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    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


    [open]  i'll pretend i'm burning bright; sahm, any
    #1
    i pretend to close my eyes;
    i pretend i'm burning bright.
    Okay, so maybe the Tundra has grown on me some since Romek said he’d be my dad and brought me home with him. Sure it’s crazy cold, but I usually don’t mind the cold so much. Fire’s good at keeping a body warm, see. So even if my legs get kind of freezing when I’m walking through snow, well, I can always get warm again. Except the wind’s getting kind of cold too today, and it makes the fire a little harder to control. Or harder to keep awake, really. It keeps blowing out, and it’s a whole lot harder to stay warm without it. 

    I keep starting little fires to dance along my skin and chase away the cold, but they keep going out, and it’s starting to get uncomfortable. And my legs are cold, and any time I try to melt snow away from them so I can be warm for a minute, it makes the ground all squishy and wet and gross and that’s just as bad as being cold. So I sigh and bound through the snow toward the closest cave to cuddle up out of the wind, start a fire that won’t blow out, and get all cozy and dry the damp off my legs.

    The cave I pick is dark, but not for long. As soon as I’m out of the wind, I wrap myself in fire to dry off and warm up, and it sheds light on the insides of the cave, or at least the bits closest to me. I let the fire spread out a little to melt some snow that blew into the cave, and to chase the water away with its lovely, lovely heat. And then I send some to warm up a spot on the cave floor that looks especially cozy to curl up on for a nice long nap.

    I’m getting better at this whole control thing.

    Pretty soon my cave is nice and toasty warm. I curl up in the spot I got all cozy-like, and gather the fire back together to sit a little ways away from me and dance, mesmerizing me with its movement even as it keeps me nice and warm. Kind of the perfect way to spend a cold winter day, I think. Well, it would maybe be even better with company, but the fire’s nice company too. Even if it is a little quiet.
    #2
    Mother tells them of Beyond, of the lands big and small that lie outside the clutches of the Sunrise.
    They flank her, one on each side, as she talks long into the night and on into the morning, past sunup and towards noon about the great prairies that birthed her then killed her - Scalped is honest in her tale-telling, of how she came into her immortality and how they, thus far, are the last of her sons and daughters. Each of them takes one last suck of her teats, but the milk is drying up and they’ve begun to sample the grassy fares on the Tundra’s outskirts where their mother chooses to stay.

    Spear & Spark give their mother loving little eskimo kisses; they rub noses together, breathe one another in, and feel like this is the last time in forever that they will see the medicine-hat mare. Their hearts are heavy on the trek back into the Tundra’s icy arms, but it is one they have made often and will always make because it is home to them and Scalped will always be that for them too, a beacon of love that beckons them forth from time to time, but she lets them go - they are growing, and they have been consigned to the Tundra for safekeeping.

    The pair of them are boundless in their energy as they attack the permafrost in great ground-eating strides; they have of course, challenged one another to an unspoken race to see who is the fastest. Spear is by far the heavier of the two, favoring their father in size as Spark favors their mother, small and swift. She is quick to outdistance Spear only to be buffeted by a particularly harsh gust of wind that knocks her sideways and sends her staggering to her knees.

    He is there in an instant, not all that slow but conceding the race to his sister; concern rides the crook of his brow, as he bends his face towards her. “You okay Spark?” She grunts, struggles back to her feet and leans against him, beset by a lean pant and the wind that has knocked the breath from her. “I’ll be fine Spear, that wind came out of nowhere!” He nods, solemn in care of her as he shields her against further outbursts, but the wind has picked up and slaps heartily at both of them until they dart into a cave --

    The cave is overbright for a naturally dark space, and they are momentarily blinded from starting into the dancing flames of a fire that has no apparent reason for existing. Neither of them can see the lightmaker huddled in on herself in a corner of the cave, all cozy and bedded down against the cold. They shiver-shake the snow from their backs, his bay and hers pale as the snow melting fast at their feet. It runs away in little rivers and they both look away from the dancing fire to what lies beyond - the filly, the maker of such a fascinating thing. “Neat,” they both say in rare unison.

    -- Spear & Spark --
    eye for an eye





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