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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


    heat of the night; any
    #1
    Spark dreamt;
    Of magma, hot and swift.
     
    She feels like she is caught beneath the earth - trapped, between layers of oppressive rock and dirt that hem the course of her frothing hot flow in until she has nowhere to go but up and out, bubbling and burning. Her path is destructive as it moves fast down the black slopes of a familiar volcano spewing flame and fits of ash. Is this the manner that her anger at him reveals itself? Not even him so much as her - the one that betrayed him, bewitched him into giving her those two that should have been theirs.
     
    Spark had channeled that anger inward.
    It had to go somewhere…
    Deep into her blood, into the very molecules of her until it changed her.
     
    She dreamt;
    Feverish and fitful until the hot rush of magmic dreams woke her and the sweat that dripped off her whiskery nose sizzled on the earth between her knees.
     
    “Spark?” he questioned softly.
     
    She blinked, trying to refocus her eyes on the stallion’s shape that swam before her. Her throat felt thick as she tried to speak around the fever’s grip on her, “Spear?” It came out stilted, she had almost mistaken him for another - for the one that should have been there, almost said ‘Giver’ but his name became a handful of ash that sat on her tongue, choking her.
     
    “Good, I thought you’d never wake up.” he took a step closer to her, but the high heat coming off her flesh kept him back. He longed to touch his muzzle for her cheek, to breathe in her strange new scent but even something in her eyes had gone different, the red seemed deeper, darker. “I think the fever still has a hold of you…” he muttered, a little forlornly because he could think of no other reason that she should be so hot to the touch, a touch that he dared even though it felt like she scorched him as he pressed his lips to her brow, nuzzling the forelock away from her eyes.
     
    “You’re burning up!” he cried.
    “I feel fine,” she lied.
     
    Spark didn’t feel fine, she felt… hot.
    She felt him lean into brush his lips against her brow, and she felt cornered with nowhere to go. It was the first time she felt like his touch was unwelcome, and it sparked something in her - the anger maybe, and she could feel it building as she lied through her teeth to him, her twin, her everything until Giver came along. The only thing she could do was climb to her feet, shake her head in warning at him but it was too late, he was still too close when it happened --
     
    Spark exploded.
    That’s too dramatic.
    Erupted; her skin bubbled and blistered and broke before sloughing off. She stood there, a small thing of living flame.
     
    Spear’s mouth fell open; he’d leapt back of course but not in time.
    Parts of his face had been singed by the whoosh of fire that his sister became, and his whiskers smoked from where they had caught flame. “S-sp-spark?” he said stuttering and incredulous as he stared at the mare made of fire. He recovered long enough to splutter, “What the hell?” but she only looked at him, one eye still black and the other still red somehow, amidst all that fire that swirled around in the shape of her now vague face.
     
    “Hush,” she bids him in a crackling tongue of fire and an instant later, she is nothing more than horseflesh and bone. She hides her surprise well, as she sidles up next to her brother, still dwarfed by him but now so much more than him too, and she can feel that chasm of difference yawning between them again, deeper, more divided, wider even. If she mourns it, that too, she hides from him as she trails her lips along his crest ending in a nibble at his shoulder.
     
    “Come,” she echoes, motioning with her nose to the volcano and the noise in the distance of what she surmises to be another gathering.

    Spear & Spark
    #2
    something has been taken from deep inside of me;
    the secret I've kept locked away no one can ever see.

         The fire had already begun to interlace itself with the tender marrow of his weary bones, and the hardened, sinewy muscle coiled beneath the dark canvas of his marred skin – it burns brightly within the hearth of his chest, where his heart hammers roughly with a thrumming rhythm against its iron cage, steady to the beat of the flickering flame inside of him. He could feel its heat festered inside of him, just beneath the surface, leaving him hot to the touch, with trickling beads of sweat seeping from his pores and staining his skin.

      He no longer detests the thickness of the air, nor the humidity as it envelopes him in its rigid grasp. The warmth has become something of a comfort to him, perhaps because it has become a part of him – fire had become a part of him, the way ice once had, and though his memory longed for the dreary afternoons spent behind the formidable wall of ice, beneath a blanket of falling snow, the craving no longer lingered in the pit of his rolling belly.

      Where dread once touched, there is indifference. His gaze, darkened with brimstone and bitumen, is steadied upon the looming shadow of the volcano, watching as the sky – hazy; a dull and dreary gray – is filled with thick, puffing plumes of blackened smoke, as the volcano itself rumbles – ominous, and as much of a force as the fire that burned within.

