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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


    [open]  where the moon had turned
    #1
    Cressida

    The world has allowed her to keep to herself this last year. Herself and her brother. She has withdrawn, gladly, to contemplate the moon apart from herself. To watch as it cuts its trajectory across the sky and feel a longing so deep, so vast that there are some nights that she wonders if she would drown in it. She sleeps during the day—finding places where the sun cannot reach her—and she comes out when the sun has dipped below the horizon, when the world has cooled and only milky light is there to greet her.

    She emerges from her cocoon of darkness and feels the ache build in her throat.

    Tips her head back and watches herself alight in the night sky.

    Feels that divorce like a physical amputation and wonders how her brother can stand it. How he can know that he is separated from that which he is and not feel himself tear apart at the seams in agony.

    She cannot bring herself to ask him. Perhaps cannot stand the idea of him bearing such pain. Perhaps cannot stand the idea that she is alone in it. Either way, she withdraws, even from him—if ever so slight. She withdraws and walks alone in the evening, her heart a heavy thing in her chest.

    As she walks, her body as silver as the moon above, she slips into her other form. The deer is mature now, as is she, but still slight, and her delicate steps barely disturb the grass as she makes her way through the meadow, across a slender portion of the river before stepping into the forest that calls for her.

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    #2
    you used to tell me we'd turn into something
    oh, you said life was much better than this
    It is not often that a dream-creature bursts forth out of his dreams; and it is not often that said dream-creature experiences a reality he cannot control.

    Tonight, Lannister is tired of the darkness. He sleeps in his dream world, head curled over his legs in the form of a lion. He rests fitfully, finding a brief reprieve from the constant anger he feels being trapped in a reality founded on nothing. A tingling burbles gently in his chest. It starts as a soft humming, the sweet plucking of a harp. The orchestra doesn’t join in all at once, no—a flute adds the tiniest push of a pressure, then a cello—and then every brass instrument strikes up into a crescendo—

    Lannister’s chest feels as if it is on fire, and when he awakes, he does so violently.

    A gasp, raucous and paired coolly with a thick layer of sweat on his neck, fills the air around him. The stallion lurches forward, unsteady on hooves he expected to be a lion’s paws.

    “Fuck,” he whispers, closing blurry and terrified eyes. “I can’t do the dark right now,” he murmurs to himself, then opens his eyes and focuses on changing the moon into the sun.

    Nothing happens. He focuses again. He finds the same result. A prickling sensation builds between his shoulders. Lan recalls the other dream-weaver he met, the girl who asked about his nightmares. He wonders if he has stumbled upon another, if he is in a nightmare he cannot control. The stuttering heart in his chest pounds.

    “Hello!” he croaks, spinning in circles. Lannister presses into the darkness searching for someone—something—to explain what he is experiencing. When he spots Cressida as a lovely doe, he approaches without hesitation:

    “Are we in your dream?” he parrots the question Iridian once spoke to him, anxiety coloring his voice.

    lannister


    @cressida
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    #3
    Cressida

    She is not often approached at night. Perhaps it is because she runs away whenever she hears someone approach. Perhaps it is because she chooses the paths that are traveled infrequently. Whatever it is, she startles when she hears his voice crackling through the distance, her slender head whipping to the side and then up, her doe eyes wide. Her legs move beneath her with nervous energy and she fights against the urge to leap into the night, to let him take chase or watch as she bounds away.

    But there is something about the anxiety in his voice that stills her.

    She frowns and considers him, dragging down the moonlight to illuminate the space between them more, so that she might see better. So that she might feel the comforting weight of it as it rests upon her spine.

    “I do not believe so,” she finally answers in her breathy voice. She shifts back into her normal body, although it is becoming increasingly difficult to think of it as her default. When the dust settles, she is herself again, silver wings folded over her back, crooked horn curving up in the air. “If it was my dream, I would not still be trapped down here,” she confesses, because it is always easier to say such truths during the dark.

    But she has not forgotten the anxiety in his voice, and it’s enough to soften her. She takes a step in his direction, her eyes darkening with worry. “Are you okay?” She sends a ripple of moonlight his way, a silvery light that would feel cool to the touch. “You look worried.”



    @lannister
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    #4
    you used to tell me we'd turn into something
    oh, you said life was much better than this
    Her softness begins to still the pained beating of Lannister’s heart. He watches Cressida with the worry she mentioned wrinkling his eyes. It’s the gentle splash of moonlight that finally urges words from his mouth: “Did you do that?” It’s not an answer to her question, not even an attempt to soothe the quiet ache of realization creeping up his spine.

