• Logout
  • 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]  the fatal flaw that makes you magnificently cursed
    #11
    It is the firmness of his summer voice that commands her gaze back to him in a way she makes no effort to fight. It is like magnetism, like stars colliding. She blinks once and the urge to look away again nearly overwhelms her. It rises like a tide inside her chest, the weight of it so desperate to drown her that for a split second her breath catches in a ragged inhale that fills her ribs with dandelion wisps. But she steadies again and when her eyes fall back open they shine with a new, guarded intensity. An insult would’ve wounded her, but she would have understood it. His acceptance is far more unsteadying.

    “Are you sure?” She asks, daring him to take his kindness back. There is a hardness that rises inside her, a stoniness inside her chest and between her ribs because she knows, she knows, how much it will devastate her if he changes his mind, even if she does not understand why. His opinion shouldn’t matter, it should mean nothing. He is a stranger, a wounded one at that. He should mean nothing to her because he is temporary and ephemeral. He is the changing of seasons, a blue sky never the same shade twice.

    But of course he means more.

    His smile disarms her and that almost furious scowl disappears from her face as she studies him more closely, softens in a way she only does when she is alone. But she is not ready for the way color bleeds from his skin, for the way chestnut bleaches to a white as bright as hers, or the way it darkens to a black as dark as the depths of the loneliest night. She knows what is happening before she can truly understand it, but when the colors find their jagged edges and his eyes blink once and reopen one black and one gold, she is stunned.

    He is beautiful like this, though nothing is quite like his natural chestnut and shining gold - that will always be her favorite, she thinks. “It looks better on you than it does on me.” Her voice is an odd kind of fragile whisper, a bird with broken wings tossed into the wild of a raging storm. And though she doesn’t mean to, she finds herself pausing their walk to reach out and trace the place on his neck where white crashes against black in jarring fragments. “It’s strange to see it like this.” She says, and her voice is still something quiet as starlight. She touches the places in his mane where the colors change from black to white to black again, moves further down his neck to touch wings that are black above and shining like white-gold starlight beneath. “I’ve seen myself, but only in reflections. So everything seems backwards.”

    She takes a step back and her eyes study him with such intensity that a man prone to worrying might balk. “You still have your stripes.” She notes, but there is something new in her voice now, something almost tremulous as she takes in the way those glowing patterns sit over the gold-drenched white of her own legs. It’s even starker across his haunches, the gold so brilliant against her smoldering black. “You’re both of us.” Her mismatched eyes are wide with something secret that she carefully tamps down inside her chest. A realization that how he is now could be what a child from them would look like, not unlike how she is pieces of both of her parents as well. She shies from it, abandoning the stripes to study his face again, to study her own face.

    “It’s a little odd.” She disagrees, but all the edge has gone from her voice and there is something not unlike affection as she looks into the eyes of this stranger so willing to be open with her. She reaches up to brush her lips along the bright white marking at the center of his face - a diamond whose lowest point fell too far. On one side there is shining white-gold fur and a perfectly black iris, on the other a chasm of the blackest midnight thrust up against a perfectly golden eye. She touches the white-gold with a gentle smile, her lips like feather across his face. “I get this from my mother.” A murmur, whispered breath that warms his skin as she moves to touch the black side next. “And this from my father.”

    She remembers herself then, withdrawing a half-step away from where she had been crowding him moments before, chastened. And, because she cannot help herself, cannot stop the question from falling like stardust through those dark, velvet lips, “Who are you, Nashua?” It is a wonder that someone like him exists, a wonder that he has been so kind despite her flares of temper and barbed retorts. There is nothing left inside her that wants to wall him off anymore, nothing that wants to fight to keep him away. “I was actually born in the Taiga. It’s where my dad lives.” It’ll seem random, a belated sharing of facts, but it is a kernel of truth she would not have given without him first earning it.

