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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]  what's a king to a god; pangea residents
    #1

    lord, I fashion dark gods too;


    He and this land have a strange relationship.
    He bore it, in his way, built the land from his own sick magic when Beqanna tried to rob them of everything they had. And when it had crumbled into the sea, he had brought it back, and with it a plague.
    (That he was not the one to swim to its sickening depths, not the one to give his blood to its resurrection doesn’t matter. He will take the credit anyway.)
    He has proven to Beqanna that Pangea is not hers to take. And yet now, the earth shifted, and once again they try to burn his land. Never mind that he hasn’t set foot here in years – time is so irrelevant – have they forgotten?
    And oh! To try to replace it with the chamber, that old, filthy place?
    (He had never much liked the place. It reminded him of his father, reminded him that he was once part of the mortal coil.)
    The mind boggles.

    He comes, ready to fight – or, more rightfully, to punish - but it seems he is too late, as he comes in time to see the earth itself swallow that raven wench. He reaches out, tries to discern who – what – had grabbed her, but all he hears is something strange, like static. It’s familiar, almost, but he can’t place the noise.
    He pulls back and looks around, at the half-repaired land. The reversion was shockingly fast, and he smiles at how quick Pangea was to reject the changes thrust upon it.
    Still, there’s no denying that Pangea is worse for the wear from the whole affair. Some of the canyons are crumbled, and the air still reeks of acrid smoke and burnt pine. Other destruction, too, and not that kind that he prefers.
    “Well,” he says, to no one and to any of them, “there appears to have been a struggle.”
    He takes a breath and lifts his head, and then he looks upon them as a king, as a god – their deus ex machina, coming in (only a heartbeat too late) to save them.
    Or, at least, to rebuild.
    “Pangea residents and would-be residents,” he says, “this land came forth from my magic, and does not take kindly to destruction. Hopefully others will learn from this, and think twice before trying to take Pangea from Beqanna again.”
    (He speaks aloud, but not to them – those words are for the faeries, to let them know he will not take kindly to any additional attempts on Pangea’s proverbial life.)
    “To those of you who love this land, bring me a piece of it – whatever symbolizes the land to you. Whatever piece needs repair. I will make it whole again.”
    He complicates things, but he knows sometimes his magic is strange here – Pangea has not forgotten the ill magic that made it. Repairing everything from scratch might work, but also might malfunction – it’s easier, to do it with their talismans, with the loyalty they imbue in them.
    He looks around again, at this odd, sick land, and sighs. A dark god’s work is never done.

    c a r n a g e



    tl;dr: basically Carnage is like "plEASE stop messing with my land. hello residents bring me something symbolic of pangea (e.g. burnt rock, tree branch, native plants, whatever) and I'll use those talismans to rebuild what got messed up)." this isn't actually limited to residents, anyone with a connection to pangea and knowledge of it/desire to see it restored can contribute. love you all.
    Reply
    #2
    BREACH

    I'd bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there
    I'm too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book

    What was Pangea to Breach?

    Nothing, really, if she was to answer immediately. Just a dirt-filled canyon.

    Everything, if she was to think on it longer.

    It was the place that had played such a pivotal role in the formation of her mother. The place where Sochi truly became who she was—the woman who helped start, and then, end the plague. Playing her role amongst the masses. Sinking her teeth into the stallion. Tearing her heart out in sacrifice.

    It was the place that had born Yadigar—breathing the dragon she loved forth from the sand.

    It was the place of Breach’s first death. Where Ghaul had ripped her limb from limb.

    And, now, it was a territory over which she had thin power, a governance in name more than anything.

    So it is begrudgingly that she answers the dark god at first, as contempt of his power over her as her mother had first been, and then more willingly when she realizes that it is her responsibility as much as those who call Pangea home to help in its rebuilding. She nods at his command, teeth gritting, before she takes flight to land upon one of the crumbled canyons nearby. Before she shifts into the wolf.

    What follows is bloody, and long, and exhausting.

    Teeth find flesh and hair. Ripping and snarling and tearing. She shifts, at times, as though a more fragile leg would be easier, and then shifts back when she longs for the teeth and the fight.

