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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]  She's A Mercenary With Perfume - Sorren
    #1

    a bright and dangerous spark

    Like the leaves withering off their stems, Cheri’s lover had faded from the hills of Loess and tumbled on the wind elsewhere. She knew from her trip home that he wasn’t in Taiga, though she’d hunted high and low for any sign of him. Her father had mumbled something to her about his extended absence, increasing the young mare’s concerns over his whereabouts, but she’d been prohibited from continuing the search elsewhere after the “event” (that was what she liked to call the strange, twisted dream of her tentative future.) Then the news from Oceane came, the surprise that she was to ascend her Lady eventually and take up the mantle of Heir to Loess, and for a brief while afterwards Cheri remained within the confines of the lush Kingdom, speaking with her fellow council members and talking over possible ideas.

    Certainly, she should be exhausted. But after that night spent traveling through time Cheri had woken and felt better than ever, more renewed and brimming with an inexplicable energy that felt like it had no end. She flew constantly, happier now that she didn’t have to worry about losing her wings and unburdened by the deeper concerns of a possible pregnancy. In fact, she flew better than before. Her corners and dips were tighter, her speed increasing and her longevity too. She found that she could fly farther and faster than ever before, and the unrestrained energy thrumming like a living entity inside of her veins hungered for the exercise.

    When at last the plans had settled and her spare time opened itself up again, Cheri made sure she checked in with a fellow friend before leaving the borders of Loess to head for the common lands once more.

    Targaryen needed her. She wasn’t sure how she knew, only that she felt a growing urgency to locate him. “He’s probably lying in a heap somewhere, all broken or banged up.” Her concerns flickered to life in Cheri’s thoughts, agitating the green-and-black pegasus mare as she shot through the mid-afternoon sky. It was well below freezing today, hardening the clouds into thick, icy crystals that pricked her skin as she flew through them, but the weather seemed mild in comparison to the temperature. At least the sun was still trying its best to shine beneath heavy cover.

    With a flick of one wing she arced gracefully to the side and descended, half-tipped, from the heavens. She circled low above the tangled forest land, searching for a break in the bare-limbed trees above the miles of clustered branches, and finally found a place to hover above before descending as elegantly as possible onto the ground, hind-hooves first. When she thumped her wings gently against her sides to tuck them in, a shiver of ice fell free to sprinkle across the bare ground. Cheri caught her breath and looked around, marveling at the sight of a lightning-scarred tree trunk near to her. That must’ve been the reason this spot remained clear where the rest of the woods was still damn-near impregnable.

    And then her gaze lowered, drawn to something nestled near the dead roots.

    It was a large, irregular shape. A … something. She couldn’t immediately discern what it was and so she stepped carefully toward it, her expression curious and sharp. Tangled among the rock formations growing out of her skull, Cheri’s glossy green forelock tumbled down the slope of her cheek and she blinked, her vision obscured for only a moment, but the moment was more than enough for whatever it was to slither out of sight. Now, feeling a sense of dread thrumming like anxiety in her chest, Cheri stopped at a dead halt. “One of these days,” She thought to herself, “That curiosity of yours is going to get you killed.”
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    @sorren
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    #2
    He never left the dark, or perhaps it was the dark that never left him. But as soon as the world was right again and so many were content with pretending that the evernight hadn’t carved away some vital piece of innocence, some crucial piece that still made them kind and gentle and good, Sorren realized he no longer fit here. Not in the light, not in a world with rules restored. Where things like manners mattered, where diplomacy was once more just as important as strength. He couldn’t pretend like the dark hadn’t changed him, like killing had not left some kind of black imprint on his heart.

    So he gave himself to other things, to hunting the creatures that did still remain, to finding their nests and destroying them because there was nowhere else for this broken fury inside his chest to go. The only relief he found was sinking claws and teeth into meat or carapace or whatever the hell these things were made of. It didn’t matter that what they bled tasted bitter and vile and left him feeling ill for days afterwards.

    He fought because if he didn’t then his demons might find him.
    He fought because if his demons did find him, he might be crushed beneath the weight of them.