    ILLUMINAE

    we can't dream when we're awake,
    or fall in love with a heart too strong to break



    @[Nashua]
    Reply
    #12
    Information 

    "You're the inspiration," Nashua murmurs, his mind becoming hazy with fatigue and the overuse of Magic. "I'm just the canvas." He tells the two-toned woman, reaching deep for something to steady his voice. It had been unsettling the first time it had happened to Nash, the way his coat had completely drained of color. He'd been out on the Isle and his mind had wandered to home - to Noel and their children - and it seemed those thoughts took all his colors home to Taiga.

    Is that where his chestnut and gold have fled now? Have they returned to his mate and family while what remains of Nash takes root here, studying @[Illuminae] with mismatched eyes.

    She reaches to touch his dark wings and Nashua can't help but smile at the mention of reflections. "I could change it, if you'd like." He tells her and the colors shift again, re-aligning so that they are a perfect match. The pegasus tries to take a step ahead but staggers under the effort it takes to be precise; the ground isn't where he left it. "I've seen myself before," he shares with her and glances over his shoulder to see where the black-and-gold mare stood. "Not like this," he adds with a slight lift of his wings that shone from the glow coming from his golden stripes.

    "My mother and brother can share memories," he explains to his companion, sharing it with her like it was some great secret. It wasn't - Nash was sure that Lilliana or Yanhua would have spoken of the Echoes with anyone who asked. But his smile tugs warmly to one side at something that used to upset him so much - just one more way he was different from them - as a colt, "so I caught many glimpses of myself over the years." The Hersir adds.

    He doesn't know how or when she comes so close; Nash only knows that she is there.

    The warmth of her breath dances across his skin as she tells him about the white marking on her face - the one now on his - of a star that fell too far. From the heavens, he wonders? She moves to the night that colors her skin - twisted shades of dark that don't seem wrong on Illuminae - and tells the story of her heritage. Nashua continues to watch her, focusing on the way that she weaves her words and appreciating how together they are creating a story that comes with hues and shades.

    It seems only fair that he shares part of his with her.

    Slowly, his skin returns to its copper shade (though perhaps slightly brighter, a color that would burn fire-red if that sun had still shone). With a blink, his eyes have turned emerald green. The pegasus is weary and tired but he's determined to tell her this: "This comes from my mother." His blazed face turns away from her, angling towards his chestnut coat. Nashua glances down to his stripes that have become brighter under his stare, "and those - ," says Lilliana's son, "those I gave to my children."

    And then Nash tells her something that does feel like a secret, confides in her with something that has always left him feeling hollow: "I don't know who gave them to me." If he had to claim a father, that would be Leilan. But who was Wolfbane? Who is he to Nashua, who wonders about the man and the monster?

    "I don't know," he finally answers Illuminae who takes a step away from him. "I like to think I'm still finding that out." Nash glances upward and wonders aloud, "do you know who you are?"

    [Image: jCdBK6.png]
    Reply
    #13
    She is only vaguely aware of what is happening on a more basal level, that all of his soft murmurs and easy smiles are knitting themselves into some important place inside her chest. She can sense the shift inside herself of course, the thawing of ice and the demolition of walls built to hide behind, to keep herself safe. But it doesn’t feel dangerous yet, doesn’t seem like this could be any kind of a mistake. He is so kind and so gentle, and there is more goodness in him in these few moments than she has ever known in anyone else. It isn’t love that builds inside her chest because it is eons too soon for that, but it is something lasting that binds her affection to him in a way she has not ever experienced before, and in its newness she does not know how to protect herself against it.

    There is some kind of faint smile on her face and she starts to tell him no, that he doesn’t have to change the colors to match the reflection she is so used to, but he does it before she can stop him. Suddenly it is her face that stares back at her, though it is so unlike a reflection for the way it is animated by his emotions instead of her dull emptiness. It is enough to make her force her eyes softer, to make the effort to relax the muscles around her mouth so they are softer like his, less tense. She cannot help but feel like he is beautiful like this, like the contrast of colors is something more than she had ever imagined it to be. Like a collision of night and day, of dawn and dusk. She is certain that these colors look different on her face with her guarded eyes and unsmiling mouth. He is the warmth that she lacks.