    When it is done, she is dizzy with the effort, with the pain. There is one more shift as she takes flight again, the descent back to Carnage more labored and far less graceful than the flight away from him had been. And when she drops down low, she releases the gift to land with a dull thud at his feet.

    Her own leg.

    Chewed through and severed.

    She loses control of the shift and stumbles away from him, her front leg bloodied and ripped apart at the knee. Already, it has begun to regenerate, but it is slow going—her gifts far exhausted by the multiple shifts—and it takes everything within her to keep standing, to not fall to the side, to meet his gaze.

    This, she thinks.

    This is what symbolized Pangea to her.

    so take all the wind from my lungs if you're out of air
    just deliver me truth, deliver me you

    Reply
    #3
    YADIGAR
    there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got.
    He has grown to bristle at anything unfamiliar in his homeland now. He lands with a heavy thud and gives a low snarl when the dark god appears to them, worried he will rip away the desert from them once more. But he speaks and he remembers the lessons passed from Anaxarete, on to Ghaul, and finally to him. Of how Pangea rose and sank and rose once more, sickly and dark. Maybe that was why it called to the monsters of Beqanna and they came to love the red dust here.

    Maybe it’s all coincidence.

    But Carnage promises to rebuild and so Yadigar seeks out his oldest brother. He faces him with his shoulders back and his head high. He draws a shuddering breath and closes his milk-white eye.

    Take it,” he commands Virgil, who wavers at the order. “Rip it out and cauterize it. Make them match.

    The haloed boy nods but he hesitates to draw closer. Yadigar remembers the white hot pain and the agony of his own blood pouring down his face. But even that is preferable to losing Pangea again. So he braces himself and does his best not to shriek when Virgil’s blunt teeth scrape the scrying eye from his socket. It had been quick, when Asphyxea tore the other out with her talons. This method is slow and he fights his quivering knees to remain still.

    Then comes the fire, and Yadigar roars at the pain. The rest dust swallows up the drops of blood that splash into it and keeps them for itself.

    His body sways but he manages to take the swirling eye from Virgil, who sobs and collapses at the weight of the task. The elder monster takes flight and lands once more, beside Breach this time. The tissue of his face is still red and pink with fresh wounds and he stinks of burnt flesh. But he spits the eye next to her leg.

    There is no future for me without Pangea, so what good is my eye if it is not rebuilt?” he says as he looks to her and then to Carnage.
    Reply
    #4
    SEPULCHER
    now is the end of days, and i am the reaper.
    He hears the request and he knows exactly what makes him think of home. When Yadigar had first brought all the lost children to Pangea, Sepulcher had been so hungry. The winter winds and the gnawing ache in his belly made him think that he was certain he would die. And then their brother brought them a fresh deer with antlers like coral reefs. They’d eaten together, and no one even had to fight for their share of meat.

    It gave Sepulcher hope.

    He slept soundly for the first time in days and woke up warm. Most importantly, he woke up surrounded by family. And they never left his side even as his body grew and changed. The memory alone brings a smile to his strange face and he finds one of the coral deer crushed beneath the crumbled rocks of a cliff face. The monster paws at the stones and digs until the head is uncovered at last. Then, he hopes his wide jaws and grasps the antler, twisting his head sharply so it pops loose.

    Do his brothers and sisters know how deeply he cares for them? Would they recognize the importance of this antler to him?

    He wonders as he trots back to Carnage and drops his trophy beside the others. Its root is still wet with blood. Perhaps it’s better that way, to match theirs. He offers a proud smile to the strange god who promises to help and then he steps back to wait patiently.
    Reply
    #5
    B E Y Z A
    remember me when i’m reborn as a shrike

    Beyza recognizes his voice. She had died the last time she heard it, the last time it had summoned her, and yet it inspires no fear. It enhances the current of excitement that had been coursing through her since the changes to Pangea had taken hold.  That death had been a catalyst for her to discover more about her magic, more about herself, and the thing growing inside of her, the piece of that other world that had hitched a ride, feels like it is humming.

    But it is not about that day that this dark god arrives. She considers the request for a short moment before finding her way to one of the pieces of Pangea that it had hurt her so much to lose. The cliff where she had lost Caledonia, the cliff where she had brought her sister and Anaxarete's daughter back to life - the first real pulse of magic that had ever thrummed through her. Not just a trick but something real.

