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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]  Hello, my old heart
    #1

    Iolite

    She rose from the tides with the insurgent splendor of an Aphrodite, sprung from the pearl of a clam shell at the heart of the sea, and thrust into a world anew with a traitorous violence that defied the gentle lapping upon the shore. She shifted from the waters croaking, hacking—with a spill of crimson that glided through the sting of salt. A deep, slender cut tapered artfully from the curve of her cheek and down to the hollow of her throat, disturbing the immaculacy of an opaline galaxy tattooed upon her skin.

    And the injury bled—and bled.
    It oozed starlight, it ached with a defiance that whispered:

    You are alive.

    An errant star adrift, she dragged herself ashore, the tawny spread of her gem-stained coat entangling wildly with the supple sand below. She did not yet dare to turn her gaze to the horizon, to eye the unfettered freedom that spread, wondrous, before her very heart. It howled with a newness that longed to be explored; with a breadth that yearned for her to seize it by the throat and to clutch it close.

    You are alive, Iolite—
    and you are free.


    Four willowy limbs fought with newborn efficiency as she struggled to rise, teetering with damselish mispractice as she drunkenly moved inland, her throat parched and her split skin aching, her adamant progress forward disturbed only by the itch of something wet and warm mapping the contours of her body. Whether it was a rivulet of the water, or a thin stream of blood from the spring upon her throat, she could not say for certain—

    But it dripped, and dripped, and dripped; it snaked down each limb in the winding red string of fate, until she braced her wounded shoulder upon the narrow width of a creaking tree. The palm’s bark bent beneath her weight, her trembling legs braced haphazardly upon the earth below, and she turned her eyes heavenward with a triumph-born smile.

    She had been delivered unto the wastes to perish—
    but the Moonstone had known secrets that the King did not; she had known doorways and passages beyond his ken.

    And so, it was not a plea for help that left her ravaged throat as she at last spoke, but rather a whisper of hard-fought triumph.

    “I am free.”


    I do not want to move mountains;
    I want the mountains to see me coming
    and to crumble.

    @Anyone <3

    RAYOFLIGHT
    #2

    a little white light in a
    sea gone black

    Oceane awakens with the sunrise. It moves over the peaks of Hyaline, leaving them silhouetted in the opulence of a pastel sky. The Queen of the South watches this procession intently from the heart of Loess, though her mind is not on the beauty of it but the plans that have begun to unfold secretly in her mind. She considers waking Soran to discuss her intentions with him, but decides the scar-eyed man deserves his sleep. The bulk of the crown's responsibilities had fallen on him over the recent weeks, but now that the invisibility thrust upon her by the Fairies has faded she immediately took to her duties once more.

    Steam from the hot spring rises before her as she leisurely chews a prickly pear. For a moment, albeit a brief one, Oceane's thoughts turn to Lepis and Castile and the legacy they both left behind. Her heart, still pink with its new scar, aches for the absence of her best friend, but enough time has come and gone now that she can think back on Castile warmly without feeling upset at his sudden exodus. Perhaps in time she will bring Loess to a new golden age, similar to the one she'd been greeted by when she first found her escape and settled in Beqanna. Better, even.

    A cool squall accosts her from the south and Oceane turns to face it, pleased that the past weeks' heavy heat might just break today. Tentatively, however, the opalescent woman looks back over her shoulder at the familiar ridges of the Hyaline mountains and wonders if she should patrol their shared border again today. She could walk it in her sleep now, if needed. The thermals, too, feel familiar when she flies over the sandstone ridges.

    Ultimately, she decides to move towards the south with the silent reassurance that she can take flight and make it to the northeastern border in just a few minutes time if the need arises. But she has become obsessive and it's time to let her mind rest.

    If ever there was a day Oceane expected Nau-Aib to rise from her past, today was not it. Years ago, perhaps, but not now. Many months have come and gone since the opalescent woman even allowed the desert kingdom or its arithmancers a passing thought. But here, in flesh and blood, as she happens upon a copse of thin-trunked mesquite trees, stands a ghost of her past.

    “Iolite?”

    @[Iolite]
    “”

    n | r




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