    He stumbles forward and she is at his side at once, walking closer than his shadow and silently forcing more of her healing into him despite that she has only dregs of exhaustion left. But she is deliberate in not mentioning that she can see how worn out he is, careful not to let him know she is still giving him what she cannot spare. She is sure he would tell her not to, and she is too tired to fight with him about it, too stubborn to stop.

    “What do you mean by share memories?” She asks quietly, her eyes on his until the crooked smile at his mouth draws them lower for an instant. “Can they share anything they want?” It is easy to imagine what a burden that might be if it were uncontrollable - a kind of vulnerability that would almost absolutely drive her into solitude. Though, she cannot help but wonder what it would be like to see some of Nashua’s memories, and the thought feels so intrusive that she flushes silently with a guilty heat.

    His skin changes again, and she finds she is glad to see that burning copper shade again, something brighter than any wild ore. It suits him more than her chimerism ever could. Especially those summer green eyes, warm and bright like buried emeralds. She listens to him silently, quietly glad for every bit of himself he shares with her. His is a kind of openness that leaves her feeling all tangled up in him. He gestures to the chestnut, naming it as his mothers just as she had named the parts of her own self for him. But she is not expecting it when he says his stripes belong to his children, and it is a wonder that she ever thought this beautiful heart might belong to no one.

    “You have children?”She asks, and she isn’t sure why her voice sounds so strange right now or why it’s suddenly harder to look at the light of his warm face. There are glaciers moving inside her chest, a thaw coming undone as she struggles internally to understand why this truth feels like some kind of blow.

    But then she realizes, and there is a kind of deep quiet that settles back over her and mutes the warmth that he had kindled in her mismatched eyes. It is a kind of numb realization, a discovery of foolishness that some wretched part of her had hoped he was as broken as she is, that maybe they could be broken together. It is better that he is whole and loved, that he belongs somewhere she cannot ruin him with her dark. Better for her to be reminded that she is better suited to the dark than to someone as light as him.

    “Maybe it’s okay not to know.” She tells him when her thoughts have grown less tumultuous and the lonely pain inside her chest does not color the tone of her voice. “Maybe they’re just yours. I certainly can't imagine them being anything other than Nashua.” She says his name like it is something wonderful, like he is something wonderful, and while she says it with a kind of quiet levity, there is still an undeniable truth that rings in her voice.

    She continues walking at his side, talking careful steps in the dark over root and rock guided only by the faint glowing of his beautiful stripes. “Well,” she says, and though it feels like she is sinking somewhere beyond where she can be reached, she turns her face to him again and smiles faintly, “if you need any clues, I think I already have a pretty good idea of that.” Of who he is. Then her smile turns coy, but it is only to hide the pain on her face and the brokenness in her voice when she answers him far too honestly. “Me? Oh I’m no one.” She’s still smiling when she looks away again, still hanging on desperately to that coy mask so that he will hear her truth and think she is only teasing. But there is a numbness inside her chest as she looks on ahead through the dark forest with a sense of overwhelming emptiness, like she is erosion in fast forward. “I think we’re getting closer to home.” Except, she realizes dully, that this place where he lives with his family no longer feels like it has room for her. Not home.

    ILLUMINAE

    we can't dream when we're awake,
    or fall in love with a heart too strong to break



    @[Nashua]
    Reply
    #14

    Nashua is aware of the cold and the dark.

    He thinks it's because Illuminae has freed from the frigid grip of Death. He thinks that because he had been so close to dying, everything around him suddenly feels more alive. There is a depth to the darkness that he could have never perceived; there is a chill in the air that has made him shiver like he never has before. Nash tries by clenching his jaw and gritting his teeth to control the shaking, but like a newborn foal, he stumbles and his wings sag and he has no control over the way his body trembles.

