"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
The ocean pulls back from the old beach; it gathers miles offshore, curdling with thick white foam around the spires of an enormous obsidian crown. Sceptre in hand, the inky black creature breaks through the murky surface and continues to rise higher and higher until it is towering hundreds of feet above Beqanna. Its shadow casts the land below in total darkness; it is a sudden night without moon or stars.
There are cries of both fear and surprise that ripple across the entire continent. It stands above them a living eclipse, an ever-growing tidal wave drawn up around its legs like an old skirt. It hums a soft, melodic tune—an unholy siren singing to draw out the dead. The souls gather at its feet, no more than wisps of energy that slowly begin to take the shapes of their old flesh.
The demon is surprised to see some living creatures creeping across the damp sand from The Beach to join the souls of the dead, but no matter.
“Welcome back,” it whispers in a thousand different voices, some laughing—some crying, some screaming, others drowning—gurgling. It takes ages before it registers that the voices the creature is using are the voices from their past. Friends, enemies, lovers, family, and children all come together in a chorus so loud that it borders on deafening.
Maddening.
“Would you like to play a game?”
—
WELCOME TO THE 2026 HALLOWEEN QUEST!
Players may enter one of their dead characters to participate. This character could have died at any point in Beqanna’s history. There is no activity requirement. Old lurkers are welcome (and encouraged) to join in, should they decide to. New players have the option to participate as one of their lineless character’s dead parents to build backstory (for this quest only) or as the character itself.
There will be two grand prize winners (or three, depending on the amount of participants) with smaller prizes given out at the end to everyone for participation.
At the end of the quest, the two (or three) winners will be given the option to bring their character back from the dead with a trait OR to have them pass the trait on to one of their descendants. This can be reserved for a future descendant (foal stats). New players have the option to give the trait to their character or one of their character’s descendants (foal stats) in the future.
Defects/curses can happen in this quest, but they are only temporary and up to the player to determine how long they last (if a new player wins) or if an old player decides to revive their character. These won’t affect prizes and you will still receive them at the end of the quest. Prizes scale depending on what round you make it to. There will be four rounds in total and then a finale for the three winners.
Replies to this post must be AT LEAST 450 words to enter.
The ocean kept no time, an hourglass suspended without a trail of sand to see, and yet the once-King made an attempt to count the current anyway.
(A breath, his chest rose to greet the phantom action, or was it so? He remembered the way it felt to burn with warmth so explicitly eruptive.)
Eyes like sea glass, hollow now, lightless, though the spirit beneath them was no more diminished than the spark of life they once held. He’d found little and less reason for contentment with his time on the Beach, though he should have taken solace there. And yet the crushing push of the ocean grabbed at him with greedy hands, frothing and churning until he could no longer keep the peace of his sentient metronome.
What is it? his thoughts ask him, a spectral voice fumbling its way along the vocal chords of a beast who once lit up the Chamber and all of its deepening shadows. Tendrils of song grow, they growl, screaming until they finally become memory bidden voices of the lonely equine that frittered about the meadows. Keening chants that transform into bodies that follow him into the dense copse of pines, the call of ravens praising them is like a prayer that leaves them both unclean and perfect. Trilling mimics forging the melodic hum of a whispered love, her body bruised and broken, and somehow perceptively unsurpassed. In this lifetime and the next.
Voices that urge him forth until they writhe like war rhythms recalling each blessed scar that traced carefully amid his taut skin, and breached his stalwart muscle.
Killdare blinked his eyes open.
Salt water clouded his sight, and for a moment, he only knew its sting. Then he realized the ocean had swallowed him whole.
The waves spurned his measure, crashing before curling beneath his growing bay mass to spin him unlawfully around the tides he once numbered. And though the sea seemed to recant all sensibility, Killdare found that it fared poorly against the wailing song that surpassed its tidal roar. A rising pitch that formed itself into eloquent screams, furious cries, and desperate sobs.
