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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


    [private]  The wild in me calls to the wild in you
    #1
    some memories never leave your bones.
    like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
    - you carry them.


     
    The boy blinks into existence. He arrives to the sound of static, the ripping friction of a world torn open. At the command of the remnant traces of his mother’s magic, the boy presses two worlds against one another. 


    He did not know it would work when first he pressed the shard of a broken, magical dagger against the edge of one world and pressed, pressed, pressed it through the skin, until it emerged here. She had whispered in his ear, the moonstar girl who arrives beside him, exactly where he should aim. It was a forest, a world so far from their own. He had murmured in response that she should keep that world held tight in the delicate grip of her mind. 


    Cling to it. He thought, as he pressed that wicked sharp shard in to pierce the world, cling to where you want to go, because I am not sure this will work. But it did and it has. And so here they step, through a ripped-open window, from one world into the next. This is Elliana’s world. It is the one that thrums in her veins and Oh! He does not know whether to look at her or at the world she has wished them to.


    His eyes settle upon her. Though he steps down into the woodland floor of this new, strange place, he is watching the girl for whom the realms of death and life thinner than a dragonfly’s wings. This girl who made his mother’s magic answer them. Elliana’s hopes and dreams must be so strong, the song of her blood connected to the earth of this world. 


    He is grateful they have arrived here, where cathedral trees reach up to new skies and foliage makes a carpet beneath his limbs. Leoniidas’ crown of antlers glimmers darkly gold in this emerald light as the grasses rustle and whisper at the newcomers who came slipping silently from one world into the next with the merest blink of light.


    The wildwood boy has still not looked at the sentinel trees that gather around them, but presses his muzzle into the girl’s neck. They are golden earth and blushing moonlight. They are two worlds colliding and his eyes close as he drinks in the smell of her. She is home, home, home. Elliana is all that his magic has stolen from them, the hope her wish brough when it combined with his mother’s time travel to bring them here is like light across water. It is hope.


    He swallows and groans like a boy saved, for that is what he is, ‘Gods, you did it.’ His voice is jubilant aching. He does not want to be here, he wants to be home, home, home. But his home is nothing now, maybe, in some ways it is only Elliana, or, maybe, this new wild wood that whispers her curious susurrations.


    @[Elliana]


    “Speaking.”
    credits
    Reply
    #2


    - ✧ -


    S
    he was once a princess.

    Of Dusk and those early evening, when navy blue bathes the world and stars start peeking, forgetting their shyness, suddenly eager to dance for the world once more with no great sun to send them skittering into hiding.

    She was once a princess, but it had been by the name of her mother and the same blood that blossomed through her own veins. But bleed her dry and it will not be blue, but red like the flower Isolt once gave her.

    Elliana could not bring herself to look out and across that kingdom and feel love for its people, people she has never known, for a land that she has spent more time wandering away from than to.

    And maybe that is why, when she pressed her lips to his ears, she whispered Beqanna, into it. Maybe it was the words of her mother, whispering to her beyond the veil that she now sat behind (like the wedding day Elliana wasn't there for). Cling to it, he had said, and she cut out a picture of what she thought it might be and placed in the locket of her heart.

    She has felt this pain before, can name it, can paint it, and sing you songs about it. The type of pain that drains the color from the world, that sheds the stars of their nightly glow, and the wind of its wild stirrings. She is altogether too aware that it has been a long time since her time in a secret meadow and a night where she worse a crown fireflies.

    She moves towards him, with a weight that feels heavier than she remembers, like she is suddenly all too aware of gravity and the way to hungers to drag them all back into the dirt they once came from. Elliana never knew moonlight had a weight until it presses now into the quiet dip of her spine.

    Her life her path, her everything had morphed since the last time she saw him.

    She had just been a reckless solemn girl with a wandering monarch butterfly for a heart, and he had just been a boy with wings that could touch the sky. The girl is altogether glad that Leo is here with her, that she found him once more. Even if her life had drastically changed since the last time they had met over the shared beauty of a tulip blooming. Back then, she was a reckless, yet solemn girl and he had just been a boy with wings that could touch the sky if so wished.

