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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


    shaking in the neon light; exist & prevail
    #1
    She is shoulder deep in the midst of a hibiscus bush; each bloom is fat and bursting and a startling crimson against the pale apricot of her skin. The smell of them combats the sulphur in the air, changes it to a wry mix of flower and fire that sits heavy in her lungs - home, it smells like home to her. Unlike her sister, she has never left the river-crossed folds of Tephra - not once, and lacks the desire to do so. She likes the hibiscus bushes and the big river that runs out to the sea. But Prevail, she had other ideas that stretched farther than Tephra encompassed and Praise chose not to follow her.
     
    Praise is the picture of contentment from the half-lidded eyes that take in the humid haze that hangs thick about the air, thicker still near the volcano’s tip, to the lazily cocked hip. The shimmer of sea near the river’s wide mouth makes the pale apricot perk up, her ears come forward and her eyes focus keenly on the yawning mouth of tide as it goes back and forth. It looks like glimmers of light rising and falling, like she imagines lungs look inside a ripped open chest - a dark thought, but she is prone to them at times, through sheer fascination of things such as the inner workings of artery and tendon.
     
    She shakes off the hibiscus’ hold on her; their scent is a powerful drug that lulls her into a laconic stupor. The sight of the sea takes her now, guides her from bush to shoreline where the black volcanic sand slides underneath her feet and shells of all colors gleam amidst the sand’s blackness like the opposites of stars. One shell in particular is of a curious shape, it seems to spiral like a single broken spire of horn much like Prevail’s or their father’s horns. Except it is a shell, not a horn and she starts to nudge it around with her pale apricot nose. Praise is not stupid but she is also not educated as to the things that make shells like this one into homes, as crabs do.
     
    However, she soon receives a valuable lesson in curiously nosing things that she should turn over with a careful hoof rather than a tender-fleshed nose for she flips the shell over and disturbs the denizen inside it - a crab! It extends waving snapping pincers then scurrying legs as it moves sideways away from her. Praise laughs, delighted by the crab’s antics not realizing that the thing is angered at her curious attack on its home which sticks to it’s back as it scuttles away from her. She follows it, trailing along at a frighteningly slow pace until that curiosity gets the best of her --
     
    Praise upends the crab!
    His legs clamber against air and his pincers clack and snap, and her laughter rings out amidst the low susurration of sea on shore.
     
    Eventually the crab rights himself over and she bends her nose down to have another go at him but the crab has other ideas. He latches on to the tender skin between each nostril and she jerks her head up in pained surprise, eyes crossed and watering from the tight grip he has on such delicate flesh. “Let go!” she cries, unable to speak the language of the crab as she flings her head from side to side in an attempt to dislodge him. Praise lowers her head in submission to the sand, blowing out hot heavy breaths through the pain that radiates up her face and into her brain, sharp and stabbing. She is a sight - legs splayed as a minutes’ old foal standing for the first time, sides heaving, and the crab still pinched tight to her nose.




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