    There is a shifting within him - a binding and bending of his bones - that he is aware of and had he known how much it took from the mare beside him, Nash would have given it back. He would have pressed into her, done what he could to restore her because it is never been his intention to take anything. But his mind is as tired as the healer beside him and his thoughts wander too far, taking him back to his childhood. He wants to escape the horrors that are all around them and in his retreat to the past, he wants to bring @illuminae, too.

    She doesn't deserve the dark, he thinks. She deserves something far brighter.

    Something shifts, then. The conversation turns and Nashua slows, trying to process the change.

    "Yes," Nashua states; the thought of them forces determination to work through the murk in his mind, the way that his striped legs feel like iron. "They live with my...," and he slows, because what does he call Noel? There has never been a word for the type of sanctuary she has been for him, the way she continues to stay in Taiga when he had thought she never would. He's never had a word for Noel and he doesn't know what to call her now.

    He is more unsure of twisting unease in his stomach when he looks over at the mare beside him and Nash struggles to keep his wings up.

    One snags on a withering bush and the pegasus curses quietly, using what energy he has to draw it back to his side. Their conversation has kept him aware from drifting (both with his hooves and his mind) and he struggles to come back to it. His troubled expression - one full of stormclouds - dissipates for a moment when she says that his stripes could be just his; he laughs quietly, suddenly untroubled by the idea. How wonderful would that be?

    Perhaps someday that might be true.
    Perhaps someday, after a few generations pass, the Northerners might not so easily recall the striped man who terrorized them.

    It's a comforting thought as they trek towards the Taiga. His future had been gone a few hours before, snatched away by the Eclipse until the dual-colored mare beside decided otherwise. And now, it was returned to him through a random act of kindness. Nash is glad that his traveling companion is smiling again, to hear the laughter in her voice because it seems like she might share the sentiment. Even if she is sharing that sentiment with a stranger. "I've never met a No One before," he tells her, hoping his teasing might encourage her to share her actual name.

    And at the reminder of home - that they might be close to Taiga - Nashua is very aware that he owes her his life.

    "Thank you, again." He tells her, because it seems like the very least that he can do. "If you hadn't come...," his voice trails off, drifting into the expectant quiet around them - a silence that could only happen when the world is full of nightmares. Nash rebels against it by saying, "Should you ever need it, you have my help."
    [Image: jCdBK6.png]
    Reply
    #15
    She is glad when he doesn’t or can’t finish his sentence about where his children live, and maybe it is purely selfish but she does not press him to continue. Maybe a friend would have encouraged him with a warm smile and bright eyes, but she is made of neither of those things, and in her friendship she only has her flaws to share with him. She doesn’t want to think about someone who is his and while it isn’t entirely jealousy that aches inside her chest, it is still something she shies from, something she refuses to look into the eyes of lest it recognize exactly who she is and who she isn’t.

    In the quiet that follows his half explanation, she tries very hard not to look over at him. She isn’t sure if it’s because there is something written in the contrast of her too-quiet eyes that she does not want him to find, or if it’s because she does not want to see the softness in his expression that comes from missing someone you love. But when his wing catches and a curse falls from his lips, she cannot help but to glance sideways at him and make sure he’s okay. It is the expression on his face that stills her tongue though, one she has seen on her own reflection on the days where she is lost in the turmoil of wondering at the goodness of her own heart. If she is good like her mother or wrong like her father. It is pain and understanding, and she wonders without asking, if this is the shade loathing takes when it settles on his face, or if it is just hers.

    It is too intimate a thing to ask, though, and so instead she reaches out wordlessly to touch her lips to his neck in silent understanding of what it is to wear storm clouds forever in your eyes.