    Those forget-me-not  blue eyes turn to him, a half-laugh, soft and fleeting. We did, Leo, she says and presses her forehead adorned with that ivory heart against his own head. A motion she does not remember was inherited from her mother. She stands there staring at him, bright blue eyes storming with emotions. Leo… she doesn't want to say it, suddenly. She pretends to forget and rests his head along the slope of his shoulder. I’m glad you’re here.




    ..but nightmares are dreams too.
    « r » | @[Leoniidas]
    Reply
    #3
    some memories never leave your bones.
    like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
    - you carry them.


     

    If Leoniidas ever stopped to think about the blood in his veins and exactly who his mother and uncle once were, maybe he would see the irony of this moment. That here they are, him the wild orphan boy and she the girl of Delumine but in their blood they are a prince and princess of the Dusk Court. Twilight courses through his veins as surely as his father’s godhood does. His mother and uncle, both serving monarchs, both lost first and then dead. Ah! He has erased them all with the fateful twist of his time magic!


    She touches him-


    He had been so focussed upon his magic, upon trying to get them here when she pressed her lips to his ear at first that he did not flinch. But now, now she steps to him, pressing her brow against his and oh how he reacts! It is not a flinch and yet not as mild as a tremble, it is some amalgamation of the two. The twitch of a boy not used to being touched. A boy who knows only the selfishness of yearning to touch another and yet not be touched in turn. 


    But Aspara has worked on him, the girl who would push him and touch him and then berate him when he touched her. She managed to slip beneath her skin with her pale skin and lovely eyes. She pressed her fingers about his heart without his knowing how she got there. She made it race with her smiles and she makes him ache for her now when all is lost. 


    So he flinches when Elliana leans into him, but he does not skitter away. He trembles as every muscle within him draws tight, tight, tight. He looks from her, away from where their bodies touch, where his nerves sing with alarm at the warm press of her skin to his. His chin tips up, his gilded antlers arcing up to the Beqanna sky and down, down to point toward the curve of his spine. Leoniidas has grown elegant, the awkwardness of his youth seeping away before the strength and power of adulthood. 


    She looks to him, her blue eyes like ice fingers along his cheek and about his throat, his eyes. The wildwood boy does not look to her, no matter how long she stares. He cannot bring himself to. Shame coils deep in his abdomen, grief for all he has taken from them both. The dark wood about them beckons him, it lures him in with its quiet, solemn danger. The whisper of the trees plays across his skin, the wood knows it can claim him. It knows he came from another wild place with wicked magic blooming in the shadows. He is enchanted, this boy, always a monarch of some distant magic wood. Leonidas longs to be alone with his shame.


    “I am glad you are here too.” His voice is brambles and shoots and dark forest things. The orphan is glad she is here and yet he wants her away from him, to leave him alone with this shame. “Where does you family live?” The words are little more than a murmur as he feels just how the warm silk of her cheek radiates through his shoulder. He could grow to like it, if his heart wasn’t still racing with alarm at her proximity.



    “Speaking.”
    credits



    @[Elliana] <3
    Reply
    #4


    - ✧ -


    E
    lliana once watched her mother go to the sea, place her soul inside a bottle and toss it over a cliffside.
    She has no way of knowing this, but that night, her mother wished that bottle all the way to Beqanna’s shores, with a red haired woman waiting for it.

    Their last night in Khiyaal, Elli’s dreams had been rich with the sea and the ship she had rode upon. Sea water tangling itself within her skin, sand gritting itself between her teeth. She can still recall the way the ship had lurched and lunged, as if fighting some great enemy. (“How long has the ocean and the sky been at war with each other?” She asked one sunny day, her small frame leaning against Torix’s own.) Maybe it was this day, maybe another, that a chasm was opened inside her chest to the world of exploration. It had always been there (the sea, adventure, wildness, storms) but it took new life, like a dandelion seeds after a child sends itself seeds scattering. It had only taken a small gust to blow her away.

