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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


    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us; any
    #1
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
     With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
     And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    It’s a strange thing in life, to walk as a man reborn.
    He doesn’t know this, not precisely. He knows there are other memories, things that sit beneath the surface, like the river of Hades (a hundred dying souls, a hundred heartbreaks crying out his name). He doesn’t know what these are, precisely, they are feelings more than specific events.
    (For example, he knows there is something wrong and terrible about the way his eyes glow orange, like jack-o-lanterns. He doesn’t know he once tore them out for a mother who hated him.)
    He doesn’t know the exact nature of how he came to be (again), only that he woke on the same shores he might have died on, coughing up seawater. His voice is still hoarse from it a year later, like he spent decades drinking it. Maybe he did.
    He doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know. He senses there is a lot he doesn’t want to know.
     
    The meadow has a hint of familiarity, and he thinks he might have once lived here.
    He doesn’t look old, the sleek black stallion who crosses the land. In his rebirth, a new body was made. Gone are the gray hairs, the swayed back, and the neck that so many traced in fleeting affairs. He is a clock run backward, the same basic architecture (the bones didn’t change – well, they ache less, now) but a different story. Maybe. He hopes.
    He doesn’t know what he looks for, as he wanders. His heart (it is the same heart, the way the bones are the same. It, too, aches less) keeps him here. Looking for something, or maybe just for company, another fleeting touch.
     


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
     I never saw a brute I hated so;
     He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #2
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    It is his solitude that draws her to him. And she, unable to resist the call, moves through the dew touched grasses to join him. She is not driven by a need to welcome or comfort him from loneliness of the crest of a new day. Saedís desires nothing of his life, his story, of him. In her youthful ignorance she only craves his solitude and silence. 

    She wonders if he is of the forests and wind too. 

    Her shoulder moves to bump against him as she joins him. The gesture is not violent. It’s nothing more than a welcome between two horses made only for the silence and the sharp pull of the wind on their tangled manes. She half-smiles for him, her eyes too caught up in the colors of the dawn to pay any real attention to the black stallion with the glowing eyes. Too dreamy, too wistful, too wild, too sad: she is too much of everything to be anything worth while at all. Yet she tries, too young to know better. 

    “Do you ever wonder what it would be like if there wasn’t anyone else?” She asks in a whisper with a camaraderie she has no right to feel (something dark creeps along her, so out of place with the innocence when she speaks.). Slowly she turns to him, all shivering flesh and wild eyes, finally seeing him. Her eyes widen and her smile brightens (all youthful boldness). Saedís thinks he is surely of the wind and the chaos it brings-- or so she fiercely hopes. 

    Suddenly she realizes she has ruined the thing she wanted to steal him from and turns back to the dawn. “I’m Saedís.”
     She offers in some half-apology, only regretting that she has ruined the silence she sometimes craves. 

    Perhaps it’s not silence she needs-- not now. 



    SAEDÌS




    Reply
    #3
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    She comes, quiet, and it’s by the touch of her shoulder to his that he first knows her. He isn’t sure, exactly, how long it’s been since he was last touched, only that in the fleeting moment of contact something in him stirs and cries out, a slumbering desperation, and a shiver crosses over his body.
    She’s too familiar, and a part of him – and old part – wants to want her of this. There are desperate creatures out there, ones who will find a sincerity in her fleeting touches and sweet tone, ones who will make too much of it and put her on a pedestal for it. He was such a creature, once. Perhaps he still is. He doesn’t entirely know what kind of creature he is now.
    A lonely one, for sure. And maybe that’s it.

    She asks a question, philosophical, one he isn’t sure how to answer.
    “Sometimes it feels that way and I don’t have to wonder,” he says, “but mostly, I think it’d just be lonely.”
    It’s why he’s here, after all – loneliness. Because maybe, this place was once home. And was he lonely, there? Perhaps. Loneliness feels familiar, a piece of well-worn clothing slipped on.
    “I’m Garbage,” he says. It’s a terrible name, given by a hateful mother he no longer recalls.
    “It’s nice to meet you,” he says, “do you live in the meadow?”



    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #4
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    She has not contemplated how he might react to her touch. It is an age-old greeting between horses. Some have forgotten it, it is so old. Some have thrown it away, discarding it in favor of less genuine gestures. Words have taken the place of touch. Yet Saedís does not let it slip away. She loves words, loves forming them from her tongue, feeling them shaped by her lips. But more than that, even, she loves the feel of skin against hers, warm and familiar, smooth and soft.

    Perhaps in that – they are not so different.

    But Saedís does not question his shiver. Rather, she meets those too-bright eyes. My little dreamer mare is forever filled with a shimmering light, radiating it from her very smile, her bright, warm eyes. Saedís learns his face before closing her eyes against it. In this new darkness, she takes a deep breath, embracing and memorizing Garbage´s scent as it meets her nostrils.