    One of them, these creatures, the everdark remnants, one of them had worn the face of his sister. Something cold and mutated and snarling. It even had her voice. Too small and fragile for the violence in her eyes, too gentle for the blood streaked over her mouth and down the front of her chest. He had known it wasn’t his sister, his twin, some vital piece of his ugly soul, he had known how the beasts evolved to be so clever. To draw prey in more easily, to kill more effectively.

    He had destroyed it with more fury than any storm, more violence and fury than even the scald of fire. He had felt nothing but satisfaction when the body tore beneath his claws because he knew it wasn’t her. It wasn’t Splendora.

    But then days passed, and months.
    Years?

    She never returned. Not even when the sun finally climbed out from behind the moon to cast a shy kind of hazy light over a world scorched by death and dark. She never came back.

    It was enough to plant a seed of doubt, enough to make him wonder at his own madness. Had he truly killed a beast? Or had it been her. Had it been Splendora. He couldn’t remember now how violent and wrong the thing with her face had been, how it had chittered and spit and leered at him. He can only remember her face and her voice and the way the body had torn.

    The way she was still gone.

    The seed inside him blossomed as seeds are wont to do, it grew and grew until the memory of what had happened scattered like ashes in the wind and left him with no sureness of what had happened. It chased him here to the forest, here where the beasts were still themselves and no one ever ventured close enough to meet them. If the tangle of trees didn’t stop them, then the bone crushing cold usually did. It was safe here. Here where he is safe, where he can hurt no one like he must have hurt Splendora.

    It is why he doesn’t realize that Cheri is herself when she lands nearby the tree he rests beneath. A more scarred and mangled version of the manticore she had met those many years ago. It is why he rises and retreats in the blink of an eye, feeling that familiar fury wash over him like cold fire. He limps silently through the trees at the perimeter of the small clearing, though this pain means nothing to him, and appears from the shadows four feet to the right of where the creature with Cheri’s face stares at the tangle of roots where he had been resting, dying, it was hard to know the difference any more.

    “Bold of you to assume I won’t kill you while you wear the face of someone I would never touch.” He says, and his voice is something low and furious, a note of raggedness from the sick that always follows the kill of one of these creatures. He is two days in and it feels like his heart is a stone in his chest, like it is too hard to pump anything but death through him. He is not afraid of dying though - there are worse things for the world than that - and so he staggers closer with a low snarl, his armored tail curling up over his back with the barb aimed for her chest.

    But he is a liar.
    He thinks of Splendora and how she never came back, thinks of Cheri who had been so full of fire and sass in a way that left him amused for many days afterwards. He doesn’t want to think of her body, now grown and beautiful, broken in this forest. Even if it isn’t really her.

    “Maybe I’ll just let you kill me instead.”

    sorren

    i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat



    @Cheri
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    #3

    a bright and dangerous spark

    A blossom that finds its place in the dark is still a bloom, is it not? And Cheri had wondered about him - the manticore from her childhood. Had he been real himself, much as he thought about the monster with the face of his sister? Had she really encountered such a strange and intense being during the end of their world? The years between that moment and this one had led her to believe that it might’ve been a dream, but facing him now clears up those old childhood suspicions. He is as real and magnificent as ever, Lord of the Forest that he is. A creature with no definite shape but an amalgamation of many things instead. And he’d treated her so kindly back then.

    His reappearance confirms his reality, that he does exist despite her suspicions that it’d been a childhood fantasy all along. Cheri can’t deny the satisfaction of that truth despite the way he stares her down now, sending her waves of aggressive tension across the short, empty space between them.

    He looked so ferocious in the dim light of the heartswood. So ready to kill her or be ended by whatever he assumed she was. Nothing of his previously curious nature remained; she wondered if he remembered the helpless bird they’d saved together. Without his encouragement she wouldn’t have been able to do it, but now he’s across from her and Cheri can see the deadly tip of that barb aiming for some soft spot of her skin. He means to end her, or to be undone by her. Why?

    “You’re sick.” She stated as a matter-of-fact.

