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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


    Death is inevitable
    #1

    She is disfigured and pregnant.
    Harmonia - once known for her beautiful, youthful, innocent appearance has been disfigured by that rat bastard Longclaw (may he rest in pieces, not in peace) when he decided to blow up into oblivion. The entire right side of her body is charred and refuses to heal.
    This angers her.
    She shifts and changes and melts and still the burns persist, making each movement painful beyond recognition. As a magician she's never felt pain before - she doesn't understand it. She has no memory of feeling it ever in her long, long life.
    Yet here she is - suffering.

    ****


    She knew where her mother would be.
    Pangea - rising from the sea, smelling of death and decay - was the only place that welcomed the palomino mare. Everyone else hated her, saw her for the monster she was. Ajatar was not longer afraid of her mother. She saw what her raw power could do.
    More importantly, the whispers of others convinced her that his death was not her fault.
    It was her mothers.
    And her mother should pay.


    ****


    Harmonia is where it is expected - in the center of the mess, lounging in the horrific remains of what was once a moderately livable kingdom. Now? Now the sewage reeks and the trash all but floats around her. She's knee deep in it, letting the sickly lagoon water and refuse cling to her dead flesh. It's the only break from pain she can find - to slather herself in the mud and glower at any one who dare come too close.

    Ajatar finds her without any trouble. The palomino looks disgusting, pregnant, covered in mud and scarred and burnt.
    Ajatar laughs.

    "To think I used to be afraid of you...look at you now."


    The palomino looks up and her eyes narrow into slits - angry slits - the right eye blood shot and white to the core from the burns. "I'd watch your words, daughter," she spits in return. For as much as Ajatar now blames her mother, her mother blames Ajatar more.
    'I gave birth to you,' she thinks. 'and this is how you repay me.'

    "Or what?" Ajatar feels the confidence surface from somewhere she'd never felt before. Where there once was a meek but friendly child becomes an angry young woman. Her lineage defines her more than she knows, and now she is squared off against the palomino with no intention of backing down.

    Harmonia has played this game before and won.

    Ajatar unleashes the first bit of her pox, reveling as the ground decays more and the stench rises to choke them both. She laughs as she traces the lines of the disease to her mother, watching it wind up her legs and cause her knees to buckle.

    But Harmonia is not standing still. Mischief magic is unreliable at best, but with a master like Harmonia it's nothing short of caustic. She fights back with her own illusions of Longclaw's death, played out over and over again in front of her daughter. She feels her power waver, feels the girl become sad instead of angry, feels her power falter...

    ...until Ajatar's heart breaks open. Or maybe it ices over. Maybe it blackens.
    It has become angry, and it unleashes more power than she knows what to do with.
    The plague accelerates and pushes Harmonia down.
    Her lungs hemorrhage
    Her eyes bleed
    The pox climbs quickly and fatally across her body - scarred and burnt and healthy alike


    But Harmonia has one last trick up her sleeve.
    With her dying bit of magic she does not attack her daughter. Rather, she does something more damaging - she places the baby inside of her.
    Her full brother
    "His name is Kave," she says with an awful smile before she dies.

    ****


    When magicians die it is not quietly
    Ajatar is spent - fallen forward in the refuse, pox scarring her own scaled legs, her stomach now swollen with pregnancy
    She watches in horror as Harmonia dies and the magic within her escapes
    She watches as her mother falls one last time into the muck, sinking deep down under its pull
    She watches as a light - ugly, muted - sizzles into the air and into the ground
    She watches - before she passes out - as the magic goes into the land.



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