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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


    embrace the deep and leave everything
    #1
    I won’t be back till sunset, her mother tells her. Stay here in the kelp forest, and don’t let anyone see you. Orieta nodded solemnly, giving the adult nereid no reason to doubt her. Orieta is not a troublesome child, she thinks gratefully. The girl occupies herself within the safety of the northern edges of the kelp forest, often playing with the seals that dwell on the rocky beaches of the Plains, or with the dolphins that live on the edges of Stratos. Her existence causes little change to Moira’s way of life, which makes her especially fond of the black-haired filly.

    Orieta’s coloring had surprised her mother: a black as dark as the deepest oceanic trench. Her gold and violet markings were just like Moira’s though, as was her marine nature. There was so little of her father in her (and so faint a memory of him in Moira’s mind, oft addled by the use of her song), that Moira had told the girl that she has no father at all, and that it was the Sea and Moira’s desire for a child that had resulted in Orieta’s existence.

    That story is one of the girl’s favorites, and one that she has requested much elaborated on in the months since Orieta’s hatching. There is so much of the ocean in the filly, from the shape of her body to the pearls twined through her mane, that Orieta has never been given a reason to doubt the truth of her mother’s story. Unlike many of her mother’s stories, that one was always believable. Her mother had told her once that the kelp forest stretched almost the entire length of the shoreline of the Plains and the Beach. Apparently the southern kelp was halfway between dead and alive? Orieta had been frightened by that particular story and asked her mother to stop telling it before she’d gotten to the end.

    After her mother leaves, Orieta does spend some time looking for the pod of dolphins that she’d raced with the night before. But they have moved on in pursuit of fish, and the black filly turns and swims back east, toward the shore. She’s no interest at all in stepping on land. It is the source of the crisp water that she means to find today. It is the current from the north, and after floating nearly to the surface to be sure that her mother is far away, Moira then drops to the sea floor and begins her pursuit.

    The fresh water grows thicker and colder as she swims north, chilling the summer sea. The water that moves through her gills slowly transitions from salt water to brackish. When the shoreline begins to converge, she pauses, uncertain.

    Floating just above the sediment, the young nereid-like creature ponders her choices. Swim farther upstream? Or keep to the brackish shore and see what she might find?

    @Squirt
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    #2
    Fazia did not inherit either of her parent’s magnificent fin shapes (yet) but she was a Baltian through and through. She did not need aid in cutting through the waters and only very occasionally allowed herself to admit that fins would make the endeavour a little easier. But she enjoyed her amphibious lifestyle - born to Baltians but in such a strange world and time that the land is now a part of her too.

    She’s become fond of the in-between places she’s discovered in Beqanna. The pockets of trees in the forest that are bright with autumn even when it is spring, the shorelines - and the part where the fresh riverwater mingles with that of the sea. Her inheritance lies in that vast ocean, and she’s fond of dreaming up all the wonderful and ridiculous things that could be found out there, past the horizon (an inbetween place she only wishes she could visit - to touch the spot where the sea and the sky brush against one another).

    But the sea holds too much, sometimes and she needs to turn away from it all. There is too much memory and too much pain, try as her parents might to hide it. So she sets her silver-slitted eyes on smaller things, things that are easier to digest. Rivers and lakes and meadows and forests - all of which have easily defined borders, and can be explored (she theorizes) completely.

    Today she is swimming in that in-between place of brackish water, her body more or less just floating - adrift just as her mind is, until she catches another shape. There isn’t much living here - many creatures adapting to just either salt or fresh water - and she moves to investigate. It’s a girl just about her age, familiar in a hazy sort of way. A Baltian, perhaps? There are still many she hasn’t met, she knows, but there's something a little off about this one.

    Fazia angles downward, churning the water with her translucent legs and stirring up sediment as she approaches. There’s enough light here that she isn’t invisible among the shadows, and she casts a soft pink-purple glow. “Are you a Baltian?”

    The curious words aren’t quite a greeting, but they’re the closest thing she’s going to give as she tilts her head - scanning what she can see of the other girl.

    --

    @Orieta
    I left it vague what age they are since it took me 500 years to reply but figured we could jump this to more current?
    Reply
    #3
    She rises higher, swimming upward until her head and neck break the surface of the smooth bay. The water laps at her scaled shoulders. and the sun overhead is bright and warm. The air smells fresh and salty - not so different from the sea - and teases at the waterlogged weight of her dark mane. Nothing moves on the shore but a few long-legged birds, and Orieta watches the scurry about at the edge of the waves.

    When she grows tired of their incessant back-and-forth, she sinks back beneath the water. Perhaps it's time to swim farther up the river, to see if there is anything more interesting to watch.

    As she turns to dive deeper, something bright catches her attention. At first glance, she thinks perhaps one of the luminescent sea jellies is drifting toward her, but as she moves closer and the glowing form takes shape in the darker water, Orieta realizes she has been mistaken. The soft purple-pink glow is from an aquatic creature, but not the type she had been expecting. Instead, a creature that looks remarkably like Orieta herself asks: 'Are you a Baltian?'

    Orieta tilts her head in a perfect mirror of Fazia's, the brows beneath her gold and purple markings wrinkled in confusion.

    "I'm from Baltia. Sort of. The edge of it, anyway. But I'm a nereid." There's a brief pause, and a curious inspection of the four long limbs. "What are you?" Perhaps her fahter had been one of the glowing jellyfish, she muses, and that is why she has too many legs.

    @Fazia
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