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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


    the edges are unfilled; quark
    #1

    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us



    This is the irony of it – sometimes, death feels alive.
    Certainly death feels like a living thing the way it creeps and crawls over her. She, who once sat at the end of the world while time stopped and the same few minutes repeated themselves, over and over again, all to the concerto of the langoliers coming, heralding the world’s end.
    Death slunk over her then, penetrated every part of her so that when finally time started up again and she tried to return to Beqanna, Beqanna spat her back out, spat her into this realm where the dead walked and the living could so rarely come.
    This land, too, seeps into her. She’s felt the changes, a low thrum of something in her bones, in her marrow. She can’t precisely articulate it, but she thinks of how trees will sometimes grow around inanimate objects, ensconce them in their cores, and she thinks it might be something like that.

    Death magic. Death something, anyway.
    Though it seems useless. She can’t do any strange magic tricks, can’t snap her fingers and make fire appear the way he so often did. She can’t leave the place.

    What she can do is this - sense things. And today she is looking out, her mind emptied, when an alarm bell goes off inside her. The thing that lives inside her is howling and scrabbling at its walls.
    For she senses something.
    A counterbalance, light to her dark. A power that is not magic but isn’t not-magic. Something mythical and strange and so unlike she powers she knows, so unlike his god-like magic and her own deathliness.
    Without thinking, she reaches out, imagines fingers stretching beyond the sky, back into Beqanna (though the Beqanna she pictures is long gone, long destroyed, she hasn’t been there in centuries).
    The fingers reach out. They reach out, and they touch.
    Come, she thinks, please, show me what you are.


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    #2

    Screaming like a siren, alive and burning brighter.
    Darkness has been seeping into my dreams. It started as a flickering in the shadows, a shimmer at the edge of my awareness with no source, no name, no tangible connection to anything in the physical world. I have watched it grow, creeping slowly in and refusing to take shape. Now, I have never been one to fear the dark. I have danced with it far too often to let a little shadow send unease tingling down my spine, or to feel dread wrapping its icy fingers around my chest.

    Still, I have kept a wary eye on that shadow even as I watch over what children of mine will permit it, even as I welcome a new son into the small family I have gathered back around myself – or as he welcomes me into his. I have watched the darkness out of the corner of my eye, bonding with my grandchildren and helping Tycho sort through the complicated tangle of emotions that is not his native language. It lingers even in the brightest moments, and I wonder if it isn't just a part of Beqanna, twisting our lives and our stories into something dark and desperate, raining desolation down on the unsuspecting. It began shortly after our return, after all.

    Hmm. I will discuss it with Pazuzu in the morning, see what my new son-in-law makes of it. His gifts are different from mine, and perhaps he'll have some insight I do not. Either way, it would not hurt for another of our numbers to be aware of—a brush of gentle fingers along the back of my neck distracts me from my train of thought. Not a spirit, not exactly. I close my eyes, tracing the touch of those ghostly fingers as they linger on my shoulder for a moment, then beckon me to follow it beyond the veil that separates the living and the dead. Pleading, almost.

    Opening my eyes, I glance around the forest my family has taken to calling home. Ryss and Pazuzu and Tycho, Drow and Arzhur and Dara, all safe and sound in their respective sleeping places. The touch is not blood of my blood; no bond of love or friendship connects us, but there was need in that touch, and I have no reason to refuse.

    Settling my body down onto the ground, I nestle up against the trunk of an especially large oak tree to take advantage of the shelter it offers. I may not need this yellow and white splashed vessel right now, but there's no need for it to lie out and get covered in snow. Might as well be comfortable while I wander. I close my eyes and leave by body behind. Reaching out to that gentle touch, to the fingers stretched across the void, I take a stranger's hand and follow her into the dark.

