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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


    we were made out of lightning; any
    #1




    For the first time in a long time, she thinks about dying.
    She’d died a hundred times over in His lair, after He flayed every inch of skin from her body, or saw fit to burn her to ashes. He would always bring her back and she would awake, whole, unburnt, with only the memory of the pain.
    She died in her dreams, too, until she’d complied enough deaths so that she no longer knows which ones were real and which weren’t. Not that it mattered – the end result was always the same, with her brought back to life to continue His games.
    He’d never let her stay dead, though she’d begged enough times (the memories of it – her on her knees, all dignity gone, mewling and begging for Him to end it, to let her stay dead).
    When she’d escaped she’d never considered dying, and when the magic that had lain dormant for so many years had risen up in her veins, dressed her in molten silver and whispered around her like electricity, she thought she might never have to.
    But now she considers it.
    She finds herself eyeing the cliff faces, the black dread of the oceans. She could walk out, turn herself to stone and sink down into the depths. Hell, she could probably do it herself, summon the lightning, turn it inside of herself, burn from the inside out.
    But she knows in all those deaths her last memories would not be of the lovely things, but of Him, how He had done this to her once before.
    He had taken so much from her, including the unique pleasure of death.

    So she does not die, although her eyes fall on foxglove and nightshade and wonders about the bitterness.
    She does not die even though she would love to have everything stop, so that her mind would cease replaying Spyndle’s words (“I can’t, I can’t,” an homage – a mockery? – of their meeting, because everything in life is circular and they’d come back, back to this, back to where no one could be touched and their eyes were wild like animals caught in traps).
    So she would quit replaying the image of Him walking away with their daughter at His side, and the nights she’s spent since praying for the girl to have died and stayed dead, because with Him, that was the most you could hope for.

    Part of her wants to run because she always runs, it’s what she does, her natural state. But she feels heavy, leaden, like she has turned herself to stone without ever setting foot in the ocean.
    She is an Atlas with worlds on her shoulders but one of those worlds – the one with Spyndle, with hazel and riverbanks – has fallen, and she wonders if the other worlds will fall, too.

    c o r d i s
    she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
    and she learned a lesson back there in the flames

    Reply
    #2

    gaza

    He’s never thought about dying, but the young are always invincible in their own minds, aren’t they? The roar with the strength of a thousand lions, and the world quivers before the open-ended amount of possibilities within them. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be, especially for a prince? An ex-prince, but semantics are semantics. A child to was raised with the world as their shucked oyster. Open to the half-shell, dotted with a bit of vinegar or wasabi or cocktail sauce… and why not all three? The youth have the stomach for anything and everything.

    Not Gaza. Immortality is just a word to him; a word without real meaning, though given enough time, he will soon come to learn its advantages and downfalls.

    One day, he might stroke someone’s mane as they die. He might witness the light leave a lover’s eyes, and wish they he could go gently into that good night alongside her. One day he might stand beside the body of a child, or wonder where they have wandered off to - as so many Beqannians seem to do. One day, he might know the meaning of death beyond what it is to outlive one’s parents, as children are supposed to do. He will die in his dreams, and he will wish to die, and he might pray to die - but Gaza will not. And so in that and only that, the silver mare and the black stallion are alike.

    In everything else, they are the complete opposite, the two faces of Janus or borderline comedy and tragedy. He, even with his precursory exposure to death and pain and loss, could not stand to hold an iota of experience to hers. However, Gaza is more like his mother than his father, and that leaden otherworldly woe cannot be ignored. He could, of course, but he won’t. Instead, he might accidentally insert himself into a broken fairytale - the one where the evil witch is actually the skeleton king of the land, and Gaza is no more than a fly to be swatted if it irritates him too much.

    Gaza does not know Him, so he cannot fear Him. And he cannot understand, but he will make the effort nonetheless. Because that is what Vanquish would do, and that is what Yael would do, and because he is a man without purpose.

    Men without purpose can either be devilishly handsome and roguish, or terribly naive and philanthropic.

    Alone, and with a sweetness and gentility that betrays everything about him at the moment, Gaza approaches the silver statue from the side - as quietly and non-threateningly as a half-draft stallion is able. “I’m sorry to bother you, but.... are you alright? You haven’t moved in ages.”

    vanquish x yael

    Reply
    #3




    She’d never known invincibility. To be invincible implies a thirst for life, a certain bravado, a confidence. She has none of these things. She may have stared down the hollow barrel shotguns of His eyes, she may have been vivisected and burnt and drowned and cannibalized and brought back from all those horrors, brought back whole and made new, but it did nothing to convince her of her invincibility.
    Rather, she simply assumed He would one day tire and she would find herself staying dead.
    (She’d hoped. She’d prayed.)
    And then she had escaped Him, had learned that inside her there is molten silver and electricity and the capacity to love that terrifies her in entirely new ways, but the love had only made her more vulnerable, because it was another place to be hurt.