    And since she had already begun to repay the debt she owed to Death, to Jamie, she sees no harm in not reminiscing fondly about that day.

    This is part of Pangea that has changed - the cliff face turned into boulders. She teleports to the base and needs to use her magic to find what she seeks. Pebbles still imbued in the radioactive blood of Anomaly wiggle out from between the boulders. She can feel the toxicity of this blood now more than she had that day in their youth and instead of holding the pebbles in her mouth they orbit around her head like a halo as she finds her way to where the other residents have gathered.

    Beyza is fascinated by the assortment of gifts already provided - including a leg and an eye - and sends forth the radioactive pebbles to settle among the other artifacts. She lingers, intensely curious - both about Pangea's creator and the ritual itself.

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    #6
    i think i'm better on my own but i get so lost in you
    It has been years since she has last been in Pangea, but when the flames had climbed high into the sky, she had been unable to ignore her curiosity.

    It had confused her, then, when she had arrived not to a land covered in ash, but one of fallen canyons and various other states of destruction. The smell of burning pine (but the lack of actual pine trees) was almost disconcerting, like an echo, a memory that was trying to take shape but didn’t have the traction. After finding Draco he had filled her in on all that had transpired – the pines that had grown from magic, and then the way the earth had trembled and split, something pulling the raven magician down with it.

    This skeletal version of Pangea had been left behind – as if the land could have possibly looked anymore unappealing than it already did.

    She had come to Pangea as a child because Stave had insisted, and her twin brother was nearly the only one that she ever listened to without much argument. But here was where she had perfected her love illusionism, where she had forged the closest thing she had ever had to friendships, and here she experienced an early taste of how exhilarating anger and jealousy could be.

    It had shaped her, as much as she did not want to admit it.

    When Carnage comes she is only mildly surprised to actually see him, having assumed he would not take kindly to someone else destroying what he had built, but being unsure if he would actually do anything about it. Her curiosity sparks again, but the light of it does not reach the endless-black of her eyes while she listens to him. He has come back for her mother time and time again, but he was still a mystery to her.

    Still, she debates leaving when he asks them to bring something that reminds them of Pangea; something to help it rebuild. Pangea was not her home anymore, the place too harsh and unforgiving for Thomas and their glass girls, and Desire, endlessly selfish, does not see a reason to help with something that is not hers.

    But there is a memory, somewhere in the back of her mind from when she had been young – when she and Stave had been most interested in their father and would ask questions in that unabashed way only children could. She is almost certain Ryatah had told them that should he ever find them, for any reason, to do as he asked.

    So she does, if a little begrudgingly.

    Along the river had been nearly the only place she had found tolerable when she had lived here. Close to the water, the greenery had been allowed to, maybe not thrive, but grow, at the very least. Here the earth was an odd mix of burnt and partially healed, but wedged between a rocky crevice, she finally finds what she had been searching for. A flower, bright orange in color, and mostly untouched by the effects of the fire, though a little wilted.

    She returns to where everyone else has gathered, and she tries to keep the disdain from her face at their contributions, though again based on her mother's stories he will likely be delighted by the body parts. She is not at all concerned at how different – less violent in its retrieval –  her item is. The flower had already looked so out of place, even in its natural habitat. 

    A flower blooming in a near wasteland, now resting alongside blood and poison. 

    She looks at him with black eyes set against the galaxy-color of her face, the same galaxy that spills across her back and sides, a likeness of the same galaxy she had been conceived in. She does not expect him to know who she is, knowing that she is just one of many – hundreds – of offspring, and so she says nothing. There is only a very faint smile that dares to lift at the edge of her lips.

    i think i'm better on my own but i'm so obsessed with you
    desire


    I did not mean to word vomit Desire picking a stupid flower but here we are
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    #7

    lord, I fashion dark gods too;


    They bring their offers – bloody ones, piece of themselves, of others. All fitting, all appropriate to a land that was borne of sick magic, a land that resurfaced and brought plague upon the earth. He smiles, and though he does not speak to those who come – not yet – he nods to them, the small group who seek to rebuild.
    It's easy, with such pieces, with the blood imbued here – he pulls from them, uses them as a conduit, and from these pieces the land is remade, the crumbling canyons patched, the scent of smoke fading and replaced with something else, something that smells faintly of copper and iron. He leaves the earth scarred, just a little – a mark of scorched earth where the land had parted and swallowed the raven witch whole. He will let that heal on its own, but lets it stand as warning for now – a note that this land does not take kindly to change.

