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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


    let your fists come undone; leliana
    #1
    while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
    I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
     All at once, the world was changed – except it wasn’t the world that changed at all. Everything around her remained as it always had with unbroken green buried beneath a sky of blue and fluttering wings, trees tall enough to catch the stars and with branches that spent their days waving and bowing. She could feel the sun where it pooled in the hollows of her apricot face, and the wind where it pushed aside the copper tangles of a decidedly unruly mane. Everything, everything, was the same.

    Except-

    She felt the change at her core, in the innermost pit of who she was and who she could be. It was magic and it was hers, it  always had been hers even for as long as it had been missing. It flooded through her skin and in her bones, it filled her veins and her heart sang with it in her chest. These were the things she had dreamed about since that first day on the mountain, these things that had become more fairytale than truth the more often she thought on it beneath the stars and in the dark of night. It didn’t matter that none of it made sense, that when she blinked the blue mare with the kind smile was gone and in her wake was only a spattering of glitter like stars thrown carelessly across the dawn.

    It didn’t matter because she felt whole again, because she knew the magic that settled deep inside her, knew the wings that burst from her shoulders in an array of dark gossamer feather several shades deeper than her skin. All those hollow spaces, the peculiar cracks in her heart she had sometimes wondered about, they were filled now. Whole, and it didn’t matter that could barely make sense of it.

    With a fleeting glance at the heavily pregnant mare who seemed to pay her no attention at all, Exist turned and disappeared into the brush nearby, reappearing on the other side to stand in the shadow of her sister. “Leliana,” she breathed, all eyes and awe and heaving chest, “something happened-“

    But something woke in her chest then, something strange and unfamiliar, though not entirely unwelcome. It was a wildness, a yearning, a magic that wasn’t hers and oh, how it reached for Leliana. It was reflexive when she released it, instinctive when she pushed her nose against her sister’s darker neck and let the magic pool between their skin. This magic was strange magic, it was dissonance and discord until it buried itself in Leliana’s chest and Exist understood exactly what it was and what it meant.

    When a pair of wings unfurled from her sisters shoulders, she could feel her own lift and open in response, widening to their full russet length across her apricot back. “Leliana,” she says again, this time even softer than before, with shadowed green eyes that seemed to be edged with quiet certainty, “if I exist, then you exist.” The phrase was a promise between them, a vow, and by some incredible impossibility it had not been broken. “We’re whole again.” She closed the distance between them easily, close enough for brown and apricot to be blended by shadow, close enough for their wings to tangle and touch.

    Exist
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    #2
    leliana
    oh, the desert dreams of a river that will run down to the sea
    like my heart longs for an ocean to wash down over me

    The world had, as always, shrunk until it was just the two of them.

    Leliana turned her graceful head to her sister as she approached, her features softening as she made out the shadows that formed into the apricot and indigo. When she reached for her, she responded in turn, pressing the crimson of her nose into her sisters and breathing in the sweet, familiar scent. She did not react when she felt the magic untangle from Exist and pool into her, she merely exhaled quietly, feeling that same thing unlock in her chest and then flood throughout her, lighting her nerves with the memory.

    Relief—this was relief. This is what it was to be turned asunder and then reformed.

    “If I exist, then you exist,” she murmured in response, her voice soft and certain. With both wonder and joy, she unfurled her wings at her sides, feeling joy as they shifted seamlessly. At first, they were soft down and as red as the sunrise, and then they melded into dragon wings, talon curled at the end and as black as obsidian. The dissolved and were replaced with hard copper, the light glinting off their smooth edges. Finally, they settled into the dappled russet of an owl, the softness of them pushing into her sister’s.

    She glanced at them affectionally and then turned to Exist, her face alight with wonder. “You restored me,” she pressed her face into the neck of her sister, her twin, breathing out and inhaling the moment deeply into her chest. “You restored us.” She did not ask how or why—it seemed too much to ask to be given this gift and then demand answers on the how and why. She was content to simply be given it in the first place without needing to tear it apart. Instead, she just smiled, a singular tear falling down her cheek.

    [Image: avatar-1975.gif]
    the heaviness in my heart belongs to gravity
    Reply
    #3
    while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
    I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.
    They are the same and they are different, night and day but forever bound in that one does not exist without the other. Where Leliana is grace and quiet, unwavering calm, Exist is like fire that consumes, wild and impatient and unpredictable. Though Leliana barely reacts when the magic seeps beneath her skin, Exist cannot help but weave around her sister, touching her lips to a cheek, a shoulder, the point of a dappled hip.

    She is a slave to the magic that burns inside her chest.
    A slave to the heart that pounds a rhythm her feet are ever eager to match.

    Exist quiets only when Leliana tests her wings, stepping back so that her sister can let them unfurl to their full length. First soft, then fearsome, strange, and soft again to which Exist steps forward, thrusting her nose against the curve of a dark and dappled neck. When her sisters words find her ears, something erupts in her chest, a thousand flashes of a single memory thrust inside her mind. But it wasn’t just any memory, it was that first one, the most important one.

    “No, Leliana, it was you who restored me.” Her voice is just a whisper, dark and urgent and full of the wild she feels trapped within the confines of her chest. When Leliana shifts to push her face against the apricot of a waiting neck, Exist turns reflexively to cradle her, reaching over to trace dark dapples with the soft of delicate, whiskered lips. There is a sudden pang in her chest, a rare pang, and though it passes after just a moment, she cannot help but regret that mother was not with them. But Victra had surrendered to the dark in her soul, had given herself to the wilds and the deep forest so that she could not taint the children she loved.

    With a sigh that is oddly tremulous against the curve of a delicate copper mouth, Exist says, “I love you, sister.”


    Exist
    Reply
    #4
    leliana
    oh, the desert dreams of a river that will run down to the sea
    like my heart longs for an ocean to wash down over me

    Leliana understands her sister but does not always comprehend her. She is magnificent in ways she will never be—in ways she could never aspire to be. Leliana is quiet and serene, a counterweight to the wildness that brews in Exist’s chest. Where Exist is a flame, she is undisturbed lakes. As deep as oceans, as unrelenting as the rains upon Winter’s edge. She simply is, and she moves forward with the persistence and endurance of a stone, heavy and calm compared to the flightiness of her beautiful, wild sister.

    Her smile is slow and soft, hazy along the edges as if hovering along her crimson lips. “Together,” she whispers quietly, breathing in her sister’s familiar scent. “We restored each other together.” It is poetic, in a way, but more than that, it is expected—it is right. It is the only thing that could have happened.

    She curls into her sister as much as the other curls into her, and she finds that she is deeply appreciative of their closeness, their intimacy. She misses her mother, of course she does, but the ache dulls when she is near Exist. Her sister helps to chase away the shadows the press inward when she thinks of their mother, of how lost she is, of how she had succumbed to the darkness. If only she could heal the heart too.

    “I love you more,” she says with a smile, repeating the words automatically but with feeling. There would never come a time when she did not say them, when she did not mean them. She loves her sister as much as she loves herself, more so. “What next?” she questions, although she does not mind if they stay here, trapped and suspended in time, forever. She would gladly live forever pressed into her sister’s side.

    [Image: avatar-1975.gif]
    the heaviness in my heart belongs to gravity
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