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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]  Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Julia & Any
    #1


    Trotting flank-to-flank with her older sister, Starsonder holds her head a little higher than she has ever held it before. The grasslands of Tephra make the journey easy, and the young mare seems to nearly float above the soft, forgiving earth.

    She dares a glance up into Julia's face, the other girl was older and still a bit taller than the apricot filly, a gap that in height that wouldn't last long. The sunlight catches the tendrils of her sister's blue mane and Starsonder gives into the impulse to reach out to briefly take one between her teeth.

    "Have you been here before? To Sylva?" She asks, happy to take her answer on the fly and never breaking stride as the words sneak out between breaths. This was the most ground she had covered in one day, and they were only just to the border.

    The feel of the earth below her hooves changes and Starsonder slows to a walk. Her tapered ears prick forward, alert, ready to swerve towards any sound. But the woodland seems quiet.

    Her honey eyes once again look to Julia for guidance, did they just... walk in?

    "Do you know anyone from here?" Her bravado is suddenly tempered as cool, damp air rolls out between the trees. But she swallows the tremor in her voice, unwilling to spoil the fun or turn back.

    And then, the world goes dark.


    starsonder


    Editing to tag @[The Monsters] if you could mess with her dream teleportation that would be great!
    Reply
    #2
    @[Starsonder] your dream teleportation has mutated into temporal rewind. you're welcome.
    Reply
    #3

    It had been a bold, brash thing to suggest that they venture into Sylva.

    Julia had heard the old stories. There had been a darkness in this forest long before the current one that came to overtake Beqanna. There were rumors and whispers of monsters and horrors that kept most away from this blazing wood.

    And yet, while the Tephran is gazing around, she glimpses enough of the color around to her to think that this place might be beautiful. Could be beautiful if this territory could chase away its shadows. But where a tragedy stains one generation, it continues to bleed out like an unhealed wound for the ones that come after. Nothing is ever truly in the past, Julia thinks. It finds a way to remerge in one way or another.

    But why Sylva? Why had she suggested that she and Sonder explore this fire-red forest?

    "No," she tells her younger sister. Papa would have a fit if he knew we were here. She thinks to herself. The painted mare gives her bald head a slight shake and glances down towards the smaller filly. "They said it used to be haunted," Julia explains and her voice drops to almost a whisper, as if she was expecting the ghosts to be listening. A smile returns on her pale face when she banishes the thought away, "but that was a long time ago." How long, she isn't sure.

    Long enough that it was before she was born.

    Since they are daughters of Warlight (and therefore granddaughters of Kagerus and Solace), Julia knows better than to just walk into the territory. When they reach the intersecting edges of Tephra and Sylva, she starts to slow. Her ears prick forward and back, trying to discern the sound of anybody that might be nearby. Did the Sylvans had diplomats like the other kingdoms?

    More importantly, was there anyone in Sylva at all? "I don't," she admits to @[Starsonder] before the world goes dark. But the shadows come crawling from their beds beneath the wicked trees and they spread, reaching and enveloping everything. "Stay near me," Julia thinks to her sister. It had been one thing to attempt an adventure to a spooky place in daylight; the night is another entirely.

    JULIA

    image credit to footybandit

    @[The Monsters] please mess with Julia's immortality
    Reply
    #4
    @[Julia] your immortality has mutated into glittering. you're welcome.
    Reply
    #5


    She's never felt the dark like this. This is tangible; she feels it in the chill the crawls below her skin. There is a presence to this darkness, and she feels smaller than she ever has before. Julia's warm side is at the ready though, and that is a comfort in the darkness. Starsonder leans into that comfort, but her sister's racing pulse makes her catch her breath. So this wasn't some trick.

    Suddenly the mention of hauntings feels like more than a just passing conversation, and she wonders if some dark magician of old is hunting them or if the forest itself has judged them as trespassers. She waits for her eyes to adjust, it is an eternity that only lasts a few breaths, but they never really do.

    She doesn't have to see to know the darkness is moving, she feels it in the cold currents of air that pass over the fine hairs that stand on end all across her body.

    But when she thinks there could be no darker night, the darkness seems to congeal into a shape, collapsing in on itself to create the body of a stallion, and her heart sinks a little lower.

    She knows that face, that dead face, that dead tongue lolling. She knows what she will find as her eyes slide down his neck and over his shoulders, following the trail of blood she can not see into the spikes of crystal that passes through one side of his body to the other. Oh, dead things should not move, and yet he takes a step towards her, his tongue hanging lower, distended and white in the darkness. The crystals glow ever so slightly, illuminating the curves of his wounds and the deep, deep wells of those wounds.

    How is he moving? She doesn't have the strength to step back and only tries to fall deeper into her sister's side, but of course, she can't get any closer than she is.

    A sound causes her to look down and crystals begin to grow from the earth. They shoot like spears and rise like boulders, seeking her heart in the same way they had sought his. And now, she does run. They strike her hooves and runs deeper into the unknown woodland and farther from the safety of home.

    starsonder


    @[Julia]
    Reply
    #6

    It feels as if the darkness will swallow them.

    Her younger sister presses into her and Julia has to remind herself to be bigger than it.

    At first, when the shadows start shifting, Julia tells herself that it just her imagination. It is just because she had been speaking of ghosts and haunts; she has created the setting for their minds to craft monsters in the dark because the two-toned girl had been creating monsters with her words.

    But that was a long time ago, she had said.

    There had been no tales about evil lurking in these woods for some time. There had been nothing said of Sylva said at all and that was why Julia thought the blazing forest might be an adventure for them both. The older filly had thought that they would find the woods empty and then they could return to neighboring Tephra, waiting for them with welcome arms.

    Maybe if there had been light to see anything by, Julia would have been quicker. Maybe if there had been more to see, Julia would have seen it. There a monster creeping nearby and the adolescent can't see it. Can't see the way it looms closer, can't see the way it takes the form of a dead man that @[Starsonder] had once seen. They have only moments - mere moments where it seems that this cursed forest holds its breathe - before it releases it in the form of this creature. It becomes the least of her concerns.

    Because Sonder runs and the world shifts with crystals that rise from the Earth. (Is that her sister's doing?)

    Starsonder's absence becomes the foremost one. The darkness devours her sister, leaving Julia with only the sound of her fleeing hooves. The painted filly lifts one foreleg and then the other, attempting to go after her sibling. The creature has her cornered. The Night smiles at her with a grin full of menace. She reaches out only once with their shared bond and tugs - Sonder!

    JULIA

    image credit to footybandit

    @[The Monsters] have at her glittering
    Reply
    #7
    @[Julia] nothing happens to your glittering
    Reply




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