    Ellliana had not seen much of a point of staying in Novus, and even less so after her brother slipped beneath the waves. Her mother had needed her, her father by bond and not blood, had wanted her to stay, and maybe, the concerns once expressed by a Terrastellan were true, that Elliana’s heart was far too tangled to to fully feel beneath the weight of ivy vines and stone walls.

    She does’t notice him twitch, him tumble inside his own body, she has never been concerned with the facts of small things, she is a daughter of the ocean, and the ocean does not concern itself over ripples lest they turn into waves. You cower, she says, a painfully obviously observation, and all at once she shifts, from dreamer to the shadow watcher her father would have loved if he had watched her grow. If I learned anything from the stories of my mother, this is not the place to do so, she says, almost harshly, but there is enough of Elena’s flower petal voice to keep the landing soft, if not a bit too steady.

    She pulls always from him, looking around the woods. She doesn't know it, cant possibly know it, but she looks like her mother here, and whether her head would lift with pride, or ears would fall back into a mess of moonshine hair with annoyance, she cannot answer. It is only seen here, how time has truly come to affect her, in more ways than just what Leo has caused. Her body has blossomed, like her mother’s sunflowers in their garden, the youth sheds like a winter coat from her body as curves begin to take their place, like sharp kisses in her hip bones, and the shadow beneath the curve of her cheek. My mother, she lived in Hyaline when she was here, she states out loud, piecing together stories. And when magic brought her back, she spent some time in the Taiga, beneath its trees, I think I still have some family there. Cousins, my godmother, she says. Her godmother. Lilliana. Her namesake. She both resents and leans into the pedestal her mother placed inside her name to live up to. The Lilli who was the captain of all her childhood stories. It is only now, under the cover of the trees that she starts to wonder if all those stories were true.

    It is then those sky blue eyes (her mother’s eyes, her grandmother’s eyes) find a stray flower, wandering among the grass, a shade of purple among green (Are you lost too? Elliana longs to ask). She plucks it from the ground and places it in the tangle of his locks. Do you remember what you asked me when we first met? She asks him because Elli is doomed to remember every conversation and every story someone tells. Shall we find some strange magic?

    Night may belong to the ghosts and the memories.
    But it belongs to the dreamers too—and the ones who wish to be.





    ..but nightmares are dreams too.
    « r » | @[Leoniidas]
    Reply
    #5
    some memories never leave your bones.
    like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
    - you carry them.


     
    You cower, Elliana observes and his chin dips into his breast. 


    “I do not like being touched.” Leoniidas murmurs, his ears tumbling like fallen spires to his skull. They drown in the thick tangles of his windswept, magic-tugged mane. It has always been that he shies from the touch of others. He has always been too untamed, an untried colt for whom touch can seem dangerous, controlling. 


    ..And yet lovely too. He knows it can be such terrible intoxication, it can leave him yearning to touch and be touched. But there was only ever one and oh how his love was unrequited. He ached for her even as she drove him to distraction. A shiver slips through his body, rocking through the curve of his spine. A chasm of guilt and loss breaks open within him and steals the breath from his lungs. Maybe he would have dared touch her, kiss her, if he knew what his magic was destined to do.


    The boy does not fear magic nor monsters. Not when his blood is filled the ichor of a god and the mortal blood of a girl so in control of time she had become immortal with her eternal lives existing in unison. This place… could it be any wilder, any more dangerous than Novus or Khiyaal? Novus where cities choked him and Khiyaal where magic was ancient and wicked, they are each dangerous with monsters clawing at his mahogany skin. 