    When the darkness fades from my sight, I find myself standing before the stranger who invited me here. It's hardly my first time walking among the dead, but it has been a while since the last time I walked the afterlife of Beqanna. Hmm, a couple of decades, if I remember right. Long enough to reunite with my dead lover and make our last twins, two more pieces of our shattered love to drag back all unwilling to the land of the living.

    It's fucking weird to be back.

    “The lady has requested my presence?” The words I speak are oddly formal, sitting strangely in the air between us. “What do you need of me?” I make no promise to give it, but I will at least hear her out. I watch her through mismatched eyes, blue and gold studying the strange woman as I wait for her answer.
    I am the fire.
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    #3

    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us



    She doesn’t know what to say.
    The woman – the being - appears, responding to her call. It isn’t a plea she’d expected to have answered – she’s used to screaming into the void. Used to living over the same handful of minutes, over and over again.
    This is different.
    This is her world, as much as anything had even been hers (for hadn’t that always been Gail’s lot – to possess things in piecemeal?). She is its reason for becoming, she is its ruler – as much as anyone rules death, at least.
    Ruler’s not the right word. Guardian. Keeper.

    She breathes in. She fixes her gaze on the translucent creature before her and she tries to think of what to say without sounding mad.
    “I felt you,” she says. It doesn’t make sense to an outsider, but she thinks this one will know what she speaks of – maybe she hasn’t been shouting into the abyss, after all.
    “My name is Gail,” she tells her. It seems polite to introduce herself.
    “You’re different,” she says. This isn’t a question.

    She is saying nothing. She tries again.

    “I can sense you. Like a counterpoint. A balance. You’re not magic, but...you’re strong. In a way he isn’t.”
    She says he like they all know his name, and she realizes the mistake. As much as he’d like to believe it, she knows he is not always forefront in their minds.

    She is saying nothing. She tries again.

    “I’m stuck here. It’s a long story, but I’m stuck here. Magic doesn’t work on me, but you’re not magic, are you?”
    She breathes in.
    “I want to go back. Not forever. But there’s…there’s someone I want to see. Not as a ghost. As flesh.”
    She’s forgotten what warm skin feels like.

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    #4

    Screaming like a siren, alive and burning brighter.
    I study the stranger as she struggles to find words, feel the ages upon ages clinging to her and anchoring her to...to a time far too familiar, even if the place is different. I've had visions of the end, dreams and an inner knowing that is hard to describe. Like a compass pointing me toward an inevitable future, but one that has turned to ash in the wake of my lover's suicide. Holding her hand as the world ends, standing over the remains of our home as the sun comes to claim us.

    She burned it to the ground when she died, and I still had those dreams. The only difference was that the hand I held was a ghost's, and I had walked the earth without her all the years between. My heart still in her hands, still hers and no one else's, I had waited eons for someone who has already been gone for most of my life. Someone who, even when she was mine, was always running away, always shutting me out, always playing some endless game of hide and seek. In those dreams, those visions, I had lived my entire life still seeking.

    I don't want it anymore. I'm done playing.

    The stranger's end of the world is different: not the ghost of the Jungle and the sun dying and devouring the earth as it expands, but a beach and a sound I don't know that grates along the back of my neck and down my spine and sets my teeth on edge, things I don't know doing the devouring. Still, it has the same feel to it, the same inevitability, the same inner knowing that this is the end. It clings to her, sinking claws and teeth into her all-too-solid soul, keeping her from life though she is not exactly dead.

    Fascinating. And utterly heartbreaking. I live with my dead inevitable future now and then, when it sneaks back into my dreams or reaches out to caress my cheek with a dead lover's touch and remind me that it waits, whispering of lifetimes alone out of loyalty to a woman whose touch I haven't felt in decades. Whose touch no longer exists other than in spirit. Who hides even now, though I've long since stopped seeking.