He spent the madness it inflicted fighting for the surface, striking for leverage against a shore that he was forcefully met with - spat up from the waves as a gurgling vessel that sputtered and coughed against each sore breath that filled his chest.
Killdare met the lightless night with a defiant stare, pale eyes glaring towards a colossal beast that overpowered the skies with its mass and sent the cosmos into hiding. Had they abandoned hope so freely?
Welcome back it speaks, the voices of many, of friends, of lovers, of enemies collaged into a singular, unsettling tone of danger. Of promise, and of pitfall.
The bay watches it carefully, taking in the sheer size, and the volume of its dread laced dimensions, until he sets his sooty jaw and lifts his chin against it.
Would you like to play a game?
Outrage sets his nerves aflame. If only the feeling would take hold and ignite as it once had long ago, leaving trails of molten rock in his wake and the twinge of sulfur against the pine needles he had been honored to call his kingdom. His home.
A heavy hoof is struck against the ground; a solid snort declares his opposition to the calamity that towers against the tides. Killdare stands firm as he accepts the proposition, “I will.”
"Long ago in a kingdom by the sea...they had loved with a love that was more than a love..."
They had a kingdom, once. They had built their palace walls out of lust and placed them on a foundation made of sin. Wrong. They had been so, so wrong and yet? They had fallen into one another anyways. 'Love is greater than sin' they reasoned when their mouths were on each other's skin. But a foundation of sin was as unstable as a foundation of sand, and their grand palace was doomed from the very start.
The sea had always called to him. His fondest memories and deepest tragedies were coated in a fine layer of salt. He had been raised here, lived here, loved here, and died here. While the manner of his death had not been easy, the afterlife had. Day in and day out his body ebbed with the tides. More often than not it lulled him to sleep and sent him tumbling into dreams of an orange-eyed man and his sickly sweet words.
Today was different. Today, the tides felt unstable, as if something below the sand was longing to break free. Though he could no longer see above the frothy water, a life lived by the sea told him that the skies were likely angry as well. They had an intimate relationship, the sea and the sky. Lovers always, but their arguments were the thing of legends.
He watched the moment his skeleton began to reform, sure now that this was no simple storm but the work of magic. His manner of death had left little and less of his earthly body, but whatever foul magic was afoot tonight was putting him back together. A femur here, a rib bone there. On and on and on the building went until finally, he could see through the eye sockets of his own skull again. Then, and only then, did his heart fill with something more than vague curiosity. For the first time in a long time (if ever!) it filled with hope.
Suddenly, he felt a pull. It pulled on his newly made heart, as if it were caught on a fisherman's hook. It begged him to surface, or so it seemed to him. Like a lover calling to him it begged, and he had always been such a fool for love. With a groan of effort he pushed off of the bottom, his eyes aimed for the sky above him. It did not take long, and fool that he was he did not find that suspicious. It was only when his head broke through the surf that he heard the voices. They assaulted his newly reformed ears, whispers and screams and lusty moans all. The sound was anywhere and everywhere all at once, rattling him straight to his core. But he didn't come this far to only come so far. He was a master at overlooking danger in the name of love.
He heard the words before he saw the creature. It was only visible by the white caps crashing against the base of it, and even then he could not see a face. "Do you want to play a game?" the thing of many voices asked. There was already another stallion answering, giving Oceanus a moment to mull the question over. He wasn't fond of games, preferring to follow his heart straight to ruin and damnation. But maybe he could try something new. Death hadn't dragged him out of the ocean depths for no reason, or so he thought. And so he nodded his head before a simple "Yes." fell from his black lips.
At first there was nothing.
…and then?
The roar of angry waves, the hiss of water on the shore.
Tiithe had been a pile of bones on the sand, flesh and muscle having rotted away with time and the plucking of carrion many years ago. Though she felt strange, an itching, the visceral sounds of that same flesh being meld back onto her partially eroded ivory frame. Black hair pushing through the new skin made her skin itch and she felt like she was going mad as that itch combined with the pins and needles of feeling and pumping blood returning to her body. It hit her, the need for air. She gasped and wheezed as air shot into her newly resurrected lungs. Coughing violently as she expelled the sand that had been inhaled and fought to get a grip on her body.