    There is a vein of strength to her, the woman who burned the wayfaring stallion who’d violated her and left her with Ka (she wonders where the girl is now, the precocious silver-maned child she’d tried and failed to love). She is the woman who loved enough to bring the lightning down and into Spyndle’s body, to jolt her back to life, to defy Him.
    (She’d even tried to fight Him when he had come and taken their girl, but He had threatened the girl’s life and Cordis was not strong enough to watch their girl die before her, even if she now wishes her dead, for her own sake.)

    She is lost in these thoughts, the tornado of memory and pangs of regret and every wretched emotion, when the stallion comes. He is young and dark and more a moment she remembers the wayfarer, but this boy does not have the same ill intent (and besides, she knows the lightning now, would burn him before he could ever get close).
    She tries to smile and fails.
    “I’m…” she begins, but she lacks the eloquence to fill in the adjective, is not sure one exists to encompass all of it.
    “I’m not all right,” she says. She knows that much. “But I’m trying.”

    c o r d i s
    she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
    and she learned a lesson back there in the flames

    Reply
    #4

    gaza

    For as long as he can remember, Gaza has been surrounded by women who look fragile, but have a surprising strength nestled somewhere inside them. His Ima rose from the ashes, reborn from a fiery disaster as a beautiful, loving, gold-and-silver magician. Zilpah, when she put her mind to it, could even be strong in a sweet and innocent sort of way. Camrynn and Pevensie ruled with a gracious, yet firm strength. Dorne was built like a rock and wandered where she would, deciding not to settle until she found the right place. And then there were the ones he didn’t know: Etro (the defiant, lost princess) and Natilyn, and the ghosts of Nocturnal and Morphine and Kagerou, the absence of Quark (who was never coming back). They all carved their mark upon his mother, and she in turn, molded him.

    He is still malleable plastic. Someone could come along and bend him this way and that, and so long as he thought it was reasonable, he would probably just go with it.

    The silver mare says I’m not alright, but I’m trying, and Gaza’s head tilts a little bit to the left as he tries to study her, tries to see into whatever it was that was bothering her. He can’t, of course. All he can see is someone who seems rather sad and whatever that sadness is, has her rooted to the ground, as if she wanted to grow roots and sprout branches and live forever in her memories. And that, in turn, seems sad to him. To be someone who was happiest in their memories is to be lost to the world. Unable to live a full life. What could have happened?

    “I’m sorry…” Gaza says quietly. Earnestly. “Is there anything I can do to help?” He hesitates for a moment, not wanting to scare her off. "I'd like to help, if I can.",/b>

    It doesn’t matter that they’re still strangers.


    vanquish x yael

    Reply
    #5




    She is strong.
    She is strong because she came out of the pits with hellhounds nipping at her heels. She is strong because she learned inside of her there was lightning, a magic electric enough to leave charring and smoking corpses in her wake. She is strong because she found it in herself to love (though that part never really felt like a choice, or a conscious decision – it felt like gravity, like a natural law of things, that somewhere the rules of the universe wrote a sentence for them).

    She is weak.
    She is weak because she wept and blubbered for death, for mercy, as He towered above her, impossibly tall, refusing all her pleas. She is weak because she could not love her own child, her silver-maned daughter. She is weak because she could not stop Him from taking the daughter she did love.
    (She is weak because she did not kill her herself – she knows she should have now, that it would have been a mercy, that death was infinitely better than the pits.)
    She is weak because she let Spyndle leave. Because a part of her was glad when she did.

    The stranger is kind and the kindness hurts, in a way, because she does not want him to be kind. She wants him to be rude, cruel, so she has an excuse to let the lightning lick over her skin like eager jungle cats, tensed and ready.
    But instead there is only kindness, a desire to help her when she is beyond help, and she doesn’t know what to say.
    “He took my daughter,” she says. It is not an answer. She is speaking to him but also she is speaking for the sake of speaking, the masochistic desire to relieve the memory.
    “He took my daughter and I let him because he threatened to kill her if I didn’t,” she laughs. It is a morbid laugh and sounds ugly on her lips.
    “As if she isn’t wishing for death now.”
    (Oh, but she hopes Perse is dead already. She hopes.)

    “I’m sorry,” she realizes she is babbling, a history he has no stake in, “my name is Cordis.”

    c o r d i s
    she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
    and she learned a lesson back there in the flames

    Reply
    #6

    gaza

    Gaza doesn’t mind babbling; he’d grown up with Zilpah for a caretaker, and Lord, that girl could talk herself from the Tundra to the Desert if someone let her. With his sister, it was an effort to be friendly and learn about another; with this one, it seems to stem from somewhere else. Some place riddled with bad memories and fear. It is something he could not heal, not even with kindness (and kindness can kill too; it slays the evil, though evil tends to return, like some insidious, inherent virus).