    He was wounded physically. She assumed he must’ve recently engaged in battle with some other creature or some horse - just like she assumed that he was a horse underneath that strange, shapeshifting skin of his. Maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter. She was just as driven now as she’d been back then to cradle the broken things close and help them. They were the ones in need of her love the most, the things she could devote herself to regardless of the outcome. Even if her patients didn’t make it, Cheri never felt regret. She tried, and that was the best any Beqanna horse with an ounce of skillfully good magic could do.

    “Let me help you Sorren.” Cheri asked, pulling her hooves close to another while she stared the King of Beasts down. “If you don’t let me, I’ll do it anyway. Without your consent.” The pegasus threatened, trembling even as she said it.

    If he wanted, those iron-clad muscles could whip his body into motion and he would be on her in an instant. She would be physically powerless against the onslaught of those claws, that stinging tail. He would hurt her and she would heal herself, but it would be a battle of who could do the opposite quicker. Cheri felt like she would lose that war. But if it meant helping him? Making him healthy again?

    All she had to do was remember the way he slipped through those glossy, black leaves of the Tephra jungle. Cheri just needed to hold onto that memory: the one where he came to lay flat on his lion’s belly in the dirt, watching her as she worked her craft. With that in her mind she could do anything, including repaying him for the kindness he’d given her when it seemed like such a thing had disappeared from their world entirely.
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    @sorren
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    #4
    His mind is lost someplace within a thousand fragments of thought and feeling. He is himself - noble to a point of arrogance, loyal to the point of stupidity, and yet he is also someone else entirely. He is basal and reduced to instinct, reduced to reaction because his mind is something slow and unfamiliar, something sluggish. It is like sinking and drowning, like dying.

    Maybe it is death.
    Maybe death knows it has sunk it’s claws into this leonine beast, maybe it waits forever in the periphery for him to stumble.

    You’re sick.

    It is a voice so familiar that it almost pulls him back to the surface of sanity, a hand reached into a dark so thick it chokes him. But it is also a voice of impossibility because it belongs to a girl, not a woman, and that girl belongs in brighter places than this one. “And you’re a liar.” He says, his voice a cracked snarl, his face a tangle of fury as he carefully looks anywhere except her eyes, those twin spots of pale spring green.

    But he is weaker than his stubbornness, weaker than his pride, and when his light brown eyes lift to her face he can do nothing but take her in. Her sameness is uncanny. Same eyes, same gems, same shade of green. Even the same beautiful scowl he is arrogant enough to think is something she wears especially for him. Except, of course, that she isn’t real.

    He snarls at the weakening of his own resolve, snarls at this creature who wears the face of someone who managed to make herself matter to him. What magic is it that knows him so well, knows these secrets he keeps buried in the darkest parts of his heart - hidden, but apparently not safe.

    And it knows her so well, knows her stare and that scowl hidden like a promise at the corners of that beautiful mouth, knows her stubbornness and her ire and the way she is so good at threatening him. He even smiles, for just an instant. If he is a storm, then she is the quiet, watchful center. She is the thing that tethers him. He is best when trapped in the gravity of her.

    It is the way she trembles that catches his predator eye. It wakes something primal in him, a fire he had thought all burned out but now flares to life in the snarl on his lips. “Pick a different face.” He is almost roaring now, more than furious as he stalks close enough to breathe in the smell of earth and dew and forest from her skin - more impossible things he can not reconcile but yearns for all the same. “She is mine.” To keep, to enrage, to protect. It is a kind of madness, a kind of poison that creeps through him, burning like a fever until he is damp and raving and lashing that knifed tail.

    And yet.
    And yet.

    When he touches her, when he finally closes the distance to press his fanged mouth to the smooth dark of her flawless skin, it is with a gentleness he should no longer be capable of. His teeth drag across her flesh, sharp and curved, but he does not press hard enough to break such perfect skin. “I wish you were her.” He says, admits, presses a kiss to her neck with a kind of broken finality that should come to her as a warning. Then his wings flare wide and his lashing tail falls, buried barb first in the thick golden-maned fur of his own broad chest.

