Order one drink, then drink the flood // Firion

[Locheed]

The dragon is not subtle. She leaps from the earth, claws marring the soil, leather wings snapping open as they cause the air to surge around her. She had waited so long for this feeling. She had only dreamed of such power as her adolescence rolled by, spring after spring uncounted in Tephra's endless summer. But all those years are nothing to her now; she had shed that cumbersome former self, half horse and half lizard, a clumsy cast-off of her heritage. Now she was who she was born to be. 

She is the color of mud and rainwater, and she blots the sky like a storm. As a young dragon, she is no larger than her horse form, but the expanse of her wings and the long coil of her tail are the pieces she had been missing. She pumps those nearly-black wings again, and her toes curl as she tastes the flames that roar from her mouth.

Each day she pushes the magic, scraping every last ounce of energy from her body before shifting back to her equine form. She reaches deep, stretching herself to the absolute limit, and remaining in her dragon form until she collapses from the strain of it.

But for now, she rides the thermals without a thought of the future.

Hours pass, but she doesn't feel them. There is glory in her every movement, and she practices rolling and diving, not realizing that the sun is dipping low.

Beqanna resists such abuses of power. She was not meant to be a dragon and only that.

There is little warning before the magic is gone. It starts with her toes; long talons retract, replaced with hooves. Then her wings seem to grow impossibly heavy, and that is when she realizes she has waited too long. Her power is fading fast, and her body begins to shift uncontrollably. One-thousand feet above the earth, she stops fighting it.

Locheed is in a free-fall. She steadies the panic in her breast and reserving the single ounce of magic she had lef. A hundred feet above the ground, her wings reappear, snapping open and nearly tearing the muscles of her back and chest as they do. But they slow her fall, and she could recover from that.

She crashes through the canopy of spring leaves in the shelter of her wings, landing below an ancient oak. The wings retract, seeming to wilt away as they are absorbed back into her spine, and she lays there crumpled but unhurt, looking far less than ordinary. A little brown mare.


@[firion] I'll update with pretty HTML later! Just wanted to get this to ya

[firion]

that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried

Firion tests his magic every day too.

But it’s a spiteful kind of testing. It’s a hateful thing because he’s pretty sure that he hates his magic. He hates the way that it keeps pulling him back to the night. The way that it forces him to live in those shadows as though it was the only place that he would belong. He hates the way that he is forced to relieve his memories of his curse. The way that it chases him in his slumber. The way his nightmares take root in his magic and he sometimes wakes up to that decaying body, the flesh sloughing off of him.

But he tests it still because there’s a part of him that loves it.

That loves the power. The way it flexes through him—the strength.

The control it gives him when he was missing it for so long.

He is testing it in such a way this day, floating though the sky as nothing but a demon wind—icy and brutal, jarring in this spring—when he sees the dragon fly by. Curious, he spirals and then follows, a biting tailwind behind the dragon. He follows her for hours, feeling his own exhaustion in his bones as he goes, and he sees her as she falls. His magic snaps out without thinking, trying to press more into her so she has enough reserves to catch herself, but he is tired too, and there is only so much he can do.

When she lands, he floats downward, whooshing over her in an icy prickle before picking up leaves and moving to the side. A small cyclone that abates, leaving the golden stallion standing in the settling dust.

He looks upon her with a bemused expression, ignoring the fatigue in his bones.

“That was quite the fall.”

so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried

@[Locheed] <3!