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    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]  the photographs know i'm a liar, any
    #1
    elodie
    My mother loved the dark.
    This was the last thing her mother ever said to her.
    Elodie had not seen her mother since. Lilian had looked strangely at the sky, smiled something funny and then let the dark swallow her whole. Elodie had searched for her but she was gone, as if she had never been there at all. 

    And that was months ago now.
    And Elodie tells herself again that she has no reason to be afraid.
    Because Lilian’s mother had loved the dark, which means that Elodie should love the dark, too. Even if it had frightened her own mother. Even if Lilian had often thrown herself headlong at the things that frightened her the most, this darkness included. And now she has gone someplace Elodie cannot reach her.

    But she would not want Elodie to panic, would she?
    It does not matter that Elodie’s heart is a bird trapped in a cage, beating its tired wings relentlessly against her ribs. It does not matter that it has been months since her mother stepped into the shadows and did not emerge again. Nor does it matter that she is plenty old enough to be on her own. She had enjoyed her mother’s company and she does not know what it means that someone can be there one moment and simply be gone the next. It is this that troubles her the most.

    Her stomach rolls with hunger and she nudges the wilted meadow-grass underfoot. It is hopeless. It has been hopeless. A tremor steals down the length of her spine and she lifts her head as her horns shift involuntarily, from kudu to elk and back again. A defect brought on by this impenetrable darkness. It had made her mother laugh occasionally, though Elodie had not found any particular humor in it. There is the faintest apparition of a smile that steals across her face now, spurred into motion more by the memory of her mother’s laughter than anything else. 

    She exhales and the smile disappears, gone just as quickly as it came as she peers into the shadows, as if she expects her mother will appear just as mysteriously as she disappeared. 

    and if i go, i’m goin’ shameless
    I’ll let my hunger take me there



    @[The Monsters] please mess with her immortality and shapeshifting antlers!!
    Reply
    #2
    @[elodie] your immortality has mutated into ethereal appearance and your shapeshifting antlers into fairy dust
    Reply
    #3
    She has lived through so many changes and each one buries decades beneath her skin that do not match the actual years that have passed. The first one she had called the Unbecoming, the day the old world died. For many, it was devastating; it was the end of the beautiful lives they had built around themselves, the splintering of something comforting, something familiar. A continent ripped apart. They had been torn from family and friend, scattered across a land that was new and unrecognizable – terrifying in its strangeness. They had been pulled from homes, and those homes had been ruined in their wake, undone and then used as the bones of a new society. It had been so much change, too much new, and it overwhelmed them.

    For Syrine, it was different.

    When the world unhinged, when the magic in the mountain pulled her to it, she was set free. The Cove had always been home, home from the very first moment she opened her eyes and swallowed the scent of ocean brine. But home and comfort were two very different things. She cannot remember her mother, and she never knew her father, no gentle caress from warm, satin lips. But she will always remember that soft shade of purple and how the color looked when it was edged so carefully in stark white lines. She will always remember how it felt with his mouth against her skin, and his iron buried like blades in the thrum of her veins. At first, she had not understood why it always rained on her, why the sun never split the cloud above her head to dry the steel and tawny of her delicate back. But he was eager to show her why, eager, when he drew patterns in her pretty flesh, ribbons of red against the white and grulla. It was because the world wept for her –because even the sky grew weary of watching such things.

    When the plague came, she did not suffer like nearly everyone else had. She had no loved ones to lose, no father or mother, not even a single friend to give any piece of her heart to. She had not been immune to the pain of others, but it hadn’t ever reached into her chest to take in the same way - and even the sick hadn’t seemed to want her. No fever or fatigue, no cough, no bloody spittle on pale grey lips. Only the rain that always fell across her shoulders.

    Perhaps it washed her clean.

    Now it was the dark, it was a forever-night that had stolen into the day and never left. It was empty and starless and almost always cold, especially when this rain continued to fall as it always had. It was the monsters that roved the shadows and gnashed their hungry jaws, it was the screams that flitted through the trees instead of birdsong, it was the flowers that hadn’t bloomed this spring.