    It takes a moment before his legs fold beneath him, his body too heavy to be made of anything but stone - and he had meant to say one last thing, one last smug parting shot about winning. But the words are trapped inside the stone of his mouth, and as the world starts to darken he is vaguely glad that this is the last face he’ll see.

    I’m too tired. He tells her, but the words die unheard inside the prison of his mind.

    sorren

    i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat

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    #5
    Cheri could hear the dead silence around them, permeating her words and making them softer than they ought to be. Somehow it made Sorren's voice louder. A liar, he called her. The filthiest of words and one she particularly never associated with herself. That’s why it stung so perfectly, without the aid of his barbed tail. For a moment she forgot he was sick and possibly delirious, that he needed her help, and the pang of sorrow from his betrayal needled its way into the world of its own accord; the tiniest bit of magic leaking from the cracks of her interior.

    She swallowed down the bitter pill.

    “He doesn’t mean it.” She told herself, trying her best to fight past this new wall between them. Declaring aloud as well as to herself that she would save him, hearing the vicious snarl he rumbled in response. His resolve weakened and her fear of failure bubbled up.

    “Murder is senseless, and the only green things I eat grow from the dirt.” He says, and there is a chuckle in the low sound of his voice as his feet knead the tufts of grass beneath them. “And anyway, I have the sneaking suspicion that you are a little too spicy for my palate.”

    She forced herself to remember. By sheer willpower she superimposed the same face from that first night over the current one stalking closer with a deadly snarl curling its lips and baring its teeth. His barbed tail had flashed in the dim light of his glow, that much was the same, but the eyes had been burning with an auburn-colored laughter and his voice had been a purr, not a growl.

    “Are you calling me chaos?”

    Cheri couldn’t change her face just like Sorren couldn’t turn the tides or bring the moon down from her throne in the sky. She hardly had time to think about what he meant when he claimed her, his movement was too fluid and her legs were too still. She did, however, close her eyes.

    At first she felt his weight, heavy and unbalancing. The phantom touch of his teeth on her black fur came a second afterward. Expecting them, her throat lifted toward the embrace. Cheri had been ready, consensual with his desire for her flesh because she didn’t fear a pain she’d already experienced before, it just so happened that his final statement was actually what surprised her most. I wish you were her, he kissed her.

    Faintly, Cheri could just make out the sound of his wings unfurling. She opened her eyes with a blinding flash of eerie green sparks, just in time to watch him fall away from her and land in a crumpled heap on the ground - wings bent and his proud forepaws curling into his swollen chest. The dark mare with eyes like glowing hellfire stared down at him, silent for one or two of his laboured breaths. Sorren might’ve thought his words had gone unheard, but he was dead wrong.

    “I am her.” Cheri said at last.

    A light bloomed from nowhere. It could’ve been seen from a half mile away, so potent were its gleaming rays caught between the bare and twisted branches of the forest. At its source no mortal eyes could look - the white color was pure and drenched in her power. It was Sorren; he’d been a key to unlocking it. Drawing it out of her through desperation and love, the manticore was enveloped by the glow and gentle cradling of her outspread wings.

    “Sorren.” She called out to him from that dark place, where death waited for him on the other side. “I won’t let you go, no matter how tired you are.”

    No matter how tired he was of this life, no matter what he’d done or what had happened to him in their time apart, she refused to let him sleep.

    “Arise.” She commanded his spirit, flushing his system with her healing until she thought the infusion would make headway over the poison clogging his veins. The normal care she’d usually taken with a patient had vanished in her urgency to bring him back, and Cheri proceeded with careless regard for any pain he might or might not experience during the interaction. She only cared that he could feel. “Come back to me.”

    I can’t lose anyone else,
    she thought as the light extinguished and the forest grew dark once more.