    “There,” he says softly, reviewing the land. Its trauma is not erased, not completely, but the canyons are restored, the land back beneath their grasp.
    Yet he does not leave, not yet. For no leader has been named to this restored place, and he will not stand to see it crumble again.

    c a r n a g e



    Carnage tidied things up thanks to the gross offerings!!! thank you all!!!
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    #8

    for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
    but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

    She heals slowly.

    So slowly.

    She knows it will come back—the leg, at least—and that she will not faint entirely from the loss of blood. She knows that she won’t come undone by this latest injury and she will rise again in the morning whole, but it is difficult to feel like the Alpha when she stands here, weak and dazed, trembling from the pain.

    Yadigar is there, on her peripheral, but she barely sees him.

    She doesn’t see the others who arrive either.

    They are ghosts and the only thing she truly sees is the dark god before them. The one who takes their sacrifices and then spins them into something different, something more. The one who bleeds them into the land and then pulls it back into something whole again. Who brings Pangea back from the shadow of the Chamber that had attempted, for just a moment of time, to displace it entirely.

    When he is done, she takes a moment, shaking.

    She looks around at the group of them, setting her jaw and holding back the keening cry that would rise in her. The scream that would tear her throat if she would let it—the darkness that would overtake her.

    “We need a leader here,” she nearly demands it, knowing Carnage is the one who should be saying it.

    “Who would step forward to lead Pangea?”

    though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
    though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth

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    #9
    i think i'm better on my own but i get so lost in you
    She watches in silence as Pangea is restored, or at least, mostly. There are still signs of the damage it had taken, scars that showed something had tried to destroy it and it had still emerged victorious. It was still not what she would define as beautiful – but she cannot deny that she feels a sort of relief to see her childhood home returned to the way she had remembered it. Desire and Stave had had little stability once they had chosen to leave their mother’s side, and Pangea is where they had gone together. She had been here for the entirety of Anaxarete’s rule, and a majority of Draco and Ghaul’s. Thomas and the twins were the only reason she had left, but now the twins were grown – and so was she.

    Desire was not quite the same brash young thing that she had been, but her selfishness was still well intact, because when Breach speaks, she nearly forgets Thomas entirely.

    Something inside of her chest stirs at the mention of Pangea needing a leader; a long-buried part of herself that would have never allowed herself to settle for just being a mother. That greedy part of her that always wanted just a little bit more than what she already had.

    Her dark eyes fix themselves onto the Hyaline queen, before diverting back to Carnage. “I’ll do it,” she says, answering Breach, but looking at him – not really sure if he would approve or disapprove, or even care at all. Her head turns, addressing the queen fully now. “I grew up here. It’s only been the last three or so years that I was gone, but….” She pauses, taking a moment to glance at the small group that has gathered. “I still came back when it needed rebuilding.”

    i think i'm better on my own but i'm so obsessed with you
    desire
    Reply
    #10

    for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
    but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

    She does not often feel a Queen. Does not often feel the weight of it or the responsibility of it. She doesn’t understand the truth of it and she certainly feels it less in the presence of Carnage, but she knows it is still a right. She knows she fought and tore herself apart to wear the crown handed to her from Ghaul.

    And, standing here, she fights to remember just that.

    So she doesn’t fade into the shadows. She doesn’t defer to Carnage, even though he is a god and she is but a girl. Instead she looks back to Desire who steps forward to claim the responsibility no one else does.

    Breach inclines her head, fierce and confident.

    “Then let it be so.”

    She glances her attention to those around them, feeling lightheaded from the loss of blood and only the barest hint of relief as her self-healing and regeneration take hold.

    If no one else would step forward, then this star-covered girl would be the new leader over Pangea.

    though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
    though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth

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