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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


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    Not All That is Lost is Gone[Valentine's Quest]
    #5
    The day begins like any other. Stalin greets the rising sun with a line of sweat already streaking down her young face. The rapid thud of her heartbeat echoes in her ears, and when she finally slows to a stop in the grey sand she can feel it pulsing through her narrow legs.

    Exercise makes a body strong. Stalin wants to be strong. The strongest.

    Her routine is as set as the granite of her homeland, and she knows these cliffs as well as she knows the length of her own dun nose. That is how she knows something is wrong, because there is something along the shore that does not belong.

    It shimmers, casting a soft light onto the sand that is already beginning to brighten with the dawn. This is not sunlight, Starlin knows. It is something else, something <i>other</i>. The dun mare goes closer (she is her mother’s daughter in so many ways), and finds that the light grows smaller the closer she gets.

    No, smaller isn’t the right word. It becomes denser, more compact.

    By the time she reaches it, the light is in the form of a equine, but it is so very bright that Starlin cannot look directly at it. as she has drawn closer, the constant crash of the waves on th shore have become quieter too, so that even as she feels the surf slide and retreat against her hooves it does not make a sound.

    She wonders for the space between heartbeats, if perhaps this is the ghost of Nerine’s cave-dweller, of the protector of Sylva, of the father of kelpies. But course it isn’t, her rational mind says, but oh by all the gods does she wish that it were.

    In the blink of an eye, it is.

    Nine words.

    That’s it, that’s all he’d ever given her.

    Nine words and her very existence.

    Her father looks exactly like she remembers him. Tall, strong, with eyes as stormy grey as her own. Or, at least he looks like she thinks she remembers him. The details are blurry still, even with him standing directly in front of. For a moment he has a sloping profile like Lochwood’s and the next he is as roman-nosed as a grecian statue. This does not disturb Starlin; it only adds to the dream-like sense of this entire experience.

    Stillwater says nothing. His lips do not move, the firm line of his mouth never falters. He turns his head a bit, but that might just be to get the rising sun out of his eyes.

    <b>”Hi Daddy,”</b> Starlin says, and while she’s surprised at the childish source of her voice, she is not embaressed.

    The dark figure turns back toward her, and his head tilts as though he is not quite sure she has spoken.

    <b>”It’s me, Starlin.”</b> As soon as she says it, she wonders if he even knows who she is. They’d met that single time and he’d known her immediately, the same way she’d known him. And while Starlin is no longer a gawky child, she is unmistakable. A darker mirror of her mother, free of the golden bangles, with sea-salt crusted permanently in her dark mane. Of course he knows her.

    <b>”You left us.”</b> There’s no accusation in the words, no blame. She does not know what life with a father would have been like, ands has never been anything less than happy even without one.

    <b>”Mother cried.”</b> Short snippets of voice, none of them having any more effect on the dark figure than the last. At that one, he does react, a shifting of weight, a tensing of muscle that her warrior’s eyes recognize. But that is all.

    <b>”I wanted…I wanted to ask...”</b> She struggles to find the words. How can she say it? The dun mare takes in a breath to exhale with the words and then…

    He’s gone.

    The sound of waves replaces the ghostly image of her father, and Starlin lets out a long sigh.

    There aren’t simple words for the way she feels: disappointed yet unsurprised. Underwhelmed and simultaneously frustrated. Another sigh, a shake of her head at the folly of magics she has never understood - will never understand - and the piebald turns to trot down the beach, her morning exercises delayed but not forgotten.
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    Messages In This Thread
    Not All That is Lost is Gone[Valentine's Quest] - by The Erotes - 02-01-2018, 11:02 AM
    RE: Not All That is Lost is Gone[Valentine's Quest] - by Starlin - 02-11-2018, 03:13 PM



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