    @sorren
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    #6
    Death is exactly what he expects it to be. It comes slowly at first, hand in hand with the burning pain from the barb buried in his chest. It is only a sting at first, just a quiet chafing like his mind cannot fathom his own idiocy and so it refuses to participate in any of the consequences. But then that burn turns to an inferno that blazes like molten fire in his veins, a blinding agony that leaves him writhing in the dirt at the feet of whoever it is that stands in front of him.

    He does not wonder why he cannot remember a name, a face.
    He does not wonder if that is strange.

    It doesn’t take long for his heart to stop beating, for that punctured thing inside his chest to finally deflate. He might’ve struggled more if he had the energy, the awareness, but poison had already taken its toll on both his mind and his body, so when darkness comes he does not struggle against it. He will be embarrassed by this willingness later, by this desire to cease to exist. But now it is something like relief, like an embrace. Like he is a shooting star in reverse, falling back away into a midnight sky.

    Until.
    Until.

    She is a hook in his belly, a tether bound to a wayward soul. In his peace he finds this chafing, finds her presence here to be an inconvenience. Doesn’t she know that he is ready to go, ready to be done with a life - a world - so set on wounding him. Sorren. He growls, not with his voice but with whatever consciousness she refuses to let go of, whatever piece of him she keeps anchored to this place inside her chest. I won’t let you go, no matter how tired you are.

    But that voice, that voice. The growl turns to a groan, and suddenly there is new pain that burns through his veins, new agony that has nothing to do with any kind of physical wrongness. How can she be here with him in this place. In the forest? In death? Did he kill her like he killed Splendora.

    His soul is a thing that writhes and aches, something cold and reptilian as it coils and curls in on itself. You cannot be here. He thinks into the vastness of death that is only just barely out of reach, only just barely too far. Because he knows this voice, this girl, those stubborn green eyes the same shade as the moss that grows on the damp skin of the Tephran trees, and there is far too much life inside that stubborn creature to be meeting her here in death.

    He does not understand.
    Come back to me.

    It is a strange thing to matter to someone, to have her pick up these unraveling pieces of him and hold them tight in trembling fists. He is absolutely certain that he has done nothing to deserve this, to deserve her loyalty. But her magic is something that commands him, and he finds that this decision to live or die is something that rests wholly in her stubborn will. Goddamnit Cheri. But even as he thinks her name, thinks of her - of green and gems and those beautiful wings, her frown and her stubborn scowl, he finds that he is less ready to leave.

    There is more to know, more of her. More of them?
    But that thought feels dangerous and so even now he falls away from it, falls away from her and this dark, falls back into a body that is once more writhing with renewed agony as she rewinds death, rewinds time, rewinds him.

    “Cheri.” It is the first real word he speaks when he is finally able to again, the first sound that is not some wretched broken groan as his body heals and then shifts back to equine. He realizes she has never seen him like this before, and he is surprised by the way it feels so vulnerable. His blue merle coat is slightly darkened by the patches of sweat on his neck and his flank, and the white badger marking of his face and the matching white markings on his legs are dull with first from his writhing. He wonders what she will think of him like this, without the mystery of wondering what his true face is. Wonders what she will make of his antlers and the small blue and yellow flowers that climb through them and in his lighter, mottled hair. “I distinctly recall suggesting you be more gentle.” He says, and though his voice is still rough and low, it is not like the growl of the manticore. “I see that is still a work in progress, hmm?”

    With a groan he opens his eyes to find her, but it is dark in these woods but for their own personal glowing. “I feel like I should warn you, as soon as night falls I will become a skeleton.” The words feel like so much work, like they exhaust him. He doesn’t even try to stand or lift his head, doesn’t move except to reach with his nose in the direction she stands. “Please do not try to heal me. Everything is fine.” There is a distinct wariness in his brown eyes as he recalls the pain of being healed by her.

    He does not mention that it still feels as though half of him is left behind in the dark.
    As though half of him is a void that watches the rest with cold, empty eyes.

