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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


    you're ripped at every edge, Garbage
    #1
    “What have I become, my sweetest friend?
    Everyone I know goes away in the end."



    She is no stranger to the cycle of life and death. Most are born and then they die, and perhaps if they are lucky there is some life that happens in between the two events. And then there are the other ones, like her, that for some reason death does not keep. There had not been an afterlife for her. There is not much to remember, although she thinks that she was cold. Sometimes she dreams of an unforgiving sea, being trapped at the bottom of the ocean floor, a blurry light above her that she thinks is the surface. But she cannot be sure if these were dreams or memories. She remembers when she finally escaped, when the seaweed shackles seemed to release their hold and she first gasped in the cold air in the midst of the churning waves. Beqanna was in the throes of the Catastrophe, and when the sea spit her ashore, with seaweed tangled in her mane and starfish clinging to her skin, she does not remember being dead.
     
    Not one to dwell on the past, it only crosses her mind every now and then. Her ability to seemingly forget and push aside her past was the only way she kept herself going. Occasionally a memory linked to a scar across her heart would startle itself awake, usually in her dreams, when she had no control over it. It was then that she would remember that nothing would ever be as it was. She was alone. Anyone that she had ever loved – even those that she had been less than fond of – seemed to be gone, forever. She doesn’t think the sea will be returning them anytime soon.
     
    She could be an apparition, pale and wavering, with empty sockets that sat like depthless caves on either side of what was once a beautiful face. Even with the immortality, she was worn. In some ways she was still lovely, in the same way an old wedding dress might still be viewed as pretty even though it’s time of splendor had long since passed. She is used, she is broken, she is alone. And she doesn’t see the black stallion that is ahead of her on the path that she too walks, but she smells him and she feels him. He is a warm orange and red glow in the middle of this stark winter, and her ghost-white lips pull into a smile. ”Where are you going?” She doesn’t know him, but as was her way, she feels like she does.

    RYATAH
    you could have it all, my empire of dirt


    Hi, I couldn't help myself. I'm pretty rusty so it's a little rambly.
    Reply
    #2
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    Funny, that they should meet.
    Two strangers, both of whom lost their eyes in long-dead kingdoms (hers, to a dark and laughing god; his, to a misguided idea this would save him).
    (Though – his came back. A magician whispered them back, and for the longest time they were amber, like Craft’s, until they weren’t.)
    And then – they should both be dead. They both
    had been dead. And death had found them both lacking.

    He knows none of this, of course. He has only the vaguest memories of his own death, too many of his memories seem to be bleeding away, and this frightens him but also feels like something of a relief. He senses he does not want to relive many of his memories, that there are awful memories mixed in, that he has done any number of terrible things.

    He sees the mare, pale as a spirit with sunken places where her eyes had once been. He feels an immediate stab of pity, taking in the ravages of age across her body – but the basic architecture of her still holds something lovely, a ghost of the beautiful queen she’d once been.
    She smiles at him when she’s closer, and he can’t quite decide if that smile is lovely or ghastly or somehow both things at once. She asks where he is going. He almost laughs.
    “I don’t believe I know,” he says, “only that I think I used to live here, once.”
    He should let her continue on – but he finds himself wanting to stay. There is something about her that a deep and primal part of him recognizes – the undying dead, the remainders of a past while the world has moved on. Detritus.
    “My name is Garbage,” he says, “who are you?”




    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.



    yesss
    Reply
    #3
    “What have I become, my sweetest friend?
    Everyone I know goes away in the end."



    If their histories were displayed before them on a map, they would probably intersect in numerous places. Lovers, enemies, and family members networked across each other like rivers and streams, but still they were complete strangers. She isn’t even sure if his name sounds familiar, because at this point she’s heard almost every name to ever be whispered across these lands, either directly or in passing. It’s come to a point that they are all the same. They are all nameless but glowing (mixtures of red, orange and yellow, so easy to discern against the cold blues, purples and greens of the landscape) images in her mind, their voices the same, their smells the same. But one thing that always stood out to her, and she does not know what it is, and does not know how to place it, is that those that had been here the longest were somehow different. Their ancestry and their stories somehow seeping from their very pores, and she reads them like words on a page.
     
    He is different like that, even though she doesn’t recognize him. She doesn’t try, for she is not concerned with who he used to be. They were both far from their old selves now. ”I think at some point we all lived here,” and there is a hint of laughter as the words roll from her tongue, referring to the meadow itself. She isn’t sure if he means Beqanna as a whole or the very fields that they stand in, but either way, almost everyone at some point seemed to find themselves living in the untamed hills and forests. She herself has not lived within the borders of a kingdom since she was Queen a hundred (literal) years ago. ”I still do. Everywhere that I had once called home doesn’t exist anymore.” The Forsaken Valley and the Forbidden Dale – lost to the abyss forever.

     
    It’s funny, too, how unkind names are completely normal here. She hears his name, and hardly does she flinch. She had birthed a number of her own children, and while they had all been given what she considered to be thoughtful names, one of her daughters had bore a child of incest and thought the name Wretch to be a proper fit for the otherwise beautiful and sweet filly. There is maybe a part of her mind that wonders the circumstances of his birth, and she wants to tell him that she is sure he is not as his name portrays, but instead she only responds with her own. ”Ryatah.” There is nothing else to go with it, just a hollow name, a single word that is not worthy of an explanation.

    RYATAH
    you could have it all, my empire of dirt
    Reply
    #4
    Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
    With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
    And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;



    He doesn’t know what she does, that the years wind themselves into his very blood, the heat-map of him, red and orange and yellow, colors of
    alive. He doesn’t see what she does, but he can read the years well enough, and discern their strange and instant camaraderie, forged by the fact that they are alive when so many others are not.
    He wonders how much she remembers of her long, long life.

    “I know the feeling,” he says, though the kingdoms he was once prince to were never welcoming to him, he has always been a thing of the meadow, nomadic. He can’t recall the kingdom’s name, though, only the feeling of the earth shifting beneath his feet, unsteady. A dry heat prickling at the back.

    He had another name, once, but it was a name that didn’t matter.
    The name that matters is the one his mother spat, vicious even as death crept in -
    you’re nothing. You’re garbage. That’s the name that stuck, the one meant for him, the grotesque rightness of it felt in a fever-throe across his skin.
    Garbage, you’re garbage.
    Ugly, filthy, useless – all synonyms he knew, ones he used, in a life that he no longer quite recalls. Not sin, but the memory of it. The sour aftertaste of bile.
    She has a sweeter name, a thing that rolls from the tongue and has no connotations – none that he knows, anyway. Her name almost sounds familiar, like he may have heard of her, in another life or century.
    “Where was home, Ryatah?”
    He asks this question because he wonders if it will jog his memory. He asks this because he wants to know what place once housed this pale, eyeless woman, as if knowing would explain why she was here, talking to him, engaging with him at all.


    Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
    I never saw a brute I hated so;
    He must be wicked to deserve such pain.


    Reply




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