    She steps away from him, the warm satin of her cheek replaced by the cool of the wind. His lungs tremble and exhale, relieved (and lost). He limns Elliana in gold as he turns his head away from the lovely dark of the siren wood to hold her in his sunbright eyes. Light catches across her hips, the slim curve of her spine, the delicate arch of her neck - he has noticed, of course he has, that she is no longer the child who gazed up at him from amidst the tulips. Though their colours no longer reflect upon the pale canvas of her skin, she still summons light to lie in myriad hues across her body. He watches them now as she moves, They paint dapples across her; Elliana looks at home here. 


    It is easy to shy from her beauty when grief is a lance within his soul. It is easy to forget the way she felt against him when his heart still stutters over itself for a girl he wishes he had had the courage to kiss before his magic stole her away. Ah, he closes his eyes and looks away, the shadows of his frown turn his golden eyes into molten metal, heated with broiling emotions. Leoniidas tries to be as he always has, aloof, detached, destined to be alone. If he has lost his whole family, Maeve and Aspara, what will stop him losing another?  It is safer, he thinks, to shackle his heart up, guard it with thorns that will prick him or any who dare touch it. 


    Elliana talks of her family here, “Find them.” He says, his voice as dark and tumultuous as a salt-slick wave. That wave is grief, drowning him, he does not wish for it to drown her too. Find them he implores her. “And do not let them go.” Oh the fae boy’s eyes are dark, his lips a wounded, black gash across his face. Sorrow softens the line of them like worried flesh. In this moment he is more than a boy traversing the trials of manhood, now he is a boy forced to become a man, forced to carry the world upon his shoulders. Leoniidas has become as cursed as Atlas. 


    She returns to him, of course she does. The air grows hotter, his skin prickling with her proximity. Into his hair Elli twines a purple bruised flower. Purple like Twilight. Purple like the flowers that adorned his mother’s hair. Now he flinches as if branded. Now he skitters from her with eyes wide, wide, wide. Here is a boy who challenged a dinosaur, who slept amidst the howls of wolves and the shadows of dragons. Yet he flinches at the touch of a girl. 


    “Stop.” He tells her firmly, his voice the crack of felled trees. His heart splinters. He might have said more. The words are there, a bitter dismissal upon his tongue. Go. Leoniidas wants to tell her. Why do you stay with me?


    But she steals the moment with a memory of their first meeting, of his keen desire then: to find some strange magic. “Don’t you think we have had enough of strange magic?” He asks, suddenly a boy again.




    “Speaking.”
    credits



    @[Elliana] <3
    Reply
    #6


    - ✧ -


    S
    he looks at him in a way that is infuriately cool, and says nothing, instead she finds a spot on that pointed ensemble of his and lingers there, concentrating on nothing in particular.

    In truth, Elliana looks at home only when she is not.

    Should she have been an empath such as her mother once was she might have have delved into his discomfort, tried to lessen it so, tried to turn off that grief or at least dull the ache until it became only a quiet thrum in the back of his mind. Instead, she just looks at him as if waiting to see if he would collapse like her sandcastles or hold himself as solid as the stone in Dusk Court.

    She is not cold.
    Just indifferent.

    Find them. He says. And never before has she wanted someone to disappear with a single blink of blue eyes in their direction. She looks like ice when she finds his gaze, content enough to freeze him in his spot. I dont want them, and perhaps in her apathy, this is the one way Elliana is cruel. We may be bound by blood, but not by bond. I do not know them. It is only slightly a lie. She had met Lilliana, once, a long time ago on the shores of Paraiso, but the meeting had been short and Elli had been young. She knows Lilliana mostly through the stories she was told, stories she has started to question if they were even true. She knows of Nashua and Yanhua, and there was a girl too, but Elliana never learned her name. But where their roots grew long and thick as the redwoods she heard stories about. Elliana had no roots at all, just dandelion seeds desperate to catch a breeze. I do not put as much stock in family as my mother would—nor apparently as you do.

    She moves away with the conscious slowness of someone who was too lost in her own head to truly care what had been thought by another. You cannot say that about magic when you yourself bleed the very essence of it, she says with narrow blue eyes. She sounds like her father, her real father, Tenebrae, and she is only slightly aware of it.