    It was easy to strangle others’ powers in the dream world once his new magic began to settle. When Lannister didn’t want his work interrupted, he shut their minds from their power, gently making them forget what gifts they possess. Now, as he tries to imagine golden tendrils reaching out to Cressida, to sense what it is she can do, he feels absolutely nothing. The hollowness of his imagination echoes and bounces back. He takes a nervous step back.

    “I’m okay,” Lannister finally answers, though it is barely a whisper, an indication he is anything but okay. He hadn’t been okay since his power settled in, since the last time he saw Elio, since years ago when he realized he was a prisoner. And this—this magic manifested by his anger—it was all the culmination of something ugly, something dark, some monstrous creature Lan sensed he was destined to become.

    “Where are we?” he finally asks, closing his eyes against the eventual confirmation.

    lannister


    @cressida
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    #5
    Cressida

    She almost doesn’t know what he means when he asks her. What he could possibly be trying to find out if she did. When she realizes that he was referring to the moonlight, she just smiles. It’s difficult to remember that such things are conscious acts—that she chooses to send forth the light toward him and then recoil it back into her chest. It was difficult to remember that not everyone lived in the world that she did where the moonlight was as simple as one’s own touch, as easy as breathing.

    But she doesn’t laugh or shrug off his question.

    She just nods.

    And then frowns when he steps back, his face drawn up in lines of his nerves. She takes a step forward, unable to stop herself, unable to stay away when everything that he is feeling is shown so clearly on his face. The air around them vibrates with it and she wonders if he knows that all of that is like an open wound, the edges so raw and so angry that she wonders if he is able to sleep or find reprieve.

    “We’re in the forest,” she says softly, her rich voice barely above a whisper.

    “Would you like to talk?”

    She angles her head, so finely shaped, the crooked horn set between large eyes.

    “My name is Cressida. I can start, if you’d like.”

    meet me where the falling stars live



    @lannister
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    #6
    you used to tell me we'd turn into something
    oh, you said life was much better than this
    The death of adoration is what eventually sealed Lannister’s fate. He was once a dreaming boy, a loving boy, a boy with such dedication and admiration for his father that Elio was all he could see—dream or reality. There was once a time that he would walk through fire for his father, up-end the entire universe and all of its realities to find him.

    But that bitterness of abandonment, that entrapment. He was shackled, pillars of magic keeping him tied to the endless, cloudy dreams of strangers.

    Perhaps he was always damned.

    A child as a gift. What kind of fate could Elio have truly wished for his son?

    Lannister is glad to be rid of it, even as the terror tires every muscle in his body. He blinks at Cressida, that quiet, fearful understanding melting into something molten—something that feels so real it burns his eyes.

    “The Forest,” Lannister parrots Cressida, still not fully capable of forming the kind of thoughts that foster conversation. He blinks at her again, then: “Cressida.” He peers intently now, rain cloud eyes searching for some answer the moon-weaver might be able to give him. Lan sucks in a breath, casting apprehensive eyes over their moonlit surroundings.

    “I’m Lannister,” he finally murmurs, returning the molten gaze back to Cressida. “Thank you, Cressida. I would . . . love to talk,” Lan adds, holding his eyes steadily to hers. “But I don’t know where to begin. Dreams, I guess. My father told me I was borne of a dream. I’ve been stuck there ever since.” He swallows.

    “You were born here, Cressida? In Beqanna?” That uncertainty colors his voice even as twin flames burn in his stare.

    lannister


    @cressida
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    #7
    Cressida

    She wishes she could understand what he was saying, what he was feeling, but whether her own experience are so limited or her mind so uncreative, she finds herself stuck in the in-between. She crinkles her brow in concentration, a corner of her mouth pulling down in the corner, and she watches him steadily—unwilling to glance away when there is perhaps something to be learned in the studying.

    “Hi, Lannister,” she greets him, knowing that such a thing is terribly too late in their interaction and yet offering it to him all the same. As his stormy eyes find her own of pale crushed gold, she remains still, mind spinning in a million directions as she tries to bring it under control. “A dream,” she echoes and cannot stop the part of her voice that is nearly wistful, floating on the edge of a thought.

    The frown returns though when he mentions that he’s been stuck and she wishes that she could fix that for him—wishes that she could make that better. “Are you stuck now?” she asks softly, taking a step toward him and wondering if it’s a mistake. If he will simply flee. “I was,” she confirms, but her gaze slips from him and toward the moon above them, the frown less pronounced but altogether more sad.

    “But I was never meant to be here. Not really.”

    meet me where the falling stars live



    @lannister
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