[open] I would hold on for all it's worth - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: Explore (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: The Common Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=72) +---- Forum: The Ruins (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=114) +---- Thread: [open] I would hold on for all it's worth (/showthread.php?tid=31625) |
I would hold on for all it's worth - Clopin - 04-29-2024 1/2 for an autoquest and also open for anyone to reply to! RE: I would hold on for all it's worth - Nizhonii - 05-04-2024 ‘Magic just happens’, the gray stallion had said, ‘You get used to it.’ I’d scoffed when I’d heard it, as dubious as I was terrified by the thought. Magic had limits, I'd thought. Everyone knew it had limits. It was bound by bloodlines, by rules. It was predictable. Yet as the months of my time here in Beqanna stretched on, I began to realize what he had meant. There were no rules for magic here. Some of the residents here lived in the actual sky, on solid floating clouds. Some had antlers as wide as I was long, and they glowed. Some could manipulate health, or summon fire, or turn into horrific monstrosities in the shadows. Magic just happens, and it has made me cautious. I try each morning to Drift back home, and avoid others when I can. The Ruins are a good place for that - something about the place tends to ward others off in the same eerie way the heart of the Forest does. Expecting silence as I make my way south along an animal trail, I am startled by the sound of impact nearby. Lifting my head quickly, I see the shape of a large tawny bird falling toward the ground. A cloud of glittering snow highlights its point of impact, and I pick my way carefully through the shallow snow on legs the same colorless shade. The bird - an eagle - is lying on its back. Its chest rises and falls, and the brown eyes are open and bright. Not dead then. “You’ve got to be the worst flyer I’ve ever seen,” I tell the eagle with a relieved smile, some of the tension falling from my shoulders. I dare not get closer, not with that wicked beak and the potential for savagery in injured animals, but there’s no scent of blood, no bones at odd angles. @Clopin RE: I would hold on for all it's worth - Clopin - 05-07-2024 @Nizhonii RE: I would hold on for all it's worth - Nizhonii - 05-08-2024 The bird answers me, and I gasp. If I had the ability to Drift, I surely would have in that moment, anything I could do to get as far away as possible from a bird that could talk. Despite all the other magic, I’d not yet run into any cursed. I had even begun to hope that they did not exist here in this new world. They are monsters, after all, terrible and bloodthirsty and…very bad flyers? That didn’t seem quite right. I know my expression has changed as quickly as my emotions: concerned, relieved, shocked, and now: wary intrigue. I have never been good at hiding what I am feeling; years of lessons at it had made me no better at the skill than I am at Drifting. I had always been more focused on other, more interesting things. Things like tales about curses, and how they were punishments for fiends incapable of speaking the truth, all of them also guilty of the most wicked deeds. I’d always imagined them as something like a bear or maybe even a grimclaw, and to see this (admittedly impressive but still just a) bird is not what I expected. Equally unexpected is the scolding for not being nice. Nice? None of the stories I’d heard mentioned that the cursed cared about niceties. In fact, I didn’t think they were supposed to talk at all. It is not cursed, I realize suddenly. This is more magic, a kind of magic I don’t know, one that gives animals the ability to speak and apparently to teleport. I had been rather rude, I realize. “You actually aren’t the worst teleporter I’ve ever seen,” I answer truthfully, knowing that I’m flushed with embarrassment on multiple levels. “But I am sorry. For being rude, I mean. I just thought you were a bird.” I’d thought he wouldn’t understand me, goes unsaid I watch as the bird struggles to rise, balancing awkwardly on its large bronze wings, and then glance quickly away, remembering that I’d just apologized for being rude and that staring was only going to compound that first impression. “A bad…what?” I ask when I look back, trying to understand as a frown obscures the bring of green around my amber eyes. He has more magic? The bright colors of the strangers I’ve come across had been odd enough, and it hasn’t ever occurred to me that a being might change themselves entirely. “Like you can change yourself into something else?” What does the bird become? A rock? A thought? Peraps nothing, currently, I realize. Just a bird. Is he as bad a shapeshifter as I am a Drifter? “I’m Nizhonii, by the way.” As soon as I say it, I realize that it’s no longer true. In a world where my home does not exist, it feels somehow wrong to mention it. “Nee. You can call me Nee.” @Clopin RE: I would hold on for all it's worth - Clopin - 05-21-2024 @Nizhonii RE: I would hold on for all it's worth - Nizhonii - 06-09-2024 Where I had come from, Magic was used for Seeing and Drifting. It followed rules, was summoned by precise rituals, and could do nothing at all like the wonders that I have witnessed here in Beqanna. Wrapping my head around the myriad of tricks and traits possessed by the natives and residents of this new world has been the most fascinating experience of my short life, and the large bronze eagle is the most recent captivator of my interest. My ears flick forward at the sound of the bird’s laugh, and then away at the suddenly silent woods around us. The real birds, reminded of an eagle’s presence, had fallen silent, leaving only the sound of leaves and grass rustling in the warm breeze as it passes through the Ruins. The screech of a cicada sounds eerily loudly in an elm to my right, the ‘all clear’ to the world around us, and my attention refocuses on the bright-eyed eagle that flaps onto a higher perch and the birdsong resumes. A horse, he replies, and I nod. I know that Magic is most often attached to horses in Beqanna, the way it had been to wolves and horses in my world. He can shift into a bird, he can Drift, his name is Clopin, and I’ve already started off on the wrong hoof by being rude. But he’s not really upset, his tone implies, and he said it was nice to meet me. Having not done anything especially nice and that I should correct that, what instead comes out is: “How bad are you really at Dr- at Teleporting?” Feeling the lack of tact even as I say it, I carry on quickly with: “ I mean, can you teach me? I can, no - I did, once. I think I could do it again, but…” Clopin can wear the shape of a bird or a horse, yet he is stuck in this shape. And he can Drift, yet he’d landed on a collision course. Magic just happens, Lautner had said, but perhaps it is not always happening to everyone all at once. @Clopin |