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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


    come down from the mountain; any
    #1

    He wakes with the taste of salt on his lips and the sunrise in his eyes.

    There is fineness to the scene he sees every morning, a casual grace that he never takes for granted. If their world had been stripped bare because of their sins, then the world that came next was meant as a peace offering from the gods. This world was not better or worse, merely different. His world was leagues ahead of anywhere he had previously lived. She had brought him home; it no longer matters where his feet are stayed, only that they stop alongside hers’.

    Walter watches the horizon. He follows the gathering waves in the distance, watches as they roll in and roil before breaking on the shore just ahead of him. He repeats the cycle until his eyelids are seared golden and his ears buzz. When the gulls lift into the air and begin their morning calls (popping into their loud existences seemingly out of nowhere, as they are fond of doing) he concedes his stretch of shore with a silent scowl.

    There is still an alien lightness to his steps that feels too much like floating. A part of his disdain for the flying scavengers is rooted in the loss of his own wings (the other part from a long-standing, mutual hatred he shares with the avian family). It has taken him longer to master movement without the balancing set of his wings than it had to learn how to use them in the first place. The sand helps, at least. He is forced to slow his stride to keep atop each uneven mound between him and his destination.

    When the cliffs rising at his left shoulder are finally tall enough to house caves, Walter sees that he is no longer alone. Nerine is a rather noisy kingdom, but unfortunately, it is due to the crashing water on the rocks rather than the number of its people. He imagines that the queen would have it differently, but it suits him all right. Like Beqanna itself, the old stallion was rebuilding himself anew. Where better to do so than the empty edge of a land where the ocean strips and cleanses the earth each day? He smiles faintly, distracted by his thoughts, when a mare passes him. It isn’t her, so he doesn’t bother to call her back for conversation. The reformed, almost-Sisterhood still loses him in its motivations. Sometimes, he wakes in the morning thinking he will ask what his place in this land is, what he should do to help. Always, he realizes he doesn’t care – realizes that he is here for one purpose only.

    The taste of seagrass is too bitter and completely unsatisfying, but he lowers his head to it like he has every day since he landed here. Around him, the sounds of the progressing day grow louder. Within him, peace prevails for the first time since his youth.

    He isn’t foolish enough to believe it will last forever. Good things never did.
     
     

    Walter

    come down from the mountain
    you have been gone too long

    #2
    djinni

    She had left him before dawn, as she always does. They sleep near, but never with the other.

    Djinni swears that once she woke up in the night and he was beside her, a warm comfort pressing to her side. But she'd been so tired and had so quickly fallen back asleep that it's only half remembered; sometimes she thinks it might have been a dream.

    She does not push him, does not tease and pull at his boundaries. That might make him leave, and Djinni has only just gotten him to stay.

    The weight of responsibility is uncomfortably heavy, but she manages to shirk it, and is wandering the beach instead of the forest by noon. The grullo mare isn’t looking for Walter, but when she sees him, alone in the dunes, she comes closer.

    “Hi,” she says with a soft smile, still not entirely able to believe that this time they’ve not gone years without seeing the other.

    current appearance:
    natural build – slim
    smoky grullo tobiano
    D J I N N I
    genie | rose gold tobiano dun | trickster
    #3

    Once, he was a young boy with skin like stone. His heart, too, had hardened, folded in on itself in the weeks following his birth. After his mother had nursed him for a time (enough time to remember the sharp angles of her face, to remember the sharper words she used to cut him from her side), she had left him. She gave him her first milk, her name, his father’s name, and his own – and left him. But orphaning him wasn’t Ellen’s only gift. She had stilled his despair, clotted it before it had consumed him there, alone in the tall grass. She had broken his heart, and when time and necessity mended it, the scar tissue made it infallible.

    He lived like iron for years, decades.

    Unbreakable.

    Almost, anyway. Walter hasn’t had a love of country or home to chisel him down. He hasn’t pined for a place with searching eyes and road-weary feet. Not even the burst of soft light setting the land to glow on a new morning stirs him. He is cold to the sun warming the angular slope of his back, blind to the brilliance of a fattened moon rising over the horizon. Only women have worn at him like the river to a rock.

    One especially.

    She climbs over the dunes with a nimble grace he cannot match. Her movement displaces sand still cooled by the night, and some of it cascades down to cover his front feet. The palomino shivers, matches her smile. “Hi yourself.” And while years usually separate their conversations, they have never tip-toed through them. Now, though, seeing each other daily changes everything. Walter feels bared and vulnerable. He pulls phantom wings closer around him before realizing there is nothing to put between them anymore. There is nothing to hold them back from each other, from becoming…whatever they are.

    But what are they? Time spent apart has always brought them together, the silence of the years easily filled by their same song and dance. Now they have all of the minutes to spend in the world, and he doesn’t know where to begin. He swallows heavily, looks to the shore and back, and decides on honesty. “It’s too easy now,” he says with a hint of humor (he grins even, one corner of his mouth lifting, wondering if she agrees or if it hurts her to hear).

    But if the convenience of their shared lives is its own curse, some changes are a blessing, too. Walter reaches forward with his muzzle and brushes a strand of her wayward hair back against her neck. His motions are still clumsy, still learning, but he lingers for a breath in her mane. She smells like here, oat-grass and the bright tang of sea-salt. But he scents the forest on her, too, the heady mixture of fallen leaves and loamy earth. It’s enough of the Chamber to spark his memory, but there, he doesn’t care to linger long. He would rather be here, even if he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Even if he worries it isn’t enough for Djinni.

     
     

    Walter

    come down from the mountain
    you have been gone too long

    #4
    djinni

    Djinni has never been hard.

