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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]  I've pulled you in, nowhere to hide now; Elliana
    #1

    i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high

    He has never believed in fate or destiny. Even as a youth, when all the world had seemed to scream it’s demands, he hadn’t believed there was one set path for them all. Then he had grown older and the future had flooded the back of his skull with all the possibilities to come. Still he does not believe in destiny. With the endless futures dancing at the back of his sockets, how could he possibly?

    There are many who would disagree. After all, had he not begun to grow into a grotesque mirror of his very own grandmother? (Not truly, not in the ways that mattered. He knows it is only that he had finally come to recognize a truth she had known for a very long time, but the world would not see it that way. But he knows beyond any shadow of doubt that fate had nothing to do with it. No, that was merely the vagaries of equine-nature.)

    Wry amusement suffuses his features as she admonishes him, declaring she would make her own decisions. He has no doubt she would be just contrary enough to attempt to wrap the flowers into her mane, if only to prove him wrong. But he also has little doubt she would find it exceedingly unpleasant. So he says nothing. As wild and reckless as he is, he does not truly wish to see her hurt. Even the thought of it stirs something feral in the pit of his belly.

    Then she distracts him with her question. He peers at her quizzically, not surprised at her question, but also not certain how to answer. Reave has never once considered flowers, much less which might be his favorite. As he pulls his gaze from her, scanning their surroundings, he frowns, genuinely considering her question. After a moment, a faintly impish smile begins to tug at his lips once more. When he glances back at her, he is already pulling a vision around her.

    A scattering of thistles, near shoulder height with purple buds opening to the sun above. No one ever seemed to care too much for them, their thorns a greater deterrent than the simple beauty of their flowers is a draw. If one must contend with thorns, it seems everyone prefers roses. But they are too delicate and temperamental for Reave’s taste. “Should we find some to twine in your mane?” he asks, eyes gleaming with a teasing light.

    As the trees begin to thin, Reave knows they are close. Elliana must sense it too. He says nothing more in response to her assertion she would not be a stranger. Her determination settles something in him, and he does not feel the need to press it. But when she asks if they are close, he smiles. “Very,” is his simple response as she closes her eyes and leans lightly against him. The bones protruding from his shoulder prevent her from pressing skin to skin, but he can feel the heat of her.

    They walk like that until the moorlands open before them. The tough, shrubby grasses dotted by heather and thistle sweep before them before falling away into cliffs in the distance. The garden he had promised her is nestled on one of those distant cliffs, but he halts. Pressing his mouth to her cheek, he whispers, “You can open your eyes now.”

    reave



    @Elliana
    #2
    kissed my penny and threw it in
    prayed to keep my soul



    H
    is matching gaze (if Elliana ever dared to look in mirrors, she might have realized how similar they are) turns from hers and there is a moment where her own eyes trip and stumble trying to chase it down before righting itself back up.

    But Reave does what he has seem to have done since meeting earlier that day—
    he catches her first.

    Purple flowers scatter before her and she knows this vision is not her own, she knows even if she does not know how she knows. Thistle, the word comes to her quickly, having seen it in the Court gardens of Terrastella. She thinks about telling him the bouquet she made for the father who wasn't really her father, or the nightmares of how it was thistle that blinded her father that really was her father.

    Or how she loved the way it felt so sharp and strong when she ran through a field of them, emerging bloodied but oh so far from broken on the other side.
    The vision escapes her—she says nothing. But the silence is oh so far from empty.

    “It was always the ill fated king that wore a crown of thorns—are you trying to tell me I am ill fated, Reave?” She asks him with a tilt of a smile. “Or that I am king of some forgotten land?” She asks him, hardly toying with the idea for long. If there were anything Elliana was less of, it was a leader. Even if she were a princess—once.

    Her heart flutters in anticipation, but there is hardly anything to note exteriorly. Elliana, even excited, doesn’t make many large movements; they are all slow, small, and calculated as if every second she is running through equations and angles and strategies though she does none of these. She just doesn’t want to disturb the world in which she lives. Unlike so many, the dark daughter of a sunflower and her shadow, doesn’t mind that nobody knows she is there when she is. She is an observer, and while she wouldn’t pass up the chance to make friends again, after so long, she doesn’t find it a pressing need. There is solace to be found in loneliness.

