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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


    i watch the city burn; any
    #1
    Lilitha had been surprised how easy it had been to shift her home base from one forest to another. After years of refusing her entrance, Taiga had been almost unnervingly welcoming. At first it had hurt, of course, the constant reminder of what could have been, what had almost been, what she’d nearly had and had lost before she could even truly grasp it. Still, there was little of her almost-family left in these lands nowadays, and the more time she’d spent wandering through the forest of towering redwoods, the more that pain had faded into a distant memory.

    She’d begun to build a new life for herself, even if the social side of things had still come slowly. So slowly. She’d spent so much of her time alone, it was hard to bring herself to reach out to anyone new, though really she should. After all, her old friend Jinju still lived here, and there were so many people to meet if she could only make herself do so.

    Ruan, of course, had made himself an exception, but he was so quiet, so strong and steady that somehow it was easy with him. He joined her now and again on her wanderings, as his busy schedule permitted. Walking beside her, letting her ramble on nervously or stay quiet as the mood suited her, sometimes pointing out an interesting sight she’d almost missed. Mushrooms growing from on old stump, or a tasty-looking patch of clover, a rabbit frozen in wary watchfulness, or a hawk about to take wing. He was easy company, and he didn’t mind that maybe she wasn’t.

    Today though, she’d been wandering on her own, quietly exploring a little piece of Taiga she hadn’t already seen. And as she did so, she felt a darkness wash through her, through the land itself, a sick, twisted feeling that told her something had changed. Something was wrong. Still wary even after three years of passing in and out freely, the first thing she did was make her way to the border of the land that had once been forbidden to her. The closer she drew to Taiga’s edge - or maybe the more time that passed - the deeper that feeling of wrongness went, setting the back of her neck to prickling and her skin to shuddering as if to dislodge invisible flies biting into her. 

    Lilitha paused just as the border came into sight. And at the edge of visibility, peeking through the last of the trees that separated Taiga from the rest of the world, she saw something entirely unexpected: a wall, vicious and thorny, towering over the boundary line, extending from the ground up toward the sky. If it weren’t so troubling, she’d have been amused. Three years, Beqanna herself had kept Lilitha out of Taiga through use of a magical wall built just for her. To be kept in, that was a new twist.

    It would have been funny, if it didn’t send a sick feeling of dread through her, pooling in her belly like an oil slick, clutching in her throat and itching just beneath her skin, as if the sight itself wasn’t enough to tell her this was very, very bad. Even knowing it was probably a waste of energy - after all, she had plenty of experience with magical boundaries, and they’d never let her through ‘til they were good and ready to - Lilitha threw fire at the wall, trying to burn her way through.

    And got nowhere fast.

    She stopped, staring at the unharmed wall, and bit her lip. Try to push through? Healing wasn’t exactly one of her specialties, and those thorns were wicked and sharp. Rather than wasting anymore time or shedding her blood trying to break through, Lilitha turned around and went to find Ruan. As leader of the pack here, he should be the first to know about such a development, if he hadn’t already found out.
    Will you fight when it all burns down?
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