    “Why, Cheri?” The question comes as an exhale, and exhaustion is a thing that settles like a weight over his prone body.

    sorren

    i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat

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    #7
    Cheri kept her eyes tightly shut. If she opened them she feared the worst: that Sorren would be cold and stiff. Lifeless. It was easier to see nothing at all and believe he was still breathing, that the ache in her muscles and the sweat covering them both meant her out-of-body experience had worked. She breathed in and exhaled slowly, waiting until that first twitch of movement signaled her suspicions to be true. And then she carefully opened her eyes.

    At first she noticed the juxtaposition of their bodies tangled together. When Cheri had originally curled herself over the manticore it was to cradle him, not caress him, but somewhere in the mix of his changing animal forms that happened anyway. One of her forelegs was pulled up, allowing a leg of his own to snake underneath it, while the other was folded beside her but firmly pressed into the curve of his stone-colored belly. The one wing not supporting her was draped tenderly over the rest of him, a curtain made entirely of green feathers - each one acutely aware of his natural outline.

    A while ago he’d said her name so softly that Cheri wasn’t sure he’d said it aloud at all. It could’ve been the other version of him, calling out to her from across the void. But looking at him now she could plainly see he was whole again, animated by the flame of life. To quell her deeper concerns the mare stretched out her dark nose and used it to trace the white markings on his face, smiling gently at the sound and feeling of his voice vibrating up through the skin. For the first time in weeks she felt exhausted.

    All the effort of keeping him alive left her drained, but pleased. “You tried killing yourself and the thing you’re most worried about afterward is me, seeing you turn into a skeleton at night?” She laughed quietly, adding tenderness to chase away his shadowy concerns. “If I’d shocked you harder do you think I could’ve knocked some sense into you?”

    She was joking of course. What happened here tonight was a one-off, hopefully not repeated for a long time. God help the stallion if he even considered it.

    “Why?” Cheri parroted back at him, not because she didn’t understand. The tone of her voice implied skepticism. She thought for a second, the sound of their laboured breathing filling up the spaces in between, and then answered him truthfully. “You drew it out of me.” A rocky start. “There are … things I don’t really understand or have complete control over. Sometimes, when someone I lo-” she stopped, corrected herself, “When the ones I care about need help, my power reacts without my control.”

    The pegasus breathed a heavy sigh. “I didn’t want to lose you, Sorren. The memory I have of our day is still so vivid for me, too real to let go of.” Her head lowered, burying itself carefully into the merle-dappled curve of his neck. “So please, I’m begging you. Please stay.”


    @sorren
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    #8
    It feels like climbing from the bottom of a grave, like clawing out of the dirt with a fight he only has because she is here willing it from him. Perhaps that is why it takes so long for him to make sense of the tangle of their bodies in the dark shadows of this forest, of their legs curled together and another pressed to his belly. He very nearly rankles at this closeness, at the heat of her skin where she lay pressed to him, poised with a wing over his body like she fell that way from the sky.

    But he has wondered what it would be like to have her body cradled against him, to have this girl of satin black pressed close enough that there is no part of her that isn’t his. Except now that she is here he finds himself frozen with indecision, frozen by a sense of propriety that draws lines of tension along his jaw because she is here and curled against him, pressed so close she can likely feel the tension now climbing through his body, but she is not his. To touch, to taste, to learn - and he might have held that resolve if not for the way she reaches out to touch the velvet of her nose to the markings along his face.

    He groans, and it is a quiet, aching sound that rises in his chest and breathes past lips so tight they almost frown. She cannot know that he had imagined what a moment like this would be like. Her fire quelled for him, that smolder in her eyes turned instead to a heat her lips brand him with.

    But she is not his.
    Not his.

    His eyes are a shade of pain when they find her smiling face, silent and guarded, no longer trapped full of burning amusement as they had been on that first night in an apocalyptic world. She has weapons with which to wound him now, and he is certain she does not realize it. “Well, I was afraid you might try to heal me again.” He says, and there is gravel in the quiet sound of his words while he studies her beautiful face. “And while I am rather fond of this part,” he motions to their tangled bodies with a glimmer of that leonine amusement in his eyes, “the rest was rather unpleasant.”

    He knows though, understands that she must have gentled none of herself when she reached to take him back from death. That there was no time to be slow and careful, no time to do anything but throw all of herself into him. And she had, without hesitation.