    She recalls a story her mother once told, of the single time she came in contact with the beauty that was Nerine, and she smiles to think that there is one thing in the world that Elena cannot touch.

    She offers him a smile, blue eyes still hidden from the world…until.

    You can open your eyes now.

    “Oh,” is all she says at first, a breathy and indifferent sound, and she can’t think of anything to follow it up with. She can’t sort her spinning thoughts into words, and everything that she thinks of just seemed so...empty. She stands there in her dizzy silence. She knows she should say something, that she should acknowledge what he had just shown her, but she doesn’t.

    Instead—

    “If you could—would you stay here forever?” She thinks, he is not the same as her, moving from place to place, always looking past her birth home. “Will you?”






    @Reave  elliana speaks


    elliana

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    « r »
    #3

    i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high

    Elliana may not speak of the memories, but they are there, drifting around her, waiting for him to pluck them from the sway of her emotions. The freedom and innervation of the thorns against her delicate skin twine between them, the fear and sorrow of those same thorns blinding a man she loves as a father in her dreams. She might not speak of it, but he sees it all the same.

    Would it unnerve her to know her secrets are not secret around him?

    He doesn’t ask. He’s not sure he wishes to know the answer.

    And then she asks if he believes her ill-fated. He nearly laughs aloud at that, but the smile that comes to his lips in its place is tinged with a curious sadness. For all that he does not believe in fate, he knows beyond doubt that sorrow and grief still lie in his own future (and that perhaps the knowledge is why he avoids proclamations of destiny so fiercely). “If anyone is to be the ill-fated king, it would be me,” he replies after a moment of silence, his voice unusually somber. It does not last however. With Reave, it never does. “But I won’t don that crown just yet.”

    There is a gleam of dark amusement in his blue gaze as he nudges her forward, the yawning vista of his home revealed. For a time she stands there in silence, the breathy ‘oh’ hanging between them. Reave, as familiar with the vast moors as he is with the backside of his own eyelids, watches her instead.

    He tilts his head curiously when she finally breaks the silence, her words surprising him. This was not the direction he had imagined she would go, and yet it makes a perfect and terrible sense. In truth, he had never considered it so deeply. Even so, he already knows the answer. Knows it as deeply as the bones still beneath his skin. “No.” It is as simple as that. He is not rooted to this place as others are despite the affinity he feels. But land is just land, and he is far too untethered to tie himself to one place for the rest of his pitilessly long life. “Forever is a very long time.” A faint grin pulls the edges of his lips briefly upwards. “And this land is far too small for forever.”

    reave



    @Elliana
    #4
    kissed my penny and threw it in
    prayed to keep my soul



    H
    is

    Would it unnerve her to know her secrets are not secret around him?

    No.

    Elliana has had enough secrets.

    Enough.

    Enough.

    Enough. Enough.

    That is what the daughter of the once queen of Terrastella believe.

    She echoes his laughter with her own. Her laughter is youthful, pure, not quite the cliche of tinkling chimes but more like trilling on a clarinet. It is airy, quiet, perhaps even sad. She tilts her head to look at him, grinning her mother’s reckless grin, suddenly wild look in her eyes. “Since when are Guardians ill-fated? Are they not usually the heroic victors?” She asks him, does not tell him how she knows he is guardian like her mother’s godfather she has heard stories about. To be truthful, she is not even sure how she knows. “Best not hold it in your hands either, thorns can cut whether it be a head or a hand, there is no preference.” The darkness of a father she barely knows passes like a shadow behind blue eyes.

    They remain a relatively silent pair until their arrival, in which her blue eye reflect valiant cliffs and gracefully blowing grasses.

    No, he says.
    “No,” she repeats back at him and smiles. Her voice, so quiet already, is barely more than a breath. “I have always been a fan of that word, did you know? It was one of my first words,” she says, though it is not a memory if only because she cannot remember it, only remembers it inside stories her mother told at dinner parties. “Everyone says to say yes to everything, but I think we ought to start saying no more,” she says, smirks. “Wouldn’t you agree, Reave?” She asks him as if it were a trick question.