    It was everything undone, everything backwards.
    But it was always, always something.

    She picks her way through the meadow, grateful that the wildflowers have all wilted in the evernight, that there is no pale purple to watch her pass. The grass is all dry and crumpled, and even without the light she can tell that nothing is as green as it should be. There is a sound to her left, a sound from the shadows that turn the meadow into a roiling sea of eversame dark, and she turns to face it with eyes wide and blue and glacial, framing a white face freckled with bits of soot and steel. She is tense as she searches, waiting for the dull gleam of iron or the flash of lavender.  But neither comes, so foolishly, slowly, she takes one hesitant step toward the sound while her little rain cloud continues to cry jeweled tears that fall in unsteady rivelets across her delicate face and along either side of her spine.

    “Is someone there?” Her voice is like a chime, soft and resonant when the wind carries the words away, and it isn’t until she inches forward another few steps that she can make out the shape of a girl. She blinks, and rain gathers like tears along the soot of her lashes as she frowns and worries and decides what to do. But there is something safe in the way that she is a girl, in the way that she is brown and red instead of purple, that there are elegant horns atop her head like a crown instead of blades of iron made to split skin. So she summons the courage she has never in her life known, and when she creeps close enough that the shadows melt between them, there is something more fragile than a smile on the grey of her mouth. “Hello,” she blinks again, stopping before her nearness soaks the girl in unwelcome rainwater - this evernight is cold enough without it, “my name is Syrine.” A pause, but it is as brief and uncertain as butterfly wings. “Are you alone here too?”

    syrine

    with a whisper, we will tame the vicious seas
    like a feather, bringing kingdoms to their knees




    @[The Monsters] please mess with her personal rain cloud
    @[elodie]
    Reply
    #4
    elodie
    Eventually someone does emerge, the sight of her preceded by the bell-song sound of her voice carried through the shadows by a dark wind. The heart knows that it is not her mother because Elodie had so dearly loved the sound of Lilian’s voice but it had never been this specific sort of beautiful. Her mother had carried with her such a deep and terrible sadness and it was never more evident than when she spoke, as if she were speaking from someplace far away. She had always seemed trapped in a memory.

    The mare that materializes does not seem a threat and Elodie feels no urge to flee. (It is as the mare gets a good look at her, though, and introduces herself that the change happens. The horns shift once more before they dissolve altogether, seeming to bleed down the sides of her face to become a pale glow that surrounds her, bathing the both of them in a soft light.)

    Elodie’s surprise registers on her face and her head feels significantly lighter as she glances down at her own legs to find that they glow, too. She blinks, confused, before shifting her focus back to the mare who has joined her in the darkness. Is she alone? She had not thought of herself as alone. There had always been some part of her that had expected her mother would come back. 

    Perhaps if she calls no attention to this strange change she will not have to accept it as real, she thinks. So she makes no mention of it, focusing on answering the painted mare instead. “My name is Elodie,” she says and smiles, soft. “I didn’t think I was alone, but I guess I was. I lost track of my mother some time ago. I thought she’d come back eventually, but now I’m not so sure.

    She had been so thoroughly distracted by the sudden glow that she had not noticed the relentless rain, the concentration of precipitation that seems to affect the area only immediately above Syrine. She glances up at the cloud, her brow furrowed but does not ask, aware that it might be a deeply personal affliction. “Have you been alone long?” she asks instead. 

    and if i go, i’m goin’ shameless
    I’ll let my hunger take me there



    @[syrine]

    @[The Monsters] please mess with her fairy dust!
    Reply
    #5
    @[syrine] your personal raincloud has mutated into electricity mimicry.

    @[elodie] nothing happens to your fairy dust.
    Reply
    #6
    Syrine watches the horns shift and disappear, and though she tries not to stare it is odd when they dissolve like rain down the sides of the mare’s dark, delicate face. She inhales as if she is about to ask something, brow furrowed beneath her forelock, but then she isn’t sure what it is she wants to ask, or if the answer is something she would rather not know. Is this a deep magic? Is it something that corrupts, something like what was used to carve these scars into the stormy grey of Syrine’s back?