      The butte upon which lava is spewed does not capture his attention for long, however, as a sudden flicker and glow of light wavers in the distance, amid the swaying, wavering vegetation. His terse browline is furrowed, as the burning light of his red eyes narrow – there is a glimmer of movement, but the sheer intensity of the light is enough to stir him to avert his gaze. Roused from him complacent stance, his thickly muscled legs propel forth, surging towards the unusual sight, as the dried vegetation lapping at his hock singe from the sheer heat exuding from his body.

      As the pure embodiment of fire changes, suddenly, into the familiar two-toned form of his daughter, a shadow of disbelief carves into his usually stoic features, while his searing gaze observes the apprehension etched into his son’s pallid characteristics. He is as stunned as he, and though he is wholly delighted by their presence (there was an immense amount of pride bubbling inside of his chest, even now – he had done much wrong in his life, but his children would always be a source of his greatest satisfaction), there was also uncertainty lingering.

      ”Spear, Spark,” he utters, his voice rich and thick, yet rough around the edges. A rumbling baritone. ”it has been too long. I have missed you.” and he has. But his darkened gaze is settled upon Spark, and on her rigid features, wrought with something undiscernible. He reaches out to touch her, to press the velvet of his nose against her cheek, but he can feel the searing heat through her skin.

      ”When?” he asks, but he does not elaborate.

      When did this start happening? he does not ask; he knows that she will know his meaning.
    wounds so deep they never show; they never go away.
    like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they've played.
    Offspring
    #3
    Spear cannot stop the frown that sours his face, even as she brushes her lips against his neck. He takes no comfort in the familiar sensation of her touching him, it feels less loving and more out of familial obligation and there is something in it that bothers him. His eyes never leave her and the intensity of his stare forces her to look away from him, which was something that she had never done except when keeping secrets, like now - like how she never tells him of how this came to be, him finding her hot and feverish and all alone on the black volcanic dirt.
     
    Knowing her, he’ll never have the answers to any of his questions. Spark had grown more secretive and sly as they’d grown bigger and come into themselves, leaving behind the gangliness of foals. For an instant, he almost longs for a time like that as they romped through the snows, always laughing. They were quieter now, and both of them had noticed it. Spear knows that things can never be as it was when they were knee-high to their father and hiding behind the long strands of their mother’s tail; they’ve grown too old and too much for Spark to look at him with pure adoration in her eyes, now there is only black and red and a spark of something that separates her from him.
     
    She put no effort into her affection for him, it seemed mechanical and stilted and she knew that he’d pick up on it. Part of her feared for him; feared what her touch might do to him now, how hot it could be and how it’d burn the hair right off of him. He’d never understand how she held herself back, how she anchored herself to him to keep the fire back from overcoming her and just the press of her lips to his flesh made her remember and just the remembering saved her from pure immolation. Spark might not have minded just burning up into nothing, sweet sweet nothing… but she could never leave Spear alone on this earth, not really (not even despite all those times apart).
     
    His stare forces her to look away from him and she is the first to notice their father looming out of the ashen haze. She is glad to have something other than her brother and the beckoning horizon to look at, her gaze held immobile by the familiar black face of Offspring. Their names tumble from his mouth, rich and rough and thick and she feels her name shiver and shake right through her as it moves something hard and loose until it knocks about inside of her and she realizes it is love, blatant love as he says how it’s been too long and he’s missed them and Spark is unaware that she is trembling just then. But his eyes find hers’ and her face softens just the slightest, cracking beneath the velvet touch of his mouth to her cheek.
     
    Her heat reaches out to his, recognizing it.
    There is barely time to stifle a gasp before a small flame bursts out her ear, flesh and fur disintegrating and then her entire black-bonneted brow is gone up in fire just from her father’s touch - from his own discernible heat that calls to hers. She is more like him now than Spear could ever be, though he bears a similar shape - thick and meaty, but set apart now, by the heat that buffets him from both their skins and makes him back up a step, seeking the more welcome air of Tephra that he once found too humid to stomach but now feels cooler than the conflagration the two of them create just from their closeness. He has missed his father too, as much as Spark has but he answers for her --

    “Two days ago, I found her feverish and fretful, asleep and alone.”
    He makes no mention of how he was fresh from the hills (now named something else, taken over by someone else) and various explorations that kept him from his sister’s side, not that he had ever been or could ever be her keeper - she had decided against that long ago, before the Reckoning ever spat them out here, far from the familiar drifts of Tundran snow.
     
    Spark recovers enough to glare at him, even though she couldn’t be all that mad… he’d found her, he’d come back to her, and she’d changed. “I don’t know how it happened,” she admitted, ducking her head in embarrassment. “It just… it just happened.” She is at a loss; one minute she had been asleep and dreaming, the next she had grown more frenzied than fevered then… it had just burst right out of her! “I can’t explain it dad.” Spark sighs, dares to lean against Offspring’s big black side, as if by doing that she could draw some strength from him through touch alone.
     