She willed it to move, and it started with a twitch of her hind leg, then her heavy skull was able to lift from her sandy grave. Her newly formed eyes blinked, but there was no light to be seen. No moonlight reflected off the crashing waves, no glitter of starlight. Just a vast darkness. What was this? Memories began to flood back now of a silvery black fox…mother? Of pines and fire. Her name.
Why had her spirit been pulled here? Why had her body been remade? All these questions rattled through her brain until an eerie cacophony of voices sliced through thought and memory. Welcome back, it crooned, and her hollow eyes surveyed her surroundings now. The beach was slowly coming to life, bodies rising, old and new. From dust to flesh. She was finally able to heave herself off the ground and her inky black limbs shook as they adjusted to her weight and her balance returned. She swore under her breath, it was as if she were a newborn filly standing for the first time. She had once been reckless and strong, this weakness was unlike what she remembered of herself. But she shook the thought as she followed the direction the other bodies were turning to. It was so dark, so very dark, but she could see it now. A creature of such darkness, a spire-like crown, a scepter…so huge….rising from the depths to beckon her. What for? And soon it asks in it's thousands of voices, ”Would you like to play a game?
She stole herself, drawing herself up and straining against this weakened body as she stared fearlessly at the dark entity with a fire lighting within her long since dead eyes. Her voice rang out into the darkness with proud determination.
”If it’s a game you want, a game you shall get…your move? Or mine?, Tiithe spat with a sneering smile of pearly new teeth, her body getting more steady moment by moment as she stood her ground. The salty ocean breeze blowing her mane and tail around her like a white veil. Whatever game this thing wanted to play, she was willing if it had brought her back from the endless loop of the afterlife.
In so many ways, she had died the moment he had. Her twin. As though his vitality had seeped into her, sharing his life so she too could live. Then, it had been stolen, drawing everything from her until she had been little more than a wisp. A ghost pressing footprints in her wake, as though the world required proof she still existed.
She had always been foolish and weak, living for others rather than herself. One existence bleeding into another, until she no longer recognized that which tethered her to the land of the living. She couldn’t even say the moment she had stopped living, only that it had been inevitable, passing unnoticed just as her entire life had.
She never understood why her mother had chosen Rapture for a name, for she had only ever been a herald of grief and sorrow. She could count the moments of her life in tales of heartbreak and betrayal, each tear that fell only adding the the ocean of her past, dragging her under until she had no longer been able to find her way.
In the end, she hadn’t even recognized what she left behind. In the end, it had truly only been Rapture, finally freed of the burden life had shaped her into. It had been a kindness more than anything. After all, without a will to exist, what is left to keep the heart beating?
Kindness is such a fleeting thing. She would know that better than anyone. Even now, she is not meant to receive such a thing, because, as it turns out, life is not yet done with her. At first, she does not understand. There is only confusion, overshadowing the eternal sorrow wrapped around her very bones. As her vision clears, she gazes up, not daring to understand that which towers above her. She would rather exist in willful ignorance than wallow in the abyss of her sullied past.
But they whisper to her, clawing at memories she would rather stay buried, reminding her of the sordid life she had lived. It was his voice she recognized first. Longclaw. And despite the years, the thorns of grief still wrapped around her heart. Then, her parents, so disappointed in what she had become. In the many ways she had failed, never living up to their many aspirations. Levi’s voice wrapped around her, so warm at first before binding her in the chains of betrayal. She had always been a fool, but never more so than this. Because she had betrayed him not for love, but a naive dream she had known could never be even while she had dreamed it.
Her children were the one thing her existence had wrought she could never regret, but even they clamored. The whispers deafened her, dragging every secret into the light, drowning her in emotions she hadn’t been strong enough to manage, even in life.