    ”It scares me” she admits, ”the thought of being all alone in the world”

    ”Garbage?” She echoes then with a soft smile, tilting her head to the side so that her forelock slips before her face. But Saedís is too full of whimsical dreams to think of names. Instead she allows herself to be lost in his eyes. ”What happened to your eyes?”

    He holds the butterfly that is Saedís, but she is willingly captivated. Something about him brings out a ripple of unbridled curiosity through her, she wants to know if he too – calls this meadow home.

    ”I suppose you could say I live here. But it is not my home” she answers his question, and assumes he will understand what she means. She has no real desire to dredge up her past. Not here, not now – when the past is irrelevant as they, two young horses, merely bask in the crisp, spring morning, thinking of the complexity of names, the dread of solitude, and the infinite possibility of a stranger.

    ”Are you from here?”



    SAEDÌS


    Reply
    #5
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    In another life, before he stepped into the ocean, he might have warned her.
    I am too old, he might have said, I am too wanting.
    But he isn’t old, now – not in body, which is in its prime, all slick black with no gray. She doesn’t know of the other life he lived.
    She’s close, still, and he can catch her scent. It’s sweet, earthy, and he savors it. She compels him, with her boldness, her dreamer’s gaze.
    “Me too,” he says. Loneliness is a terrible creature, and for all his familiarity with it, it never gets better. It’s why such shivers crossed his body when she brushed past. It’s why his mind reels at the scent of her.

    She inquires about his eyes. He doesn’t have the real story to tell her – the real story is terrible, anyway – but he has something. A notion.
    “I got them from my father,” he says, and at that word -
    father - his voice chokes for a moment. He doesn’t know his father. They never met, in this life, or the last. In this life, he doesn’t even know his father’s name.
    (Covet. An awful king who killed the man his mother most loved.)
    He fights the urge to close those same eyes, to hide the orange hue. They are a mark, a scarlet letter proclaiming his heritage.

    “Mostly,” he says, “I live here as much as anywhere else. I was never one for kingdoms.”
    What worth is he to kingdoms, anyway? He has no powers, besides a penchant for not dying when he should, he has no mind for diplomacy and no spirit for fighting. He is better as a nomad. As a nothing.



    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #6
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    If she must place him in myth, she thinks, then let him be that sad, savage king whose long hunger spared Scheherazade´s life. Or let him be Lancelot, twisting into himself in dark places, his mouth hot and his hands cold.

    Were Garbage a creature of slathering jaws and wolf-sharp fangs; perhaps he wouldn´t be talking to Saedís at all. She wishes she could help him in some way; in her dreamer´s heart and sky-bright eyes there is no room for the darkness that lurks so comfortably inside of Garbage. She is of innocence and dreams and a thousand fickle things made of sunshine and the brightest of lights.

    ”I am sorry” Winter´s sorrow embraces the whisper of her voice; makes lovely the words that are otherwise laced with defeat. She can sense that the question pains him somehow, as if some old scar she has unwillingly and unknowingly ripped fresh. She can hardly bear to meet his gaze again, not when she feels so naked within it.

    ”Please forgive my bluntness.” She forces herself to meet his gaze then, and the ocean-depths of her eyes shine with torment above her struggling smile – for it is in her nature to never want to cause pain or hurt in another. But she mustn´t worry so – for he has already moved past the subject.

    She wonders, as his mind travels where she cannot follow, who or what it rests on. And it is concern, not apprehension, that alights her brow and sighs along the gentleness of her features; a wisdom beyond her years that seldom surfaces, and her childishness is suddenly sober. But is it your duty, little dreamer, to heal all those who are broken? How she yearns to! But it is not her business the ghosts (or ghost?) that haunts him, and she turns from his gaze again.

    The subject of kingdoms a less complicated one, and though Saedís knows little of such things (and she too – would be unfit of kingdom life, for she holds no other power than the innocence of her heart)  – she guesses that it is a much more harmless subject and so she simply asks;

    ”Will you tell me of this place, then? I know nothing of her story, or how things work around here”


    SAEDÌS


    Reply
    #7
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    He is not dangerous in the way that most things are. He was dangerous in that way, once, but that was a very long time ago and that creature is long gone.
    No, here it is his desperation that makes him dangerous, the way he is weak and wanting, the way he does not know how to hold back, how to say
    no when he knows he should. It is a different kind of danger, insidious and odd.
    He wants to touch her again, because she is kind to him, because she looks into his eyes and does not flinch from them. He almost does just that, his head moves, a little jerk of a motion, but then he stops himself. He doesn’t know her. She isn’t his to know.

    Your kindness is wasted on me, he wants to tell her. But he doesn’t. Selfish, he wants her to stay. Wants this moment in the meadow to last.