    I suppose that, like any hot-blooded young male, his desire to help is tied to an inexplicable attraction to the silver mare. She wears her despair like a niqab, allowing only the quiet, subtle beauty of her skin to shine through. It was this (and he’s sure she gets this all the time) that called him over - and the unnatural, ethereal stillness with which she stood. Perhaps it is the Yael, or the Vanquish in him (or both - both were protectors) that makes Gaza want to drape his neck over hers and draw her closer and simply hold her until she falls asleep. What he wants is rooted in innocence and tainted with testosterone, but that is something that he can hold back.

    He is, after all, Good Guy Gaza.

    He shifts his weight from one side to the other, watching the silver mare with  quiet intention and soft eyes. “Don’t apologize, Cordis,” (he tastes her name, and it is sweet and sour in his mouth), “I’m Gaza.”  He pauses and then tries to delicately proceed. “Is there any way we could try and get her… back? I’m pretty strong…” Nevermind that he doesn’t know a single thing about fighting, or that his He she speaks of is far more powerful than even his Ima.

    He doesn't know it would be a suicide mission.

    vanquish x yael

    Reply
    #7




    She grew up alone, save for Him. And they never spoke, not in any real conversation. He would tell her stories, sometimes, when He would return smelling of acrid smoke and charred meat. He rarely hurt her when He told those stories, how He’d burned their cities down, sown their earth with salt. In those times he preferred to press against her as if they were lovers sharing secrets, which was somehow worse than the pain, this macabre intimacy.
    After the stories were done, the wicked tales told, He would begin to hurt her and whatever ways He had envisioned while away, and she would always be grateful.

    She almost laughs despite it all, the hint of mirth in her lips. She envies the boy for his innocence, for thinking she spoke of something that could be beaten.
    (She does not know He has released her daughter, that she walks, smiling, His brand on her neck. That, unlike Cordis, she cherishes the mark and the warmth of it.)
    “No,” she says, “even if He could be fought, I don’t know how to locate her.”
    (She ran from the place, once, but all she remembers is a blur of cracked earth, a pile of bones.)
    “She was the first child I loved,” she says. She still isn’t making sense. She’s speaking with whole histories behind her, worlds Gaza knows nothing of, just as she knows nothing of his. But she cannot help it. The words tumble on her tongue and spill out, as desperate and lost as she is.

    c o r d i s
    she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
    and she learned a lesson back there in the flames

    Reply
    #8

    gaza

    She sounds like she has given up all hope, as if this He she speaks of has committed so many atrocities against her, and there was no way in heaven or earth to make amends. As if He is all powerful, all knowing. As if she were the weakest creature. Insignificance is learned; it is instilled, never born.

    There was something that once made her flee from Him. Once upon a time, she stood up to him, and yet now she bows her head and takes the blows once more.

    He does not know this, of course, but nevertheless, her cowardice is disappointing. He frowns. It doesn’t need to make sense, because even in his naivete, he has seen real grief and knows how it clouds the mind. It is a standing fog, moved only when the mind wills it to. She might be buried beneath wisps that are far too dense and thick for him to navigate. Gaza, however, is nothing if not gallant and persistent - and her skin is too alluring for him to turn away. He takes a step closer. “So that’s it? You’re just giving up…? What if she’s out there, waiting for you to come and rescue her?”

    If anyone were waiting for him, he thinks, he would not rest until he had found them.

    vanquish x yael

    Reply
    #9




    The ones who were not there don’t know. They don’t know what He is like, now. He has passed from king to god, god to myth, myth to legend. He is not a thing to be fought, only survived. Or defied, a few times, like when she brought Spyndle back with the lightning, like when she ran.
    They think Him an opponent. They think Him fallible because they do not know what it’s like to have your skin flayed from the bone, to be burned alive, to be left encased in ice.
    (That was only once. He much preferred fire to ice.)
    She would kill a hundred strangers to bring Perse back, but He is not a stranger, He is all too familiar.

    She doesn’t like this boy, who questions what he does not understand. She does not like him because it makes her wonder, too – what if Perse waits for rescue? She cannot bear the thought of it.
    (She’d never hoped for rescue, herself, but she has been taken to His lair as a newborn, it was all she’d known and the concept of rescue wouldn’t occur to her until she’d been free for days.)
    “I’m not giving up,” she says.
    (Surely she’s not.)
    “He has all the cards. I have to play His game,” she says. It’s her only option.
    (Isn’t it?)

    She says nothing else. Instead she turns, leaves. She does not tell him goodbye.

    c o r d i s
    she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
    and she learned a lesson back there in the flames



    yoooo so cordis wasn't taking this anywhere so i vote we close this out and he meets perse now bc she's actually 'free'
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