She wept. A river of tears, washing her into the ocean she had left behind. She tumbled, the eddies and currents too powerful for her to find her way. She didn’t even try. She had never been strong enough, and even death could not erase that understanding.
The creature’s words were a life raft. Anyone else might have reached for it, but Rapture did not even try. Instead she simply stared at the figure towering above her, gaze blank and hollow, the memories of her past far too much for her to bear. She had always been a weak creature, a fact that was never more apparent than in that deathless moment, called forth by a creature as capricious as the concept of kindness.
i think i need a sunrise, i’m tired of a sunset --
Over a hundred years at rest, and still her soul feels tired.
When it hears the call, it does not immediately rouse. Like a child fighting the urge to wake, giving in to the longing to curl back into itself and return to deep slumber, her bones stay resting where they always have.
But the voice continues to call, and eventually the soul responds as if being tugged by a physical thread. It is still reluctant as it makes its way across the lonesome beach, every piece of itself fighting as it rebuilds. Bone by bone, piece by piece of a once broken heart, and eventually muscle and flesh until she is, she supposes, as she had been in life—unassuming, easily overlooked.
There is no relief when she revives; when her eyes blink away death and the world comes into focus, along with the pain. She had forgotten what it had felt like, when she had been asleep. She wonders if it had always felt like this, or if it only felt all-consuming because she had gone so long without it. For her, death had been a relief, a respite from a life that had mostly been covered by darkness. Though parts of her life had been beautiful, her life itself had not been. The threads of her tapestry were mostly dark with the briefest moments of light—Rancyd and Nisko, and their children—and when death had finally come for her, she had been ready.
Every stuttering beat of her heart feels like a thorn to her skin, every intake of breath like something sharp between her ribs. She cannot even tell if it is real, because though something beats in her chest she cannot be sure if it is actually a heart. Her body still felt cold, and though she breathed, the air felt like ash in her cobwebbed lungs.
The cacophony of voices almost sends her back.
Her body stops and her soul tries to continue forward, an invisible war between the two. The voices all run together until they start to unravel and she can hear them all individually, so clearly that when she hears Rancyd her heart, finally, flutters in a way that feels alive. But the rest of them are there, too; all the ones she had tried to love, lips she had clung to as if they were a lifeline when really they did not care if she sank. None of them had ever looked back at the mess they had made, as uncaring as a shore is to a shipwreck (you should not have crashed here if you did not want to drown, and she had accepted fault without argument).
She sees Him, shadowed and strange, hears his question hidden within the voices. No, her mind answers him, and so she cannot understand when her tongue, dry and gritty as sand, and her voice, hoarse and nothing at all like the soft melody it had once been, tells him, “Yes.”
The world of black he had been swallowed by a hundred years ago or so shook and rattled. A mind that had long been asleep, a soul sent to the abyss where it had belonged, quaked awake within the darkness. A mind covered in metaphorical dust and cobwebs groaned and crackled awake. As sentience returned to him, he swore he heard something. It begins soft and distant. A song? No. The noise grew and swirled in his consciousness. Voices. Cries and screams. They came back to him. Those he had tortured. The ones he loved and the ones he hated. Elite screaming at him that he was a monster. Frejya demanding retribution for the mother he deprived her of. His mother screeching about his shortcomings. His children crying out over his death.
What had ever happened to them? His children, the ones he loved so wholly. A cry from his child she had murdered out of spite. His princesses. He had only ever wanted to keep them safe. The sounds raked against his mind, gripping at a heart that no longer existed. He wanted to roar at them to stop. To leave him be. He paid the price with his life, was that not enough for them?
Welcome back. The voices suddenly say in unison. It comes to him like a sneer, a taunt. They crashed together, haunting and cold, and his soul shuddered against the noise.
He tried to make sense of the voice(s) when he realized he was feeling something. Feeling. Bones rattling together, gray green flesh stretching over the muscles and tendons piecing his skeleton back together. Broken, useless black wings rising from his back and dropping to his sides as he took shape. Once black eyes remained white and clouded as they opened to see the monstrous form that had risen from the sea. He inhaled. The cold salty air harsh within his nostrils and into his ancient lungs. The air caught in his throat, a hoarse cough rising from his chest as he gasped against the feeling.