    This woman has spent countless ages immersed in the end of the world, played it out over and over, so much so that I can read it in the space around her soul. Not the details, just glimpses and that sound. “I felt you,” she says, and I focus my gaze on her instead of the ending that clings to her. The sound fades, and I nod. There is something different about her as well, under the weight of all that death, all that ending...or maybe woven into it, harnessing it and making it a strength instead of letting it consume her.

    “My name is Quark. And I'm not magic, no, couldn't tell you exactly what I am. Not quite sure there's a name for it, really. Spirits and vision and life, fire and healing and reaching across the void, walking other worlds...” Even building one, once, little good though it did any of us. It was enough to bridge the gap between myself and my love. Built of our lives, our dreams, our shared potential, it was solid and real enough that our time there resulted in a pair of twins that shouldn't have been able to exist. I'd sworn to her if we couldn't have this world I'd make her a goddamn new one, and I did.

    Even that wasn't enough.

    “I want to go back. There's someone I want to see. Not as a ghost. As flesh.” God, if Nocturnal had ever said those words, I would have found a way to drag her back across the void, would have sunk dragon claws into her soul and not let go until she was home to me. If she'd said them to anyone else, trying to find a way back to me, I would have given my goddamn life in an instant for whoever had made that reunion possible, once upon a time. So how could I do anything but try?

    “I couldn't do it on my own,” I tell her, narrowing my eyes and studying the way the end clings to her and puzzling out the way possibility tingles along my skin, letting what power I have reach out to touch the space between her and the weight of death that never quite came for her—and never quite stopped doing so. “And I don't think I can make it permanent. But maybe...”

    As I make contact, I can feel that clinging, crushing weight perking up, taking notice. Not of me, not exactly. I am nothing to it, I am no one. But...oh. Ohhh isn't that interesting? It's almost as if...it recognizes the sameness between itself and the ending that has haunted my dreams for decades, since the moment I lived through a fever that was meant to kill me, since the moment I gave up death for Nocturnal and set myself on a far different path than the easy passing into the dark.

    Where I touch, it gets...distracted, almost. Tendrils caressing that vision, that dead promise of happily ever after that mutated into a ghost of itself when Noct died. Its touch burns like acid, and I push a little bit more of my ending between it and Gail. “Maybe I can buy you some time,” I murmur as all that death slowly turns its focus on something new and interesting and like-but-not-like.

    Gritting my teeth through the adic-burn, I gather up the scraps of that dead future, the tattered remains of my old hopes and dreams for my relationship with Nocturnal, all those flashes of vision, the way my life still tries now and again to steer itself toward her. I wrap it all up in the lingering weight of always and push it into the space between, fighting back a scream as I feel the death that had been clinging to Gail slowly start to dissolve and digest and consume the ghost of what might have been.

    When enough of it is focused on the distraction I've provided it, I slice through the bond that connects me to a future that will never be mine, almost collapsing as the pain of acid devouring its skin fades away into memory. I sway, reeling from the effort and the loss, and stumble toward Gail. Don't think she can make it back without me, and I'm running low.

    “Right. Not sure how long that'll take, but it's time to go.” The words slur, but even as exhausted as I am I reach her and grab on, sinking power into her skin so that life clings just as stubbornly to her soul as death had moments ago. “This might hurt. Not sure, haven't tried it before.” That's all the warning I give her before throwing myself back toward my body and dragging her with me across the void.

    Hurt may have been a bit of an understatement, though I do my best to shield her. It's agony, clawing my way through what is usually a thin veil between the worlds. Ah, but that's when I'm traversing it alone, and this time I'm bringing a friend along for the ride. It feels like forever until I am suddenly back in my body, which is somehow still perfectly intact though it feels like it should be flayed raw and bleeding from every square inch of skin. I barely have the energy to lift my head, but I manage it anyhow just long enough to see that Gail made it back with me. Grinning, I collapse against the tree.

    Worth it. “Go find your someone.” Make the goddamn most out of the limited time you've got, because I don't know how long it's going to last. And I don't think I can do that again.
    I am the fire.
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