    It is reflex when he reaches for her, when he presses his nose to hers in a moment of wordless gratitude, when he is too selfish to stop there and lets his lips wander up along the curve of such a dark, midnight cheek. “And you,” a pause, because he had heard the word she had begun to speak, the one that felt like a jolt of lightning beneath his skin, because he wants her to know that he had heard it even if she had swallowed it back, “care about me?” His eyes are open against her face, sharp and searching for any hint of vulnerability as his breath warms the curve of her jaw. “Only care?”

    Suddenly it is there again, that living amber flame buried in the backs of eyes too bright and warm to be any simple shade of brown. “Is your power how you found me here, Cheri? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but not even the sunlight can find me in this place.” He might have risen then if not for the way she buries her face in the curve of his dark neck, but the moment she does it, it tears a possessive growl from someplace deep in his chest that is far more lion than equine. Never mind that there is no one here but him and her to hear it. “Stay where, Cheri.” He says, and his mouth is against the curve of her neck, his lips and his teeth and the gentle wandering heat of his breath as he wills her to be bold enough to claim him.

    To tell him to stay with her.

    sorren

    i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat

    Reply
    #9
    Touching, whispering to each other in the dark heart of the Forest: these were things she shouldn’t be doing. Not after only meeting him twice, this lion with the heart of a dying star. My lion she thought irrationally, surprised when he began tracing her cheek with his soft nose. Cheri hadn’t expected it to feel like ice pricking her skin, giving her gooseflesh. His touch shouldn’t feel so tempting at first taste, either. She thought these kinds of emotions and feelings came slowly, built themselves over the months and years of knowing someone else, but clearly she was wrong.

    She wanted more from him, and that was very irrational of her. Dangerously irrational, considering how tangled things could get between them. She cared for him a lot, obviously - or else she wouldn’t have drained herself entirely to bring him back, but there was a problem: they knew almost nothing about one another. He’d literally just gotten done telling her that he transformed into a skeleton at night, and he clearly had no idea where she lived or who she’d become.

    And yet, it didn’t stop Cheri from wanting to tell Sorren that yes, she passionately loved him. As irrational as it might seem, the feeling of his breath warming her dew-damp hair had her thinking of doing this every night - skeleton or not. In fact she wanted to remain here until then, just to prove it. Except she didn't; the truth as to why she came here in the first place kept Cheri quiet.

    She’d come here looking for Targaryen; by a stroke of luck she found him instead. Fate (she assumed) had a sinister edge to it. Only a thing like destiny could have her feeling this way so suddenly about a stranger from her past, when the childhood love of her present still hovered somewhere in the unknown corners of this world. Her guilt ate at her, but Cheri withdrew her head from the safety of Sorren’s embrace and looked him over, unashamed.

    “Stay with me, Sorren. In Loess.” She asked him in a low voice. The silent woods absorbed her words and kept them from traveling too far, but there was no mistaking the undercurrent of longing within them.

    “We’re connected now.” Her nose bumped into his, almost invisible in the dark. “I want to explore your unknown corners, and show you mine.”

    Another adventure, a new discovery. Targaryen had his chance and he left her of his own free will. Beneath it all - the emotions, the desire - there was a gleaming pair of red eyes boring through her subconscious, taunting her. Another prayers, they would probably say. Cheri could almost hear the chuckle and picture that characteristic smirk. Instead of confronting them, she ground her teeth together and pushed her uncertainties away.

    “I’m not sure what exactly ‘this’ is -” whatever they were becoming, “- but I know what it could be.”

    And that, she refused to say, is what led me to you instead.


    @sorren
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    #10
    She is quiet for long enough that the strangeness of this day has him wondering suddenly if this isn’t all part of some wild fever dream. If she is little more than an apparition summoned from this ache inside his chest, this loneliness that has devolved into something more like distance - a distance he enforces if only because he knows what becomes of those who dare to love him. Like his sister, his twin. It would make sense that his mind, broken by sickness, by death, would pick this girl to tether the last pieces of itself to. Cheri, that stubborn fledgling healer who found him in the dark and owned him from the moment she had first scowled a warning at the laughing manticore while he watched her give pieces of herself to a broken little sparrow.

