"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
Luckily, his ‘home’ is full of red rock and enough sand to bury his heart hundreds of feet deep where it can never be found again. It hasn’t changed much since he left, except the sand is a little pinker than he remembers, and the smells—ah, there’s new smells. But Yael is still around, somewhere. And Else. Else, with her lover and her children and all of those bad memories he’s been trying so hard to run from. The Jungle was home, once. And the memories were there, too.
Maybe he should visit Else, he thinks. Settle their differences.
If she didn’t run away from him screaming first.
Tarnished grins, more lion than horse, it takes him but a second to finish the rest of the transition; electric blue, with silver markings on his face, silver on the tip of his ears, and a shiny shimmering silver mane and tuft of the tail to top it off. He rather likes the feel of the hot sand beneath his paws again, relishes in the feel of the sun bearing down on his back; things he’d hated as a child that had spent its whole life in The Jungle, he cannot help but enjoy as an adult that had seen how cold the rest of Beqanna could be.
Home is home, and home is where the heat is, he decides.
Sitting down at the edge of the easternmost border, Tarnished sucks in a deep breath and then let’s loose a loud roar that’s certain to carry on and catch someone’s attention. Although, be it far from him to know that Yael isn’t around much anymore and that he has already met one of the two Queens—albeit, in a squirrelier form.
tarnished
vanquish x nocturnal
Even on the way down, even on the way down.
Vanquish x Nocturnal equus mutatio, immortality, disease manipulation, trait immunity
She feels him before he roars, of course. She feels everything that happens here, every shift of the sands around her, every whisper, every word. The Deserts become her, and she becomes the Deserts – it's a handy thing, really, the way they've blended over time.
And as soon as she feels him, she knows him. They'd faced off once in the meadow, and she can't help but smile at the memory. Something tells her that they are strange kindred spirits of sorts. He is perhaps more complicate d than her usual partners of mischief, but anyone willing to join her in a strange squirrel battle that had extreme destructive potential was, well, pretty okay in her book. She'd meant to find him after it, really she had, but life just gets so busy, y'know?
And now here he was, unknowingly depositing himself right on the outskirts of her land.
Roaring.
That'd probably scare some of them, to be sure, but it didn't scare her a bit. There isn't much that can accomplish that because fear comes only when you're threatened, and there isn't much in Beqanna that can threaten her. What is danger to a magician? There is nothing she cares about that cannot defend itself, and it would take a force greater than any known in Beqanna to assault her personally. Even if Eight, or Yael, or Pevensie were to be captured and used against her somehow (and yes, there are exactly three horses who could even possibly qualify for that), she wouldn’t break. She doesn't break. And because she doesn't break, she doesn't fear.
She sighs, basking in the summer heat of the Deserts as she weighs her options. She's going to approach the lion-horse Tarnished, she knows that, but she hasn't decided quite how yet. She's been trying to keep her magic a bit more in her pants lately, at least when it comes to approaching others. Wouldn't you know, they tend to get spooky and flighty when horses just kind of pop into existence next to them. But Tarnished is no normal horse; he's hanging out on the borders as a lion, she doesn't doubt he can handle a little excitement. And so, her choice becomes clear.
At a mere thought, she appears. As a black squirrel. On his nose.
She's sitting on the vaguely flat bridge of his lion-nose, quite comfortable. She'll stick to him no matter how he chooses to move his head; he won't throw her off, he won't dislodge her, and he damn sure won't be able to eat her. In her tiny squirrel hands she holds an acorn with a single bite out of it. It may or may not be the same acorn that they had once fought over in that tree. She hasn't decided yet.
Taking a huge bite, she chews it thoroughly, watching him the entire time. Would he recognize her? She wonders. Finished chewing, she swallows in the dramatic fashion of all squirrels and chipmunks and other rodents, who seem to have an almost anacondalike capacity to huck down things that are far larger than logic seems to dictate.
Finished eating, she offers him a squirrely grin. She's pretty (as squirrels go), shiny and black, a little creature in the prime of health. She's identical to her appearance that day they'd met in the meadow. And when she speaks, her voice is the same as it had been when she'd been running up the tree. "Why, hello again!" she chirps sweetly. "So good of you to come visit me."
CAMRYNN
co-queen of the deserts, magical, mother of badassery
08-14-2015, 03:17 PM (This post was last modified: 08-14-2015, 03:21 PM by Tarnished.)
We were young and wild and free,
fightin' in a love we couldn't leave.
I’m fine one second, blind the next.
It happens so suddenly that I cannot help for snarling and thrashing around, I try my best to clear my eyes but my vision isn’t coming back and—oh, well surprise, surprise! It’s only a little ball of black fur blocking my view and I go cross-eyed trying to look at her. She looks the same as that day in the Meadow, acorn in hand, almost as if to remind me that I’d lost both the battle and the war; my ears flick back when she bites into the nut and I struggle to fight back a grin when she swallows it down.