    “Where would you go if you reached the end of the world?” She asks him. Thinks, in her head, that they would go further. Further than time and life and anything, just because they can. She thinks this, knows this in the very depths of her heart, but rather than voice it, Elli closes her eyes and breathes quietly, imagining just what wondrous places they might explore. She laughs like the trickling of a stream. “I think, I would watch the sunset, there, at the end of all things.” She says, and there is so much longing, so much passionate curiosity burning beneath her eyes that she wonders if he could feel she was likely to explode from it. But instead she tips her beautiful, thin neck back so that she might peer into the expanse of the pale sky.




    @ elliana speaks


    elliana

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    « r »
    #5

    i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high

    He enjoys the recklessness of her smile, the wildness in her eyes as she looks at him. It matches what is in his own soul, the deep and yawning ferocity he has never been able to shake. He has always attacked life with everything he has, and in that moment, she looks as though she understands. As though she has been there too.

    Kindred spirits in a single, endless breath, gone too swiftly.

    His gaze when he peers at her matches in so many ways, his own feckless heart beating inside his bone-marked chest. “I’m not sure anyone would call me a hero,” he replies. The amusement he feels cannot quite mask the darkness that lurks behind it. The devilishness that fuels those words. No, if he were anything in the story she now tells herself, he would be the villain. She would be better served putting aside her fairytale notion of what Guardians should be.

    He doesn’t say anything more. He should, but he finds himself unable to. It is one thing to tell her he is no hero. It is quite another to shatter her illusions entirely. She seemed to believe there is something good and noble in him, and for a moment, he almost wishes there were. Perhaps he does not truly believe in good or evil, but for a single heartbeat, he wants to.

    In the rolling expanse of heather and grass and thistle, Reave presses closer to her, the sharp bone of his shoulder against the softness of hers. A reminder perhaps, that he is all cutting edges. His lips find her cheek as she smirks at him, the riddling question falling from her lips. He grins at that, appreciating the lure of her words for what they are. He doesn’t move though, instead breathing his answer into the curve of her jaw. “I think yes and no are equally powerful,” he counters, an answering smirk creeping onto his own mouth. “After all, if you hadn’t said yes, you wouldn’t be here with me now.”

    He withdraws then, eyes gleaming dangerously behind the glowing mask of bone. After a few breaths, he turns to consider the distant cliffs, as though he might be able to see the sunset at the edge of existence from there. After a moment, he replies thoughtfully, “And what if there is no sun there?”

    Abruptly he turns back to her, grin toying with the corners of his lips. “But I suppose that’s neither here nor there.” He pulls farther away then, blues eyes landing on her with a newly stirred teasing, a temptation. “How would you like to see that garden I promised you instead?”

    reave



    @Elliana
    #6
    kissed my penny and threw it in
    prayed to keep my soul



    T
    he story begins long before Elliana and Reave and Beqanna.

    It starts with Elena and Lilliana and Beyond.

    And stories and stories and stories and stories.

    And then came Elliana.

    And Reave.

    And them here, in Beqanna.

    Elena and Lilli always said they had a way of finding each other, even if through their descendants. Even if their descendants—they are not quite what their mother’s would have predicted.

    Her mother has always struggled for her happiness, forever two steps behind it, and she has search all her life for that which would make her content, but Elliana came upon it one day and it has stayed with her ever since. Outside of the realm of her secret heartache, a well that runs deeper than the Earth's core, she is steady, alright, well. It comes as a shock, to most, that a girl so quiet and so tainted by the sorrow in her life by abandonment, by death, by struggle, should be so completely incorruptible. She is not a stranger to hatred, to lust or to violence, but she endures it with the grace of an ageless queen, and it does not ruin her as it might have, before.

    She likes his eyes, she decides, now that she is finally looking at them, truly and really looking at them. She thinks for a moment, yes, she likes them. She tilts that pretty little head intelligently and says, finally, “It’s only because the world is too stingy, wanting to be heroes themselves,” she says and maybe it is unfair of her to assume such a thing, but she thinks it all the same. Her mother pushing through the pain of her brother, her father fighting for her to stay, to bring her back, the way Aeneas jumped off the ship. Everyone wants to be a hero. (Elli doesnt, not because she is original, but because she has seen the cost and it is not worth the effort.)