    I’ve never met a no one before. He says a while later, and she is not unaware of the teasing in his tone or the way his eyes flush brighter. “How lucky for you that I’m your first.” She says back, and though she is not quite as deft as he is at this, there is still some secret laughter shining mutely in her mismatched gaze.

    She does not understand that he wants her name, cannot fathom a single reason why anyone would ever think they’d like to know her.

    “You’re welcome.” She says, but the acknowledgement makes her feel uncomfortable, and it’s even worse when he alludes to what might have happened if she hadn’t been in the right place at the right time. “I got lucky.” She says, and she’s trying to brush off the attention his gratitude brings because she doesn’t want him to notice the pain in her face as she considers what that other outcome might have been like. If she came too late, came to a body already cold and empty. If she had never met this male with summer green eyes and laughter in the lines of his face. It is a physical kind of pain that makes it hard to breathe.

    “I need,” but she cuts off again, looking not at his face but up into the sky as though it isn’t dark and there are constellations she can trace like paths across a midnight kingdom. “I need to never have to know how much darker this world could be without you in it.” She says it with such quiet, with such unspoken pain in her eyes that when she looks back at him his presence is a relief she cannot explain. “That’s all I need. Just keep yourself safe, yeah?” She hates this ache inside her chest, this yearning to step closer in the dark and learn what it is to find comfort in the curve of his shoulder, to know what it would feel like to matter to someone as good as him. Is this how her father felt about her mother? Probably, because that had been something doomed, too.

    “You did more for me than you know.” She says, and her voice is the quiet of summer nights, of cool air whispering against the underbellies of leaves in the greenest trees. But she does not elaborate further, doesn’t even pause to look at him, to see if his face changes at her strange confession. “Thank you, Nashua.”

    ILLUMINAE

    we can't dream when we're awake,
    or fall in love with a heart too strong to break



    @[Nashua]
    Reply
    #16
    Nashua was created from conflicted feelings.

    (Not that he knows this. Nash had only ever seen his parents together a few times and there was never kindness between them. A kind of ominous presence is something he vaguely remembers about the shifter that once roamed Taiga. The way his mother used to recede further and further into herself when he came around, like he made her skin crawl so much that she wished to be rid of it.)

    He doesn't know if he is like either of them; he barely knew Wolfbane and what he does know comes from siblings that knew a much different creature than the one that claimed to be his father. And Lilliana - and as she had been with most things that had hurt her - had locked her past so firmly behind her that she refused to talk about the things that had caused her pain.

    So Nashua with the melding of his father's stripes and his mother's coat, doesn't know what to tell Illuminae when they finally get to the edge of the Taigan wood. His weary from the entire travail. His mind is still circling around the creature that had been in him, around the way that it burst free from his chest and some part of him wonders if it let loose something else as well. His green eyes go searching for the two-toned female and Nash begins to realize that she is looking at him less and less.

    That her blue-and-amber eyes are looking up, tracing the imaginary lines of the constellations if they had still been shining there.

    His mind is hazy and while he has trouble focusing on one thought, he can feel that their conversation has shifted somehow. He had tried teasing her - which is mostly Nash's way of communicating with almost everybody - and the easy warmth that had been light that kept Nashua succumbing to the darkness is gone. Had he said something? Had he done something?

    For a moment, he just stands there and wonders if there was a way to call her back.

    What the winged mare tells him - that the world was much better with him in it, that all she needed was for him to stay safe - leaves him slightly baffled. He wants to go after her, to tell her to wait, to ask her name. But she has turned away and is gone so quickly that in the Long Night to come, Nash will wonder if he dreamed her. Some kind of hallucination born out of his blood loss and his attempts at healing himself (though the wound was knit together so neatly, so carefully, tender in a way that Nash never is with himself).

    She leaves him with the image of a mare who hadn't left a name, so on the quiet nights that grow deep and dark that remind him of the winged mirage, he simply murmurs "Thank you."
    [Image: jCdBK6.png]
    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)