The memories brought to the surface by those from his past were still clawing at his mind as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing and what he wasn’t seeing. Water raged around the dark form, no stars or moon to illuminate their surroundings or provide him a good view of who, or what had brought him back to this place. His muscles began to twitch under his renewed, murky skin, bracing against the churning waters surrounding him.
Would you like to play a game?
There must be a good reason this creature had drug his soul from whatever pit it had been drug into and pieced him back together like a cursed art project. He thinks for a moment, wondering what would happen if he said no. A raspy “Yes.” hissed from his throat. Kars had done many terrible things in his life; death should be no different.
It is a hell-hound’s voice that rouses her. It is, perhaps, the only voice that could.
A soul steps into a miserable body and the body blinks opens its eyes.
And when Anaemone turns those eyes toward the creature on the horizon, she understands that is not a thing alive, she is a thing reanimated. The last breath she had drawn as a living thing had been only water and, should she plumb the depths of this body’s memories, she might remember the saltburn in its lungs.
She understands, too, that she is not this body. It is a vessel she had lived in, once. (How many years ago now? She had never bothered to keep count, she couldn’t even guess.) It is a feathered thing that had so readily bled, the skin so delicate that oftentimes a blade of grass might draw blood. How she had resented it. Just as she resents it now, the way the eyes blur from decades of disuse when she tries to draw the creature into sharper focus.
It had been her mother’s voice that had roused her, slid her back into this body, but she understands that the voice had come from this creature’s mouth. It speaks again and she feels some slither of annoyance to have been summoned here, like this, for a game.
But there are others, too. Others who feel this same pull, some invisible thread tugging at the meat of their gut, coaxing. She hears them. Yes, they say, yes! She does not bother to look at them, the others, not that she could see them in any real detail anyway, the way the eyes keep sliding out of focus. Miserable things, they always had been, and she realizes that her annoyance is a result of being forced back into this body. This useless, useless thing.
The limbs work, she finds, if only barely. She feels a newborn, limbs coltish and unwieldy, as she takes a stumbling step forward onto the seabed. “I guess,” she murmurs. Because it appears as if she has precious little choice. She is not a deeply intelligent creature, Anaemone, she never has been. (She had, after all, drawn that last gasp of seawater into her lungs on purpose–not in an effort to end her own life, simply to see if she could). But she knows that denying this creature its plaything would likely offer no better outcome than whatever game it has planned.
This body’s life had been unremarkable, she remembers that much. It had not ruled kingdoms, it had not held any particular sway. She remembers that it had bled. And bled. And bled. It had bled so much sometimes that it seemed perhaps that was all it was good for. This is all to say that she cannot see any real reason for her to have been summoned here to play this game. This body is merely a thing that had lived, once.
The moss-covered ground is damp and spongy as small, black, pebble-like points suddenly push through. They rest a moment, the moss beginning to breathe and pulse slightly in an uncomfortable rhythm; its cadence frighteningly similar to your own heartbeat. In and out...in and out...
A moment later, the blackened pebbles sprout into stems, upward and upward to reveal the first image of blackened antlers. Bits of moss and dirt cling to the valleys of the cursed growths where they meet in crooked joints. The antlers give way now as the dark head appears; it pops out like a cork, saliva and mud oozing from between the incredibly dark lips. It pauses only a moment before the swirling blue emerges in the eyeless sockets, a dark energy fueled in lake-blue wisps. Then follows the image of a bony neck, an impossibly thin rib cage, and spindly legs with cracked, chipped hooves. You have just witnessed a cursed rebirth.
It does not take him long to understand how to move; the joints, knobby and thick, pull him towards the corded voice of the shadow-caster. The air is wet, moisture clinging heavily to the salt particles lining his dark nostrils. Undergrad does not know his purpose. He does not question why he is here; he just is. The blue swaths of light twist and twirl deep in their eyeless nests, anxiously...hungrily.
