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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


    [private]  can you see a light burning round the bend; torryn
    #1

    DESPOINA

    She dreams of him, even as she shuns the rest of the world.

    She wonders if his child has his eyes or is wrapped in shadow the same way. She wonders if they inherit the smoke of him or if they are the opposite. Do they breathe light. Do they love him. Does he love them? She cannot help the sharp ache in her breast when such questions haunt her. She cannot help the way that her very body twists around the pain of it, pressing into the blade until it stings, until it cleaves her in half.

    In some world, she would perhaps fold into herself more.

    She would heal herself, nurse the wound until she found the horizon again.

    But this is not that world. This is not the ending she is given. Instead, she hardens. She calcifies. She feels it pierce her and the poison solidifies in her belly. It turns into anger, and hatred, and a desperate, dark need to tear those down around her. She shifts, sometimes, in her sleep and wakes as the hound, her head thrown back with blood on her mouth and tears in her eyes and a belly fully on nightmares.

    She stalks the world and when she tears out the throat of strangers, she imagines it’s her.

    She imagines it is the mother of his child.

    (There are some days she no longer recognizes herself.)

    Today though—today, she is still Despoina. She hides the beast somewhere deep within her and she pretends that it does not exist. She pretends that did not gorge on those she would have once desperately wanted to be her friends. She pretends she is still sweet and pretends that she was never ruined.

    And when she sees him, she freezes, her black eyes going flat.

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #2
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    He looks for her everywhere.

    He looks for her from every shadow that he lingers in, from one corner of this land to the other. He glances across their faces, he searches the outskirts for a single glimpse of iridescent blue, but to no avail. She is just as good at disappearing as he is, and he wonders if this is the universe’s way of punishing him – again.

    As if being turned into a shadow that feeds off fear and sorrow was not enough.
    As if he did not already punish himself over and over for all of his wrong-doings, as if he did not already live a life of solitude in an effort to protect anyone he might care about.

    The universe must be protecting her, then. And he would accept it if he wasn't so selfish. He knows that he is not good for her – not good for anyone, but least of all her. Terror and misfortune seemed to follow him wherever he went, and the last thing he would ever want is to bring harm to her, but hadn't he already done that? He had looked her in the eye and told her he had been with someone else; he had watched the way his words had bruised her, and watched, too, how effectively she walled him off.

    He would have left her alone if the world had not gone dark.

    It had been thrilling at first. Where once he had stuck to the shadowed parts –  the forests, mostly – Beqanna was suddenly wide open to him. But the longer the dark stayed, the more foreboding it felt. He was familiar with darkness and danger – he was the monster in the shadows, the red-eyed creature of nightmares. This feeling that he could not shake, though, told him that this was more. Something more than him, something bigger.

    He looks for her with greater urgency after that, and though he has imagined a thousand times what it would be like to finally see her face, she still catches him off guard.

    He stutters to a stop, his bright red eyes piercing through the darkness to find her face. “Despoina,” his voice nearly cracks with disuse, and he worries what he must look like to her now. They have often met in darkness, but not like this. The shape of him is nearly indiscernible in this endless night, save for the eyes that glow like lit rubies. “I was looking for you,” he tells her truthfully, resisting the urge to step closer to her.
    torryn
    Reply
    #3

    DESPOINA

    It hurts to look at him almost as much as it hurt to never see him—and that she doesn’t understand.

    She wishes it made sense one way or another. That some part of this would at least feel good or in any way desirable so that she could lean into that like the weak creature that she is, but both ways equal pain. She is left aching or bruising no matter where she turns and she realizes that it is enough to turn her mad.

    Maybe she already is mad.

    Maybe she always has been.

    She swallows hard when he comes closer to her, a motion that is only detectable by the way that his eyes get larger and the glow of them brighter. The darkness should scare her more than it does, it should strike fear into her very bones, but she knows that there is nothing out in the shadows worse than her own fear. She is a creature of hell, and there is nothing that could not claim her as their own.

    This darkness is her birthright, she thinks.

    So she grits her teeth and feels the muscle jump in her jaw. Maybe he should see her for what she is, she thinks. Maybe he should know her for exactly what she has always been and the wild idea nearly makes her laugh like something was broken inside of her. “Why?” she asks and she can’t stop the way that her voice sounds so cold—so unlike the sweet girl she had been, the one so desperate for attention. For him.

    Without warning, she shifts. She is nearly the size of herself normally, but that is the only part of her appearance that remains similar. The rest is wholly different. From the claws that dig into the soft earth beneath her to the black fur that does not reflect light the same as her usual iridescent sheen. Her eyes glow as red as his own as she stands there, refusing to feel shame for the body that has always been hers.

    “Did you find what you were looking for?”

    And if her voice is a tad colder still, who is to say?

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #4
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    He can taste her pain and he wishes it did not taste as sweet as it did.
    There was a version of himself, long dead and lost in a maze of caves underground, that would have never dreamt of hurting her. A version of himself that would have seen the bruised look in her eyes and been cleaved in two by the pain on her face.