    But there’s a look of surprise on the bay mare’s face, and in the way her gaze drops to study her own legs, and Syrine finds that her questions have fallen away from her lips and there is only quiet inside her chest. Maybe it is the glow that rises to the surface of this new acquaintance, the way she is suddenly cloaked in something like gentle sunshine, but Syrine feels more at ease when those unfamiliar brown eyes rise again to find her with a smile as soft as the glow that illuminates them both.

    Elodie is a beautiful name.
    She might’ve said so, too, but the quiet is something that comes to her more easily than vulnerable truths.

    But Elodie is softer than Syrine has ever been allowed to be, and her truths are something she shares so easily, something that thaws the wary ice inside Syrine’s own chest. Might she have been like this girl once? In another world, another time, another place. In a home without shackles, in a skin without scars. Maybe. But Elodie is gentle smiles and easy warmth, she is shy sunshine breaking through the clouds on a hazy morning, and Syrine thinks she could have never been anything so good.

    “I’m sorry about your mother.” She says after a moment, and her blue eyes find Elodie’s for only a moment before flitting away again not unlike a wounded bird. “Do you know why she went?” Not where, because of course if Elodie knew that she would likely be there too, and anyway why is what matters more. Why holds the secrets of where, holds the truth of whether or not someone would want to be found again. Syrine knows that not everything that disappears wants to be found again.

    It is foolish, of course, but she hadn’t expected Elodie to turn her own question back on her, wasn’t expecting to explain about alone. So she is too quiet while she watches those kind brown eyes wander up to the cloud raining down over only Syrine, quiet when no question comes about it, quiet long after she should have given some kind of an answer. But her chest is knots that she does not know how to unravel, and at the center of it is a heart that is only just barely beating.

    “I,” a pause, and her gaze wanders up to a sky she still wishes were home to the constellations she had come to know so well, “Yes?” She doesn’t mean to say the word like a question, but it certainly falls from her like one, something glass and entirely fragile tipped over the precipice. “Longer would have been better though.”

    syrine

    with a whisper, we will tame the vicious seas
    like a feather, bringing kingdoms to their knees



    @[elodie] i'm pretending she still has her raincloud so i don't have to pick her mimicries yet lmao
    Reply
    #7
    elodie
    She could not have known to anticipate the question.
    It slips between her ribs like a blade and her breath goes thin.

    Why?

    She had not even glanced back as she’d disappeared into the darkness, as if called there by something. And Elodie had watched her with a kind of foolish smile on her face, head tilted as if it were some private joke between the two of them. Even though her mother had never been the sort to make jokes. The heart will do everything it can to protect itself from the truth, Elodie had learned.

    No,” she says and shakes her head slow, frowning softly. “No, I don’t know why.” There is a sadness in her smile now, a kind of despondence as she averts her gaze. She had never thought about it. She could not bear to think that perhaps her mother had gone to find some happiness without her. 

    It was like the darkness just called to her,” she muses quietly, an afterthought, almost as if she is unaware she’s even saying it out loud. There is no reason for her to admit this to a stranger, but there it is all the same. It comes spilling out of her before she can stop it and she makes no effort to call the words back. “I don’t think I could have made her stay.

    Even if she had known.

    Elodie had never wanted to be alone.

    But Syrine had.

    Is it guilt that spreads through her like disease? Guilt for having disturbed her aloneness? No. It cannot be because Elodie moves closer and closer still until she can feel the rain, too. Until it seeps into her skin, too. Until it glues her forelock to her face. 

    You like being alone?” she asks. “Why?

    and if i go, i’m goin’ shameless
    I’ll let my hunger take me there



    @[syrine]

    @[The Monsters] please mess with her ethereal appearance and her fairy dust!
    Reply
    #8
    @[elodie] your ethereal appearance has mutated into firefly aura and fairy dust into fire mimicry
    Reply




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