Undergrad drifts from his resting place without guidance but can feel the presence of others. There was something that had roused him from his peaceful grave, something reaching in to disturb him, offering nightmares and a painful hunger. Something more corrupt than his own existence, and it beckoned him until he found himself beneath an arched shadow, the warm sun blotted out, and within a small formation of ranks by others that Undergrad sensed were ancient beings, consumed in death like himself.
The giant speaks in a thousand voices, a thousand whispers, maddeningly. Undergrad feels the blue wisps tilt upward as he stares through his own antlers, his lips parting to reveal equally black teeth and gums, a small line of spit glistening at the edge of his mouth and beginning to dangle. Undergrad grins and grins and grins, black lips splitting and revealing each of his jagged, sharp teeth. His insanity begins to blossom again, and others would notice as well if they could rip their eyes from this unnamed deity. Undergrad, himself, can not remove his own attention if he tried. Something commands his entire being with sickeningly strong greed.
Other murmurs and hoof falls creep up around him, but the giant is a drowned god, and Undergrad feels powerless to command his own thoughts. A beautiful chaos consumes his fractured mind, and a new feeling of relief washes over him as he lets this being devour his will and his weakening grip on reality.
It’s been God knows how long since he’s paid attention to anything.
There have been far too many years of drifting along, incorporeal and indifferent, so it’s no surprise that he barely notices when the ocean begins to churn. Instead, he gazes along the same blurred landscape he’s been staring at since he died, wondering why his soul refuses to move on, despite the centuries that have passed since his body rotted to nothing but bone. His eyes fall to the sandy shore, wishing, yet again, that he could feel something beneath the feet that are not there.
He’s not even sure why he feels this maddening yearning to walk among the living once more, for he barely remembers anything from his time, let alone anyone that mattered back then. Even if he could remember, he couldn’t see how any would even still be alive to keep him tethered to this earth. Magic was still fairly new, or at least much harder to come by than it is now, and it’s very possible that immortality was an inconceivable idea at that point.
As he stands, trying to recall those he loved in the past, the darkness drapes itself across the scene, though he still does not fully comprehend his surroundings. No, rather, he is lost in his annoyance that the names and faces refuse to come through as clearly as the feelings that remain. How much longer must he continue this frustrating existence (if you can call it that)?
The screams of fear tickle at the edges of his awareness, but it still takes far too long to recognize the changes the beach is being subjected to. But finally, the sounds get to him, and he looks up at the dark creature that looms above him, that dominates the darkened sea and its roiling depths. Well, that’s certainly different. As intended, the demon’s haunting melody compels him to slink ever closer, though he believes to be drawn in by the impressive figure it cuts against the star-strewn sky.
This time, he easily notices the others that gather at the water’s edge, and finds himself awed as he watches their physical rebirths. How fascinating to see bones, stained and pitted with age, arranging themselves into their proper places as tendons, muscles, and skin spawn from nothingness to bind the skeletons into whole beings once more. A vague tingle works its way through his formless essence as he witnesses these intriguing acts of macabre magic, and before he can begin to think that it might be happening to him as well, he realizes that he can feel what seems like every grain of sand beneath his feet.
He looks down to see inky black legs, seemingly whole and pristine. Surprised, he twists slightly to see a similar pair of hind legs exactly where they should be. A soft rustle as he does this tells him that his matching wings will be there when he looks for the rest of his body, and sure enough, they lay neatly against the slicked out, bright red coat that he knows so well.
But the discovery phase does not last long, as the myriad voices invade his mind, shouting so loudly that they cannot be ignored. The statement is innocent enough, but the voices are weighted with a variety of emotions that send twinges of guilt reverberating through his newly reborn body. He quirks his head as he goes back to looking at the dark creature, wondering what its intentions are.
And so he cannot help but assent when it poses its question.