    But now all that remains is this shadowed shell of what he had once been,  a smoke-filled skeleton that fed on pain and anger rather than light and love. He wars with himself, he fights this urge to press a finger to her pain and see how sharp he can make it; the part of him that recognizes how wrong it is, the part of him that doesn't want to be the source of her sorrow. The sound of her response — a single word, cold and heavy — makes something inside of him flinch, but it does not register in the shadows of his face. “Because I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he answers her honestly. He did want her to be okay — he wanted her to be happy, he wanted her to be with him but away from him, he wanted her safe but he wanted her all to himself.

    He couldn’t have all of those things. He knows this, but he refuses to see it.

    She catches him off guard when she shifts, and he steps back in confusion. The confusion eventually caves way to a flicker of anger, though he cannot place why. He is not sure if she was trying to intimidate him, or trying to drive him away, but he finds that both ideas send pinpricks of fury down his spine.

    It is difficult to see with the dark around them, but he shifts, too. The shadows that made him equine spin and tighten, leaving behind a canine shadow-beast to nearly match hers. It was a mistake on his part — he lacked control in this form, and when he speaks to her the words are a guttural growl spoken between sharp teeth. “You’re being difficult.”
    torryn
    Reply
    #5

    DESPOINA

    There is relief in finally giving into the anger.

    It was easier that sinking further and further into sorrow. It was easier than feasting on her own pain, on making herself smaller by gorging on her own heartache. It was so much easier to turn to the fury that had always been her own—letting the hellhound overtake her so that she was nothing but this hellish creature. In this form, she wasn’t sad Despoina. She wasn’t the girl nearly killed by her mother and then abandoned. The girl adopted who had run away. The girl who fell in love with a shadow she knew nothing about and then left to her own devices again. A girl who longed but who was never wanted.

    She was a killer in this form.

    She was predator and not prey.

    Her red eyes sharpen when he too shifts and that relief clicks even further, something in her mind switching as she regards him. He isn’t Torryn anymore. He isn’t the boy she loved from the first. He isn’t the one who turned from her and had children with others without a second thought.

    He’s an opponent.

    Her lips peel back from her sharp-edged teeth and there is a growl that builds in the slender column of her throat. “Maybe I am,” she barely recognizes the pitch of her own voice. It is throatier than usual and she takes a step forward, refusing to be cowed by him. Refusing to be the one to turn away and run this time.

    “Maybe I deserve to be difficult,” she spits out and her hackles raise.

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #6
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    There is a moment where he thinks he is going to fight her.

    He imagines them clashing, hellhound and hell-shadow, and he wonders if he could actually bring himself to do it. He has attacked others before, but never anyone once he has learned their name. But to attack her, that would be something else entirely. She is not a stranger, and not a passerby that he has used for idle conversation as he stirs and toys with their emotions until he is full.

    She is the girl that haunts his days and his nights, the one that makes him wish he could just for once not be the monster he has become.

    He would never forgive himself for lashing at her.  He doesn’t see how he could. He has hurt her before, on accident; he knows he has left a mark on her heart that never should have existed, and he knows he should have tried harder to heal it. Instead he had run, he had let himself think that by leaving her, he was doing her a favor.

    With their nearly matching red eyes locked on each other, both their hackles raised and teeth eager to sink into something, he realizes the full weight of what he has done.

    Seamlessly, he shifts back.

    The shadows roll and twist, his strange skeleton clicking into place until he is equine again, or as equine as he will ever be. “You’re right,” he tells her, his voice quiet, almost defeated. Holding her in his gaze he does something that he rarely does; something that he might regret, but he is so desperate to tame that anger in her eyes, even just a little. Very carefully and subtly he begins to drain the anger from her—nothing too drastic, just enough to hopefully persuade her from still wanting to attack. He doesn't consume any of it, either. He lets it all spill into the air and the ground, lets it dissolve and fade away. 

    He does not take the hurt or the sorrow; he leaves it because he knows he has no right to use his power to take them from her. He had caused it, and he would not allow himself the easy way out. 

    “I’m sorry, Despoina. And I would do anything to get you to forgive me.” Involuntarily he steps forward, but he stops himself, afraid of angering her again, afraid of making her leave. “Tell me. Tell me what it would take, and I'll do it.”
    torryn
    Reply
    #7

    DESPOINA

    The anger is such a shield for sadness that it does not take long for it to fold. The second he begins to drain it—the second he looks at her and apologizes—she loses her grip entirely. It bleeds from her and she is left as a husk with nothing but her sadness to swell in her, the tides washing up along the shores of her heart. She shifts as he does, and she feels even smaller than she had before. She shrinks, dropping the delicate curve of her nose down to her chest, her inky hair curtaining in front of her iridescent face.

    “Don’t apologize,” her voice is small too, a bare whisper that she can barely give form to. “Please.” She forces herself to look up at him, to study the darkness that is his face—to try and find the core of him from within the shadows. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She had, she knows. She had lashed out and used her endless pain as an excuse for every possible wrong. For hurting others. For hurting herself.

    For trying to hurt him.