    Maybe she would move away from the boney armor that perches against her side, maybe she should. But she doesn’t, because Elliana is Elliana and she never changes. He is sharp edges and Elli is an endless circle looking for some sign of a point. Reave offers it in the form of a shoulder blade sticking into her own and there a wash of relief that floods over her.

    “Touche,” is what she responds with a reckless grin that shows how much, just how much she appreciates such an answer as his. “Then I will make one, set fire to the horizon till it blazes as bright,” she says with a gentle determination.

    A promise of a garden.

    “Show me.”






    @Elliana speaks


    elliana

    « ♡ »
    « r »

    @Reave
    #7

    i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high

    She declares that the world is too stingy to make him a hero, and he laughs. He laughs because he cannot help himself. He laughs because even if there is truth in it, he still doubts anyone would ever dare declare him as such (even if she might, she is the only). And he laughs because despite all of that, he has never wanted to be a hero.

    He had offered his life for the sake of the world once, but it had not been from the goodness of his heart. It had not been some deep desire to save the world that inspired him to take up the challenge. No, it had been love for his family. For their sake, he had put his life on the line. Had it not been for them, he would have so easily left the rest of them to hang for their arrogance.

    And if truth were to be told, he had been only a child then. A child with childish notions and imaginations.

    Leaning in close, he mutters the only response he can to her, his voice still redolent with humor. “The world is full of fools.” Perhaps he is one of those fools, but he would not be one filled with fanciful notions of his own self-importance.

    She does not retreat from the sharp angle of his shoulder against hers, and he finds himself pleased. Even when he draws away first, he is still pleased, though if pressed, he’s not quite certain he could articulate why. Male pride perhaps. Or maybe it is as simple as the pleasure of having found someone who does not recoil from the fearsome and bloody image he paints.

    With that wide grin stretching across his lips, eyes gleaming with careless delight, Reave shifts forward. His eyes dance from her to the moors sweeping before him. The cliffs jutting into the edge of the horizon. With another glance at Elliana, he starts forward, words heedless on his lips, “Come along then.”

    It’s not far, nestled on the edge of the cliff. And as they reach it, the gnarled and lawless layout stretches in an uneven circle. One could walk among the plants, if they dare the treacherous and twisting paths. If they dared the gaping maws and carnivorous inclination of the plants growing within. Reave once had, as a child. When the stone corpse of his mother had been stolen and placed within, a macabre statue to grace this bloodthirsty garden.

    It seems to sense their presence, the spiny buds turning and opening in their direction. Inviting. Warning. Or perhaps both. Gaze shifting to his companion, he lifts one brow in question. “So, is it everything you imagined?”

    reave



    @Elliana
    #8
    kissed my penny and threw it in
    prayed to keep my soul



    L
    aughter.

    His laughter, specifically. Hear ears catch at the sound, and there is the slightest head tilt and widening of blue eyes, and twitch of her lips, but what her expression is, what it says, it is hard to say. She will not make this expression again—

    Until laughter happens again.

    His laughter specifically.

    Reave is far more selfless than Elliana is. Because even if it is the love of your family that would convince you to lay down your life, that is selflessness. Because Elliana was a child just as Reave was, and he went to save the world, and Elliana left all her family behind with only a blink of blue eyes and she was gone into the sea mist.

    The world is full of fools. And now it is her turn to laugh, scrunching glacial blue eyes and wrinkling that shadowy nose. “What the world be without them?” Them. As if she were not one of them. How could she not be? With a reckless smile and heartbeat that hammers inside her chest, flinging itself around much more than a canary in a cage ever did, ever could.

    There is something in the sharpness of her shoulder that compliments her own, because Elliana has never been smooth and sure, she has always been sharp and rigged, if not steadfast. ‘Come along then.’ And a girl who was always searching for a leader and found it in neither her father nor her mother, she finds it in the bone armored guardian.