Cheeky girl.
“Ah, well, I suppose you should get used to it,” I sit back down, because if she isn’t going to move I’m sure as hell not going to attempt to walk around with her perched on the bridge of my nose. But then—well, what if I don’t have a nose? Smirking, my body quickly dissolves until it’s nothing but dust in the wind. I scatter, then pull myself back together some feet away—a horse, for once. I don’t think she’s ever actually seen my original form and I figure if I’m ‘visiting her,’ she might as well know who I actually am. “Tarnished,” I offer, flicking my tail and swiveling my ears ‘round so I can actually look like I’m listening. See my ears? See them? Yup, paying attention. “Or Nish, everyone seems to like calling me that.”
I say no more, because what more can be said to a squirrel? I’m not even sure if this is her actual form. I doubt it is, but stranger things have happened, yeah? It occurs to me that she’s probably a magician, a mere shape-shifter cannot pull things out of thin air; I should probably run, or something, but she calls the Deserts home. As does Yael. So she cannot be all that bad—but then again, Nocturnal had been a cannibal and they had let her be Queen of the Deserts.
Elected her, even.
Details.
“So who is ruling these days, squirrel friend?” I wonder, because last I heard, my father had been murdered and Yael sat on the throne alone and then—well, I’ve been trying to not keep up with Beqanna politics unless I have something to gain from them. They’re often too complicated and messy. Too many allied to one another to not piss someone off and all that.
tarnished
vanquish x nocturnal
Even on the way down, even on the way down.
Vanquish x Nocturnal equus mutatio, immortality, disease manipulation, trait immunity
Oh, he plays every bit as well as she does. She's suddenly terribly glad that they'd met, and she can't stop a grin from forming across her squirrel face as he dissolves. She stays hovering there, exactly where she had been, chomping on the acorn as pleasant as you please. She finishes it while he speaks, watching him as she floats in midair. She listens with polite attention as she snacks, as though he's some kind of erstwhile dinner guest. Which, well, maybe he is.
He asks who rules here, and she can't help but smile again. Perhaps she doesn't deserve it anymore, not after how long she's been absent. But if there is someone who deserves it more, well, the silent sands aren't offering anything. At least, not yet.
Chucking the undesirable top of the acorn aside into the sand, she gracefully jumps off her midair perch. By the time she lands, she is fully equine again, facing Nish in her real form for the first time.
And it really is her real form. She is a beautiful thing, pure black, entirely without natural markings. Her mane and her tail fall in gentle arcs, long and free of tangles in a way no wild horse's ever should be. Across her chest a gold crook and flail glimmer in the sunlight. On her left cheek, a trail of precious stones drapes gracefully, like an impossibly strange necklace. She smiles at him wryly.
"Funny you should ask." her voice is velvet, chocolate, rich and deep and sweet to the ear. "It's a pleasure to meet you Tarnished. I'm Camrynn, Queen of the Deserts." her wry smile twists a little deeper. "I rule here with Pevensie." although she knows the sun queen has been gone perhaps even longer than she, the queen of the darkness, and so perhaps that's not true anymore. But she's not one to rock the boat – ruling alone doesn't bother her, and if she can rule alone while appearing to rule with a companion, so much the better.
"And you? Where are you living?"
She asks with genuine curiosity, although she already knows the answer. It's just so much more fun this way, to let him tell her all about the shenanigans in the Valley, to let him tell her from the perspective of a relative outsider. Of course she knows what's happened with Demian and Eight and all of it – is there any corner of the world that can escape her scrutiny? And she hasn't quite decided how to deal with it, this blatant disrespect for magic. She doesn't much mind that Eight was dethroned; it's the right of his subjects to try it really, it's always the right of subjects when their monarchs disappear. But it would've equally been his right to smite them all off the face of the earth with his magic.
If she's being truthful, it's a pretty big turn off that he just calmly accepted the deposition as calmly as he did. She doesn't question the wisdom of it, but damn, it's just so much easier to get all hot and bothered when your man's being a stud, you know?
She should really go visit him. But then again, he could've come visit her. She is no damsel in distress, waiting desperately by the phone for him to call. If he wants to talk to her, he can come. After all, out of the two of them, only one is busy ruling a kingdom.
But she doesn't say any of this, not to Tarnished, not to anyone. Close to the vest is the only way she plays the game, and her poker face is unbeatable. Her wry smile never wavers, and her eyes are an easy electric blue, the same color as she'd had in demon ice dragon squirrel form. She is the picture of listening.
CAMRYNN
co-queen of the deserts, magical, mother of badassery