    He had thought about asking her to stay then, stay with him in the dark, stay in Tephra by the light of the volcanic streams that stretched like unwalkable paths across an overgrown jungle. But she had been a girl, she had been naive and innocent in a way he had been unwilling to tarnish, and from the moment she stopped watching him out of the corner of her eye - the moment she had stopped believing he was some kind of monster, he knew she couldn’t stay. Couldn’t be around him.

    He would ruin her.

    Now here she is, curled against his side and looking him over with such unapology that it is all he can do not to take her, to claim what could never be his, even when she speaks such quiet, impossible words and touches her nose to his. Stay with me. His doubt is a snarl in his chest, a fury in his eyes because she should know better than to trust someone like him, to want someone like him. He is a slave to this need, to needing her, and so it has to be Cheri that keeps distance between them. Has to be Cheri that keeps herself safe.

    But they are each prey in the other’s web, each victim to this thing that lives inside both of their chests and drives them together with a kind of gravity that leaves him feeling -

    Everything.
    Crushed beneath the weight, buried but somehow weightless. Like there is purpose again, meaning in a life that had begun to unravel at every single seam until the colors of his future were indistinct piles of meaningless thread.

    And hope.

    It is something strange and unfamiliar, and it feels like stone inside the cage of his ribs, like a parasite sitting inside his chest waiting to devour him. Because that is all hope is ever good for. To wound, to disappoint, to break. There is no world where someone like him gets to make a life with someone like Cheri, no matter what claims she makes of what things could be. He will only ever disappoint her, only ever make the wrong choices. He shouldn’t even be allowing himself to picture any part of this future she hints at, these could-be’s. But he does because he cannot help it, because he is untethered and unbound and she is reaching for him in the dark despite every single reason she has not to.

    So he imagines, in these quiet moments, what it would be like to live inside her world of could-be. To trace kisses over this delicate body pressed beside him, to learn all of the dark spots strewn through the white like they are stars to guide by, constellations that will always bring him home. He imagines lying together like this every night, talking about whatever wonderful adventure she had that day because he is absolutely sure she fills every moment with something important. He isn’t sure what he could possibly be good for, especially in a place like Loess, but maybe he will have stories to tell her as well. Things to make her scowl, things to make her smile.

    He even imagines what she would look like with her belly swollen with his child, and the pain of that ache inside him is what finally breaks his silence and brings him back to her. “I would have come even if you hadn’t asked.” He says, and his lips are in the strands of her mane, a caress over the arch of that beautiful neck. “I let you leave me once, Cheri. I will not be doing that again.” He wonders if she is clever enough to hear the threat in these words - he doesn’t mean them to be, but even he can hear the way it sounds. The darkness in such a vow. If he were a weaker man he would wish that there weren’t so much darkness in him, that he would have inherited more of his mothers goodness, her gentleness. But he knows better than to wish on daydreams, on lost causes.

    He wants to touch her, to learn in this moment every single one of these unknown corners she speaks of, but he can feel the curse waking inside his skin like a living virus tracing fissures through flesh as though he had been sewn together and suddenly is not. “It is nearly night, healer.” He whispers against the crook of her ear, beside that crown of crystal against her brow. “I don’t want you to stay and see this.” He says, and his lips brush her forehead with a kind of tenderness even he had forgotten himself capable of. Inch by inch he leaves a trail of half kisses down the line of her dark face, pausing only at the corner of her mouth before a quiet, feline smile slips across his lips. “The change is gruesome. There’s no need for you to watch me die twice in one day, hmm?” He presses the last kiss to her mouth, to lips as soft as the night is dark, and there is nothing halfway about the way he demands more. The way he has forgotten that he does not want to take her innocence. “Go on, little love, I will come find you later in Loess.”

    sorren

    i'll take my heart clean apart if it helps yours beat



    @Cheri
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