    The next is harder for her to manage and it feels like choking up shattered glass to try—but she still does. “It’s not your fault if you didn’t feel for me the way that I,” she stutters here, heat rushing into her cheeks with shame, “that I felt about you.” She breaks eye contact again, shaking her head, before taking a step toward him to. This time, her face is more open, her black eyes wide and expressive.

    “Let me try to be your friend again, Torryn.” It hurts to say his name too, but the pain is a good one, a welcome one. The kind that she would gladly inflict on herself again and again.

    “I want to try.”

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #8
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    He can see the way she nearly wilts after he has removed all the anger from her, and he almost feels guilty for it. He would rather see her bristling and furious than subdued the way she is now, as if he had reprimanded her. But he is weak and he also cannot bear for the anger to be directed at him, doesn't know how to shoulder it. He has not yet learned how to fix the things that he breaks, does not even realize that this is going to be an uphill, losing battle that he fights for the rest of his life.

    He stares at her, beautiful and delicate, with that feral side that he had never seen until now. He stares at her and thinks of what they could have been like if he was not this. He wonders if she would have even spared him a second glance as the plain roan boy he had been. There had been nothing special about him—brown eyes in a family of yellow-eyed shadow creatures, with no kind of affinity to the shadows to speak of.

    He can’t decide which is worse; being this nightmare that she at least was drawn to, or never being seen by her at all.

    Slowly, he shakes his shadowed head, his head angled down to hide the harsh glow of his red eyes from her. “I don’t think we can be friends, Despoina.” The tendrils of shadow that shift and twine around his face shield the way he is clenching his jaw, and the way he grinds his teeth as if he could turn the emotions to dust and swallow them. He wishes he could ignore the hunger—a different kind than what he is used to—gnawing like some rabid beast in the pit of his gut.

    But before he knows it he is stepping forward, and he sweeps his nose along the bottom of her jaw. He holds her there in the glow of his red eyes for a moment, and then hesitantly brushes his lips against her cheek. “I don’t want you to be my friend,” his voice is a low rasp now, and he is close enough to feel the warmth that radiates from her skin; everyone always felt so warm compared to him, but she was something more, something electric. “I want you to be mine.”
    torryn
    Reply
    #9

    DESPOINA

    Despoina doesn’t know what she is without her sorrow.

    It has been her only companion—the only constant in her life. From the very first, it had been there with her, when her mother had nearly torn her to pieces. When she had instead abandoned her in the den. When she had found a brief reprieve amongst the family of skeletons and wolves, it still been there. She could not see the loud, boisterous family without knowing, in her bones, that it wasn’t her family to have.

    It had followed her when she had fled.

    When she had tried so desperately to get that demon’s attention for longer than a second.

    When she spent years on her own—always alone.

    But he managed to make her feel something different. Something new. He managed to make her feel anger and frustration. Managed to make her feel hunger. And when he approaches her, presses his nose against her, there’s something new again that blossoms in her chest: need. Want. Desire.

    It makes her gasp, something sweet that whistles over her tongue. It makes her dizzy and she nearly shifts and runs away from fear of the overwhelming feeling. Instead though she leans into it, something electric on her tongue as her teeth press through the shadows to find him beneath them. Him. Torryn.

    “I am yours,” she confesses because it’s the most natural thing in the world to admit.

    She almost laughs then but instead presses closer into him, her heart tripping.

    “I always have been, I think.” She can’t imagine being anything but his. Can’t imagine that he was not perfectly carved for her and that she was, somehow, created for him—that he was the counterpart to her. The darkness she could never run from somehow made manifest and turned into a home for her.

    I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do

    Reply
    #10
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    The new beast that he can feel coiling in his gut is not one that he is familiar with. He knows how to sate the other beast — he knows how to find sorrow and rage and ruin, knows how to coax it from them if it is not organically there. He hates that he has now grown so familiar with it that he can pinpoint its exact needs and wants and knows how to keep it at bay.

    But this, this gnawing need to have her, to lay claim to her in a way that he would never let anyone else, that is something else entirely. He had not felt like this that night with Breckin;  she had been lovely and captivating, but she had not been the answer he was looking for.

    When Despoina reaches for him, when she presses herself beyond the shadow and to the strange mass beneath that served as his skin, it is like she has melted herself into his bones. He can feel the stutter of her heart, a predatory sense that he wishes he did not have, but in this moment she has transcended from victim and prey into something else entirely. He is no longer searching for her sadness; he is not trying to draw away her sorrow and despair.

    He only wants to pull her close, to wrap her in his shadows until they devour her whole.

    He drapes his shadowed head over her neck, the long, smoke-like tendrils of his mane now billowing around the two of them as he brings her in close. “I wish I could promise that I’ll never hurt you,” he rasps into the groove of her throat, where he runs cool lips against her skin. “But I don’t want to make you promises that I cannot keep,” he continues, the words quiet and laced in sorrow because he wishes he could promise her things like that; wishes that he did not have an insatiable need that was indifferent to her own feelings, the beast that was sure to break her heart.

    “You could do so much better than me, Despoina,” he pushes closer, shadows crawling across her shoulders as he drags his nose down her back,  a possessive growl building in his chest when he breaths into her hip, “but I’m far too selfish to let you.”
    torryn
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