    “I was dreaming then I was burning…” she murmurs rather dreamily, to no one in particular.

    Spear & Spark
    #4
     
    So many thoughts seem to pile up in his mind. They were unorganized and were not able for him to sort through, leaving Warrick feeling overwhelmed and heavy. It was a familiar feeling to him, though he hadn’t felt it in a long while. He had been hoping that perhaps the chaotic thoughts and feelings had made their exit permanently when he had formed new relationships here in Tephra, but those relationships are dissolving (or were they already dissolved?) and with their absence, the heavy bulk eagerly set in once again, making him feel stretched too thin. In response to the ache in his chest and mind, Warrick had dove into his duties that Offspring so generously had given him. Despite not knowing him, Offspring seemed to understand Warrick’s strengths within the kingdom and targeted his ability to begin new, steadfast relationships with the newcomers. His assignment made him realize that Offspring was always watching and observing. He wonders, then, if the black stallion knows of the hardships he’s faced and the ones he still is trying to overcome. He must not, Warrick decides, for then his assignment would have been very different.

    He had already brought to Tephra another resident from the Field, Sirana. She was strong and adventurous, unafraid of new and unexplored land as well as strangers. She was a good fit, in Warrick’s eyes, and though he feels confident that a friendship between them is blossoming, his stomach turns sour with doubt.

    The bay stallion, with painted legs the color of the night sky, stares down into one of the many rivers that stream down from the volcano and run throughout Tephra. His reflection warps from the movement of the water as well as from the golden sunlight that plays bright patterns on the rippling surface. He continues to stare, looking thoughtfully into the river, but at the same time, is completely emotionless. His usual dazzling blue gaze somehow seems clouded, an edge of a frown beginning at the corners of his cobalt mouth.

    He tells himself that his thoughts about Ellyse have been innocent; he merely cares for her well-being and in all honesty, hopes that she would find Magnus again. He did not want to see the sadness find her eyes and hold her captive like that one day on the grey shoreline of the beach. He truly sees her as his friend and wants nothing more than her own happiness, but he cannot tell himself this without his heart twisting and turning with discomfort. He knows that a part of him, however small (even now), thinks perhaps that he could set it right, that he could be what she so desperately needs. Foolishly, during her absence, he had entertained these ideas. When her eyes grazed over him as if he was a complete stranger, he realized just how foolish he had been.

    Just as his thoughts were about to turn even more sour, a flash of light with an accompanying sound distracts him. He breathes in sharply, blue-tipped ears pricking forward curiously. Without hesitation he begins to move forward, splashing into the river and crossing quickly (it was rather shallow and the water cools the warmth on his back from the summer sun). Warrick comes onto the scene rather quickly, recognizing Offspring immediately. He’s rather glad that the king was already there; Warrick was used to investigating alone.

    The blue-pointed stallion draws up from behind Offspring, careful not to intrude but so that his presence was still noticeable. There is no evidence of a live fire, though smoke and ash clings to the air as his nostrils flare curiously. He is about to inquire, lips opening for words to form, but that is when Offspring’s gentle touch to his daughter’s head (Warrick can tell from their language and movements that these three were somehow related) alights with crackling, glowing flames. Warrick cannot help but raise his brows in astonishment, quickly putting the pieces together in his head. She is the light he had seen.

    He takes a single step forward, his head now parallel to Offspring’s shoulder, though there is still a few lengths of space between the two stallions. He cannot help himself; for his heart is compassionate and the sorrowful, confused look of the girl creates a gentle etch of concern on the dark lines of his auburn face, a small frown creasing his navy lips. His eyes shift to Offspring momentarily, meeting his new king’s gaze with a mild look, for though they have not met officially, he hopes the black stallion (also loving father, he realizes) does not find him too bold. His brilliant gaze of cerulean finds the painted girl – Spark, how fitting – and with a soft sigh, the lines of his mouth turn up slightly into a smile.

    “Unexplainable, maybe. There are a countless many things that are left unexplained, but are no less great than the things can be.”

    His voice is quieter than Offspring’s had been, but equally as deep and rumbling. For a moment, he lets his words linger on the air, wondering if he should try to take his own advice.

    “I’m Warrick,” he says, introducing himself to the twins that stood before him, for Offspring had already been aware of the stallion’s name. “I saw the light and wanted to be sure that things were alright.”
    like the sun,
    swallowed up by the earth
    warrick




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