    She is sand in every sense; a multitude of pieces held together by wind or rain or gravity. She blended into her Beqanna life as easily as a grain of sand fits with the dunes, and was gone with the wind in the next instant. After a while – after her parents had gone, and then her sisters, and finally her brothers – only one thing had kept her coming back.

    He’s before her now, saying hello as though they do it every day (and they do!) and she wonders for the first time why she had ever felt the need to leave.

    Not long ago she had told Stillwater she was bored. That was true in Sylva – and is true in Nerine too – but it is not true here. Not with Walter, who has spent decades on her mind; never with Walter.

    “Would you rather I leave again?” she asks with a smile, finding the humor in what he says. “I’m sure the gulls could keep you company.”

    Djinni is very still as he reaches out – careful to not spook him – and when she moves to press her shoulder against his she does so slowly, so that if he were to shift away they could pretend it never happened. The grullo mare looks out at the sea, enjoying the crash of the white foam against the grey beach, and then looks back at Walter’s empty side.

    “Do you want them back?” She asks. “I could give them to you.” It is an offer, not a trade. She’s shown more of herself to Walter than to anyone, and she watches him carefully for a reaction. Djinni has never wielded magic the way that magicians do, but she has her tricks, and she wants Walter to feel truly himself. She had been trapped on this beach for nearly six months – unable to do anything but walk around in her own grullo skin – she does not want to keep him here against his will.

    current appearance:
    slim build
    smoky grullo minimal tobiano
    brown eyes
    D J I N N I
    genie | rose gold tobiano dun | trickster
    #5

    “Damn the gulls,” he says, smiling into the arch of her smoky neck. To think of the way they flaunt their casual, avian-freedom usually sets him on edge. Now, though, he is too caught up in Djinni to worry. He sees the slow roll of her shoulder, how she shifts towards him like a wave to the shore. But instead of scuttling away like a sandpiper, Walter awaits the crash. He tenses (his muscles quivering quietly), he lifts his head (looks into her muddy eyes because his trust lives there), but he doesn’t move away. They collide and it is gentle and soft, as if they hold something fragile between them.

    It is momentous; every touch is between them.

    They stand pressed together against the ocean. She speaks, and he soon forgets that they are as they are. She teases, and he focuses on her words rather than the heat they begin to share. Words strung together make a lifeline that he is always eager to cling to. But this time, he is not like a desperate man overboard. Walter reaches for conversation eventually but doesn’t blindly grope around for the rope. He eases into it, eases into the feel of her weight against him. He gives in a little more (and she leans more heavily with his shift) and learns what it means to support her.

    Because coming to Nerine wasn’t only for her. Stranding himself on the shoreline was his own kind of test. He’s spent decades missing his gold-bangled mystery but has never before tried to tie her down. Perhaps, if he was grounded instead (or his feet buried in the dark sand) she would be the one to stay in the end. She would be the one to keep coming back to her wing-clipped wanderer.

    In her next breath, she offers him flight again. And Walter’s honey eyes slide away from hers because he thinks of being able to leave. His hooves shift beneath him in the same instant, remembering the road. The dying breath of winter stirs over them. It dives into the caves before sweeping out towards the sea, trailing scents of damp rock and lichen as it goes. So much here, the stallion thinks, so much left to discover. The breeze is another reminder of what the Mountain still keeps from him. Before, his wings would ruffle and press tighter against him, against the chill.

    Now?

    Now, he has a different source of heat. A better one, too. What better test is there than temptation? “I do.” Hesitation creases his brow when he looks back at Djinni. He knows she believes in him (she must), but does he believe in himself? “I miss the skies,” he says, and his voice barely falters.

     
     

    Walter

    come down from the mountain
    you have been gone too long

    #6
    djinni

    They have spent decades tiptoeing around each other; it will take years of such familiarity before a touch between the two of them is anything less than thrilling to Djinni. She feels him smile and does the same, feeling the warmth of his breath against her when he speaks even more strongly as the wind whips over them.

    The buckskin mare watches the shadows of the gulls as they flicker across Walter’s yellow hide. She meets his eyes when he seeks her out and returns his smile. Giving him back his wings, making him – physically at least – whole again? This is what she wants to do. She had asked him because she is sure she knows he will accept, and so the moment that she feels him shift beside her rather than toward her has her doing the same.

    Had she been wrong?

    Does he not want his wings back? Or does he, and it’s something else she’d done or something she’d not done? Is this where they’ll end again?

    Walter speaks up before panic truly overwhelms her and Djinni closets the emotions.

    They no longer exist; she never felt them. She is not afraid of anything. She never has been.

    They return in an instant and Djinni finds herself a bit farther from the palomino stallion, the buffer of his feathered wings between them when before there had been nothing. Rather than mourn the loss of their physical proximity, she sprout a pair of her own as well, feathered the same black and tan as her hide.

    “Let’s go!” She says with a bump of her wings to his. Djinni disappears, and overhead a small speck appears in the sky. She falls forward in the empty air, gravity pulling her down, and then unfurls her wings in a wide sweep, catching herself an instant before she slams into the sea. Her laughter echoes over the crashing waves, and she soars a semi-circle over the green ocean before coming back to Walter. She hovers impossibly well (more support from wishes than from the wind), waiting with a smile for him to join her.

    current appearance:
    natural build - slim
    silver buckskin
    birdcatcher spots on back and hindquarters
    silver unicorn horn
    black and tan wings


    ooc: djinni can transfer over 10 points to restore his wings. when you post in the mountain to "officially" get them back, just mention that she's using her points for it Smile
    D J I N N I
    genie | rose gold tobiano dun | trickster




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