He loved them, though. The monsters and the children.)

    “Perhaps,” he says, but he has little time to speak more, for then she is close enough to him that for moment he is unsettled, and then she keeps moving, closer and then through him, as if he did not exist at all.
    He shivers, though the sensation had not been much of anything. It was more the visual of it, her skin sinking into his, strange but intriguing. He is still slightly adrift in that strange transpiring when she speaks again, of hunting – of power.
    Hunting is a pleasure, she says.
    He pauses. What’s the word he wants? What she describes is not something he wants – anything resembling bloodlust in Rapt is twisted inward, his own desire to be hurt – but her description is something delicious all the same.
    “It sounds fascinating,” is what he goes with, then admits, “I’ve had no experience with it, myself. Too soft, I suppose.”
    Soft in some things, not so much in others. Everything’s relative.
    “What else do you do,” he asks, “besides hunt?”

    but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever



    @[Titanya]
    Reply
    #7

    give my all to watch you fall

    There is a lot she has yet to experience in this new, second lifetime still.  She has died, but she hasn’t lived – not fully, anyway.  

    Before, she’d been the master and keeper of her every move, had existed only for herself and the next step into the unknown ahead.  She had kept her brother and his family after that, had circled their edges like a predator looking for any weaklings in the herd lest one of them try to break away.  Eventually she failed at that endeavor, too, and their little clan splintered and fractured into individual parts that once made a whole. Had once made her whole, even.  She carried on but it was never the same.  All the wild places that were the most unforgiving became her spaces of repentance for all she hadn’t done, all those she had failed to protect.
    And then the flames licked at her old feet and consumed all of her first sins.

    Titanya relishes her rebirth because she will not let herself become a cesspool of stagnation again.  She has already done more than she could have ever imagined the first time around, but it is not enough.  There is an urgency that brings her back to the common lands day in and day out, always searching for what comes next, always craving something she cannot find.  Taunting even-keeled men who hardly react brings her no closer to satiating her hunger, she finds.  And talking of hunting instead of actually hunting only leaves her frustrated.

    Too soft, he muses, and she barely hides a contemptuous snort.  It does present an opportunity though, something to do“That can be fixed, you know.”  Her amber eyes narrow on the champagne’s face, sizing him up and not giving any indication either way on what she decides.  Titanya sends a few tendrils of her own power out to him.  It is his for the taking, this increased density, if he chooses to use it. 

    “Have you ever wanted to destroy something?  I do, all the time.”  She says it plainly and without remorse.  Her gaze shifts to a crooked young tree with a missing crown, perhaps one that had been sheared off by wind or lightning, she thinks – the perfect target.  “You should easily be able to kick it over, or kick through it, even.  If you want to that is.  It’s what I do besides hunting: creative rearrangements.”  She laughs a little, caught up in her own bravado.  Adrenaline surges through her veins at the thought of what he can do, of what she has done many times herself.  She wonders if he’ll feel the rush too, if he’ll decide today that he is made of iron and not wool.




    @[rapt]: she is lending him some increased density if he wants it, if not, feel free to ignore it
    Reply
    #8
    rapt
    rapt.

    there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail
    the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream


    “Can it?” he asks. He assumes he is stagnant, in this way – that there is no path for him other than the one he is one. His nature, after all, is to serve, to lay prostrate before monsters, to be hurt. And he doesn’t mind this.
    (He likes it, really – a fact he does not often admit aloud, because who admits to such base, ugly desires? He hurt me, and I liked it. He hurt me, and I asked for more.)
    He feels it, then, something pressing at his chest. He doesn’t know what, only that it feels like a weight, feels strange, but he opens to it, the same he way he opens to so many strange things, and then he is the weight, a strange thing, a shift in the body.

    He listens to her, shifting in his changing form. Has he every wanted to destroy? It is not his nature – truth is, he prefers to be destroyed, but this seems too brazen to admit to her.
    “Once or twice,” he says, and this is not quite a lie, for the thought has passed his mind, though never much backed by desire. Still, he finds himself wanting to obey, wanting to please her, so he follows her gaze and sees the tree, goes to it.
    It takes several tries – despite his density, he puts so little force behind it, at first – but when he tries, actually tries, his hoof splinters against the wood and there is a crack as the tree falls victim to his impossibly heavy hooves.
    He collects himself, breathing heavier than the exertion should have called for, heart pounding. It’s a different kind of power, this.
    “Wow,” is all he says at first, “it’s a different feeling.”
    The confession, then, albeit a sideways one.
    “Usually I’m the thing that’s being destroyed,” he says, and there is no sadness behind the words, for that is his power – to rebuild himself, to mend the wounds, to make himself whole so he can be taken apart again.

    but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever



    @[Titanya]
    Reply
    #9

    give my all to watch you fall

    “Of course,” she says, when he wonders if his gentility can be reversed.  At the least, she thinks she can sharpen his edges, whittle them until they can cut if the need arises.  “Anything can be improved on.”  Anything can be built up when there is nothing at the start, she adds, silently, but doesn’t want to offend him enough that he walks away.  This game is just beginning.  It is shameful that he has been brought so low, shameful that he perhaps started life this way to begin with.  If she knew his thoughts though, it might be her that walked away in disgust.

    Instead, Titanya loans a part of herself to him.  She thinks if he can only taste what power and strength are that he will find a seed of it inside himself.  She believes he will nurture it, allow it to grow, and wield it like a newfound muscle, this strength.  All she can do is give him the tools to get there, the desire to be more than he was before. 

    Now that she knows he exists like this, she can’t let him languish in his weakness any longer.

    “Once is more than enough.  It’s not your fault you couldn’t act on it before.”  The fact that she has wanted to destroy since the day she was born does not diminish his own declaration of a few violent cravings.  All it takes is a spark, a tendril of shared magic between strangers in the meadow.  He takes it, reaches out for help, and she grins back at him.  Titanya is silent as she watches him go to the tree and kick out a few times in vain.  That’s no matter; a mighty oak tree does not rise in a day.  When the resounding crack finally rings out across the meadow, startling both beast and bird, she lets out a holler of joy at his success. 

    “Isn’t it wonderful?”  She asks in a rush as if she were the one to wield the increased density and topple the tree.  Her smile is now a wide thing that breaks easily across her face.  It isn’t long lived though.  He confesses that he is normally the one destroyed and her smile drops down into a deep, scathing frown. “And why would you allow that?  Why haven’t you done anything about it?”  She becomes almost angry, even, her amber eyes burning into his.  She can’t fathom why anyone would sit idly by.




    @[rapt]
    Reply




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