    She watches him in a heavy silence. A silence that soon grows deafening. Find your own way, Leoniidas, or drown in your grief. She stares at him with blue eyes that hold none of the warmth of her mother, but neither are they outright cold. She watches him, and it is seeing the hurt smeared across his face like Halcyon warpaint that she softens her. She could still be Elena’s daughter after all. Rise your head above this ocean of sorrow, Leo, and we will find each other again. and she snatches the flower from his hair and lets it cascade onto the forest floor, crumpled and broken.

    It is only when she is away from him that the trees begin whispering, something she cannot quite understand and she wonders—




    ..but nightmares are dreams too.
    « r » | @[Leoniidas]
    Reply
    #7
    some memories never leave your bones.
    like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
    - you carry them.


     

    Elliana looks to him and her eyes are ice. They set jackfrost seeping across his body. It begins at his antlers where he gaze rests (not upon his face which, he thinks, is both blessing and curse). From his golden tines the frost of her seeps down to the crown of his head and across his cheeks. The chill of her races down his spine, chasing a shiver that rocks the bones of him. 


    Leoniidas trembles and vows to himself, to whatever gods haunt this new world, that he is off girls. That downward bow of his lips, rife with grief and sorrow grows deeper. Oh, if his emotions were a sea he would be drowning, sinking like a stone. Can she see how he drowns, as he turns his phoenix-bright gaze to hers and dares to freeze at the touch of her eyes upon his. Her coldness reaches in through his eyes, down, down, down into his soul. Leoniidas would be a statue before her, a boy frozen forever at the whim of a girl. 


    And that is the mistake he makes. Leoniidas is still a boy discovering girls. He has witnessed their complexity, their strangeness, their utter unfamiliarity. They could be aliens to him for how confusing and complex he finds them. 


    Yet he yearns. Oh gods how he yearns. The fae-boy thinks of Aspara, how her beauty stole the breath from his lungs. The want to touch her slayed him. He thinks of the pain of not touching her and now, how she is lost anyway. The soft warmth of her skin is a ghost now. Aspara is resigned to exist only in his garden of lost memories, pressed with his family into a bed of flowers he will forget to weed. The memory of them will be choked from him. Leoniidas fears it and longs for it. 


    Elliana talks to him of family and so much he can understand. He thinks of the uncle he snarled at, never recognising him, he thinks of the father and mother he has not seen since his birth. He thinks of his sister, as fleeting in his life as an eclipse in the sky. No, Leoniidas did not know his family either, but to have been drawn out of his solitude, into the arms of friends and family, only to lose them again…


    “It is easier not have family at all,” The wildwood boy murmurs, agreeing, if just for a moment. 


    But then she speaks of magic, of the chaotic time control that flows potent and lethal through his veins. “I would bleed myself dry if it meant being rid of it,” low, low like a lupine snarl the lie rips forth, as if snagging upon too-sharp teeth. Leoniidas knows it is not that easy. He knows that time magic is not merely in his blood. It binds the pieces of him together - soul and skin and heart and mind. Time is all he is, a gift passed down from his mother. There is no dissection that will see him separated from it. 


    She departs him and he watches her go. Feels the silence of the woodland reach in to cocoon him. He surrenders to it, to the lovely darkness of the deep woods.


    We will meet again Elliana said. The words form a litany across his skin. They seep into his blood and beat in time with his heart. He will not separate himself from the truth of her parting words. Yet he wonders, when they do, if he will be anything like the boy he is now. Or if his sea of grief will be swallowed down by the wilds of this new world and he will be irrevocably changed. No longer a boy trying to understand others, but something wilder, more feral, more alone. He yearns for the latter, he feels the need for it deep, deep within his soul. 


    The trees whisper at his back and Leoniidas turns to them, leaping into their shadows, no longer a winged boy of time, but a stag that knows only the song of the woods, the vitality of solitude.

    “Speaking.”
    credits



    @[Elliana] fin <3
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