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    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


    [mature]  shut your mouth, baby, stand and deliver... ivar
    #1
    The warmth of spring peels back the snow cover, revealing the winter’s kill. Wet hide sloughs away from gnawed bone and stinking meat. The Meadow lies eviscerated at her weathered hooves.

     She is old now - her back swayed, joints swollen with arthritis. Time had stolen her beauty long ago. Perhaps as a mercy time had also stolen most of her sight. Still, the old hag preens her tattered coat, unable to shed the filth of winter. How maddening the summers had been the last few years after her body refused to release that heavy winter coat.

     Mallek crinkles her nose at the stench of death that seems to have permeated her hollow in the trees. Slowly and in feeble, shuffling steps, the hag wanders in an attempt to escape, but the smell follows. After a time night falls and the rush of water reminds her of her thirst. She makes her way to the edge of the River, a place she has never been and perhaps never will again.

    -Mallek

    @Ivar
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    #2
    Snowmelt makes the water frigid, so the kelpie braves dry land in search of more comfortable temperatures. The spring's night air is tepid at best, but at least it is not freezing. Ivar has grown accustomed to the tropics, to the ever-warm waters that feel like a second skin. His hide offers no insulation, but at the the hard scales aren't unpleasant to look at. Mostly a deep sapphire blue, interspersed here and there with gold, the same metallic shade between his opalescent white markings.

    In every way, the two of them are opposites.

    Yet when Ivar's flickering ears catch the sound of a faltering step and he first sees the dark mare, he is transfixed. Motionless but for his golden eyes and flaring nostrils, the kelpie watches her make her way closer to the River. Closer to him. Prey, moving near: old and weak and easy. He waits, a practiced hunter, and then takes a step forward just in time to cross her path as if on accident.

    "What brings you out tonight?" He asks with a half-smile on his impossibly handsome face. There's nothing but genuine interest in his golden gaze. He knows better than to let the mask slip. The way he settles his weight on one white-stockinged leg suggests he intends to stay and listen to the answer rather than continuing on, but he seems to offer her an out when he adds: "Though if you're on your way to meet someone, don't let me stop you."
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    #3
    At best the old mare sees only shadows, but nightfall brings utter darkness to those clouded eyes. In her youth Mallek had been quite beautiful. Her hair had been as fine and as soft as silk. Her coat gleamed brilliantly white with only a few well placed sorrel spots. But as beautiful as she may have been on the outside, her heart had always been an ugly, thorny place.

     How many children had she birthed and then abandoned? How many hearts had she crushed beyond repair because hers could never be whole? How many of her children had gone on to create havoc and ruin because their own mother could not, would not guide them.

     She thinks of Azkaban, her dark servant of the Chamber of Evil. She thinks of his sins - those he had raped and imprisoned in that putrid pit. She thinks of Shatterflesh and the night he took her… or had she taken him? She thinks of their inbred son, Deatheater, and how she left him to fend for himself as a newborn, too ashamed to look at him.

     The stranger’s words do little to rouse her from those memories. They seem distant, even as if they were under water. The past drowns her this night.

     “What brings you out tonight?” the kelpie says, his voice as soothing and as sinister as the rush of the riptide. “Though if you’re on your way to meet someone, don’t let me stop you.”

     How many men had she met in the dark of night just like him? (Though perhaps less toothy).

     “I won’t.” she replies, her throat full of phlegm and grit. She holds back a cough as she attempts to move past him, closer to the water’s edge.

     Let the past drown her this night.

    -Mallek

    @Ivar - feel free to power play however you see fit.
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    #4
    Her faded looks are of no concern to the golden-eyed hunter. Beautiful or ugly, they are all the same beneath the water - quiet and still and perfect. She attempts to move past him and for a moment it seems that Ivar intends to let her pass. He takes a step to the side, but as the bony mare passes by his shoulder bumps ever so gently against her hip.

    get into the water.

    It's a simple command, easy to follow, and Ivar glances back to see that the pale mare is already up to her chest in the icy water. For the first time his sharp eyes skim her scrawny frame with something more than open hunger. Will she even survive a swim out to the open sea in her shape?

    It doesn't matter, he decides , and slips into the water behind her.

    dive, he commands as his muzzle brushes against the bone of her hip adding: happily out of caution. The past few years have been spent honing this skill, and Ivar is all too familiar of the consequences of an unsuccessful hunt.

    All a passerby will see is two horses going for a swim. They both dive eagerly beneath the dark water, and only one will emerge again.
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    #5
    “Get into the water.” he commands, though his voice is unheard, rather he speaks directly into her mind - bending feeble synapses to his will. He must be gentle so as not to break her completely before his fun is through. She obeys. The river pulls against her feeble legs, ice cold. Her joints scream at first, but then she grows numb, moonlight peering through the treetops to illuminate only a shadow of the beauty she once held.

     “Dive.” the voice comes again. “Happily.” he adds. Mallek laughs, then coughs, then sputters. Then she plunges beneath the surface and she does not rise again.

     When the water fills her lungs, the kelpie releases his control - releases that command of happiness so that she might die in the misery she deserves. Fear - terrible and raw, fills her as the water does, and it is heavy. So heavy.

     Deep into that darkness she sinks - lifeless eyes frozen in terror as the undertow takes her away.

     Old wretched hag. This was more than the death she deserved.
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