    The plants are spacious and wide and beautiful. The landscape presents itself as dangerous, treacherous, but Elliana is her mother’s daughter as much as she tries to fight it, and she would rather dance along the side of cliffs than frolic through meadows. “I don’t think I could have imagined this place,” she says in a breath, “But now should ever someone tell me a story of a garden, I will imagine it to be this one.”






    @Reave elliana speaks


    elliana

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    « r »
    #9

    i am the mace, the map, the fall and the high

    The price for his act of selflessness had been a steep one. A piece of his soul, ripped away as he had been consumed by monsters, returned only the form of his ever-present companion. Perhaps it had been deserved. Perhaps that had merely been the cost of his hubris. But if asked, he would say without hesitation that it had actually been a small price. After all, what is true morality if one cannot feel it?

    For his one act of selflessness, he has been made eternally selfish. Rune might whisper in his ear to guide him in what way he can, but one small angel perching on the shoulder of a much larger devil does not instill confidence.

    He has been called kind, and now selfless, but it is little more than a means to an end. Cruelty does not beget friendships or allies. Cowardice does not inspire trust. Though perhaps it does inspire the age-old philosophical conundrum: is good truly good if it is done for the wrong reasons?

    If there is an answer to that question, Reave does not have it.

    In the end, they are both creatures who cannot be categorized as neatly as the world wants them to be. Perhaps that is what had drawn them together. Or perhaps it had merely been the whims of chance. Whatever the case may be, Reave knows he does not want to release her so easily. It’s undeniably selfish of course. She sees a side of him no one else does, and he finds himself enjoying it far too much.

    “It wouldn’t exist,” he replies, the ready grin on his lips belying the gravity of his blue eyes. The world has long been built on the backs of fools and non-believers.

    He had brought her to this garden because he wanted to see for himself. It is a place as wild and lawless as the land in which it had been planted. It’s why he enjoys it so much. Why he tends it, offering the plants feasts to keep them fed and healthy. And when he sees her reaction to it, he is not disappointed.

    Her laughter is a caress, the delighted notes whispering across his skin with her approval. His eyes gleam as a grin creases his features, a rumble of satisfaction rolling through him. He closes the distance between them, unable to keep himself from the tumbling brightness lingering around her. Lifting his nose to touch her cheek, he murmurs, “It’s a garden worthy of stories.” He pauses, eyes glinting with something wicked. “As are you.”

    reave



    @Elliana
    #10
    kissed my penny and threw it in
    prayed to keep my soul



    E
    lliana has been the princess in the tower, watching a world outside of a solitary window as it brushed by her, never truly interacting with her, never quite opening its arms to her. She had friends, Aeneas, Danae, Isolt, Hilde. All of them so different, they were soft, they were beautiful, they were frightening, inspiring, bewildering.

    And Po, an entity all his own, he was the most beautiful, wondrous, kind creature Elliana had ever known. And yet, surprisingly, she had always looked at him with those bright, bright blue eyes, and she did not want him in any other way than she would want someone to tell her a bedtime story or to venture to the ends of the earth with. No, Elliana’s heart lies somewhere with angels, guarded carefully but lightly, and she would have it no other way.

    Her inhale is short, as feathery as a butterfly wings and full of the fluttering of secrets, flying, trying to break themselves from the heavy chains of Reave’s blue gaze.

    She turns away, because Elliana is not brave, she is steadfast, weighted, and strange, but not brave. The sun sets itself against the glass blue of her own eyes and she blinks in response as the harshness of its beam illuminate the sharp corners of her face. Elliana is unaware of her eyes even being closed, so the garden is imprinted to the back of her eye lids.

    She doesn't notice him shifting as she whispers with her eyelids pressed together tight enough to sting. The only thing she notices is the way words burn on her lips, strange and too loud as the sound of nature around them lulls. It feels as if the world has silenced around them, frozen but for the hushed yet heavy sounds of their tangled breaths.

    She wonders in the ebbed noise if he might hear the frantic, wild thrum of her heart over the steady inhale and exhale of her fragile lungs.

    Part of her wonders if she says the words at all or if they are mere echoes of the broken, sad hum of that frozen organ hidden in the garden of her ribs.

    “The ocean breeze is brisk, Reave.”

    And a shiver shoots down her spine.






    @Reave elliana speaks


    elliana

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    « r »




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