    Her question surprises him, and he laughs, a little, a rusty sound in his throat. He isn’t used to laughing.
    “Well,” he says, smiling, “I’m no historian, and Beqanna herself has changed a lot. I don’t know much of the new kingdoms, but years back, there were other kingdoms. Alignments, of good and evil, though no one much aligned to such starkness. Kingdoms of solely men and solely women, as well. But then there was a reckoning, and many lost their magic, for awhile – and new kingdoms came. Some of those new kingdoms fell, but most have survived.”
    He pauses, considers.
    “The meadow, though, has mostly stayed the same. Home to nomads and others who don’t want the protection and structure of a kingdom.”
    He is close to her. Her eyes shine in a devastating way. He doesn’t notice this. He
    doesn’t.
    “What about you?” he asks, “were you born here? Or did you come from far away?”


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #8
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    It had been far too long since Saedís had met someone as intriguing as him, and she was drawn to it as rain is drawn to the rivers. If his words was not enough to provoke her doll’s smile, his laughter most certainly was. How fairytale his gaze is and how queen-like she feels in his manor! While their proximity admittedly has brought color to her face, she dismisses it as though he has just been caught off balance, and nothing more. She answers him shyly, offering the soprano of her voice as harmony for his baritone, dancing a little in the energy he emits.

    ”You do strike me as the nomad-type” she sings, and she cannot hide her liking of it, ”If nomads were to stay rooted in a place, I imagine this would be it.” It is playful but not insulting, the singsong of her child’s tone. She laughs lightly, but the sound is pure and devoid of mockery, as are her words that follow soon after. “I came from the ocean…”  A pause, and her gaze shifts from him, tracing the path that had brought her here.  ”I had a home once, but I cannot seem to remember it. I suppose you could say this place found me in a way – and now I am not really sure what to do with myself.” His gaze has caught her off guard and she feels vulnerable so near him; her confidence is unsteady as a butterfly in the wind, and she wonders where he will take her.


    SAEDÌS


    Reply
    #9
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    She is brightness and heaven’s light and he fears it as much as he reveres it, because he was reborn but not remade, the same mechanisms of his heart malfunction. It’s an old story and one he’s lived a hundred times before but he doesn’t remember those except in a distant sort of ache, the longing for a home that’s no longer home.
    She laughs, which is worse – which is better – and tells her story.
    I came from the ocean, she says, and a memory crosses his mind, a lightning strike of recollection. A gulp of water in the lungs. Following a girl down, down, down, and then nothing. Blackness.

    But he’d woken on the beach, had he not? Woken there with a wet coat and salt-crusted mane and no memory of what had transpired.
    He laughs, again, this time in a sort of disbelief. Her story mirrors his, though he doubts the circumstances are much the same.
    “I know the feeling,” he says, then confesses, “I woke up on the beach myself. No idea who or what I was. Things have come back, since, but not…not everything.”
    It’s too much, what he tells her, even though there’s handfuls of secrets beneath that, secrets like
    I think I might have died and I think I’ve done terrible things and I don’t entirely know who I am.

    And --
    the way I want to look at you frightens me.

    “Well,” he says, the beginning of a sentence he shouldn’t finish, “I could show you my favorite part of the meadow.”
    Until he says that, he didn’t realize he had a favorite part, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth he realizes it’s true. There’s a place not far from here, full of wildflowers, close to the river. And why is it his favorite? He doesn’t know. But it is. In that place, once, he thinks he might have been happy.



    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply
    #10
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    Where Garbage wanders in darkness; Saedís wears her innocence like protection from all things somber and complicated. She cannot remember when or why she left the Oceanside. Surely, dreamer, you had reason for staying alone? Was it because of him, or something else that you made no effort to save yourself, but fall into a slumber in which you were not quite dead or alive? But she did not know, and that was no lie.

    She longs to delve the secrets from his eyes, to pry open that labyrinthine mind of his and get lost down the dwindling paths of memories best left forgotten. She wonders if what she would find should she reach the end of that maze would rattle her.

    She had been so certain that laying her past in a forgotten grave was the only way to escape the cemetery. And it had been working, so far. Beqanna had promised her new riches, and day after day she grew sun-strong and star-bright, and the earth was alive again for her – oh! She had forgotten the smell of morning dew and the relief of an afternoon breeze; even the warmth of a companion next to her, speaking of trivialities, and passing the day. These were things that she had wanted back so desperately and so they had seemed to surface accordingly, at the expense of suppressing what she used to know.

    Some things she would never forget, and one of these was the ocean. Its wraith danced when the wind blew, and she knew it lay just beyond reach; she would find it, when the wings of her confidence had regrown. All the other things had become ethereal and dreamlike, things she only saw when she called them forward at her will.

    ”I miss it” she confesses to him; and her eyes glimmer bright-hot with a sudden longing ”The ocean, I mean.”

    She wonders if he has known it like she has, but suspects his memories of the ocean are of a far less affectionate nature.

    ”It’s the only thing that I know was real.

    Just like this moment, he, is real, she thinks as he offers to take her to his favorite place in the meadow, and the promise sends a shiver down her spine.

    ”Please do” she breathes, and there is longing in the silk-spun softness of her voice. She takes a step closer, gently pressing her pale-white mouth to the tar-black of his shoulder, motioning him to lead the way.

    There is something to be said for decisions.


    SAEDÌS


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