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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


    the animal within; argo
    #1

    Keeper-

    The bear came in the night, keen to feed.

    It snuffled the ground, smelled the horses, and it’s brain recognized them as a source of meat. But in the same spark of recognition, it realized that horses were too big and too full of health to hunt. It needed something small or lame, none of which these horses were. So it turned its attention to the river - rivers had fish and fish was good. Each thought was primitive even though it’s brain was more developed than that. It had yet to recognize such development and kept to the baser aspects of the bear’s nature. Like recognizing the fact that the bear was starving.

    She - for the bear has a certain sex to it, lumbered down the bank and into the shallows, looks upriver and downriver and focuses on a bend full of rocks that narrows it into a form of rapids. Grunting, the bear moves there and lifts her upper body out of the river and onto the rock, supporting herself with one paw on the slippery-slick stone. The other paw begins to swipe methodically into the rapids, coming up empty-handed most of the time. She tries and tries again and then, success! Her paw comes up with a fat wriggling salmon that she throws onto the riverbank. The bear continues her fishing until she has three decent sized salmon expiring on the grass where she’s thrown them.

    It is enough for this night’s meal and she leaves the river to sit back on her thick furry haunches before the fish. She picks one up in her paws and tears into the soft pink belly with her teeth. Her bear-brain recognizes the salmon as good eating and she picks the bones of all three clean then curls up to sleep, her stomach happily fat and full from her first meal.

    This is when Keeper wakes up.
    She blinks the sleep back from her eyes and stares at the fog blanketing the river in the early morning hours. It looks so pretty from where she lays, close enough to stretch her neck out and peer into the water except that she doesn’t - her nostrils are working fast against the musky aroma of an animal that seems to surround her. She recognizes it as bear but has no recollection of how she came to be by the river at night let alone brave enough to fall asleep there. Nevermind the fact that a bear had come sniffing by her while she slept! Horrified, she climbs to her feet in a rush and takes a step backward only to met with a most unsatisfying crunch - -

    Keeper cranes her around and down to discover some fishbones underfoot. Her hoof had crushed the pale thin backbone that was all that remained of one of the salmon. How could she have slept through that? A bear eating salmon ought to have been noisy enough to wake her from even the deepest sleep and make her move on. That was when Keeper began to feel dread pool in the pit of her stomach, leaden and heavy. She hadn’t felt right since heeding the fairy’s call to the mountain and having quite the experience that she had yet to tell anyone about. Yes, she began to realize that something was not quite right....

    She sniffed the ground, confused as to why her smell was all tangled up with the bear’s smell. Her nose moved over the salmon bones, unaware that she had a few in her mane from where they’d fallen into the bear’s neck-scruff and carried on over during the change to remain stuck in her own hair. Keeper lifted her head after some time and stared at the foggy river, but it had no answers for her because whenever she looked in it to check her reflection, all she saw was a mare with dark troubled eyes. There was no sign of the bear not that she recognized it in herself at the moment because it lay dormant, as if in hibernation.

    This is when she wished with fervent desperation that the piebald stallion was around. The one of moonlight and lakewater, who had constellations she’d yet to name scattered across his dark skin. His fur contained galaxies that Keeper’s mouth begged to explore even now in the heart of her confusion - not for him, but for the strange proceedings of the morning that left her feeling sick and dumb with dread.

    What had happened? She wondered, could only wonder because there were not enough answers on the riverbank to all the questions that Keeper suddenly had.

    not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless



    @[Argo]

    it didn't turn out half as well as i had originally imagined but it's up and new and yeah lol <3
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