• Logout
  • 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


    nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet; tiphon
    #1
    Eilidh

    (Everything is different, but it will always be the same.)

    She remembers the words as though she’s only just heard them, like she can still see the morning mist that veiled the meadow that day, like she can still feel the cool earth against the side of her face as she breathed in sweet dew and the soft decay of red maple leaves. It’s gone, though. All of it — that warmth, that lightness, that freedom to just be. Gone.

    And Eilidh is no stranger to absence, but this is new and different. Deceptive, because the world still looks the same.

    Nothing is missing. She still feels the crisp autumn wind sliding through the fractures of leaves, rattling gently on their branches. The sky is still clear and dark, and endless. Like the earth hasn’t tipped on its axis — like it isn’t bleeding devastation through freshly gaping wounds too large and gangrenous to even think about sewing shut. Like nothing is wrong when everything so badly is broken. Here, in the moonlight, with the soft flickering of a thousand gentle stars above her, it isn’t what you expect an apocalypse to look like.

    But the sickness is everywhere.

    With it came the fairies, who had laid an impossible decision before her and told Eilidh to choose: stay and die, or go and live. And the rational parts of her knew that it was a simple decision, but the sad, aching parts of her can’t comprehend life that isn’t here, in the meadow. It seems as though a thousand times she’d tried to leave. As though a thousand times Eilidh had made it as far as the river, but everytime she got so far the memories would break across her like waves and her resolve would crumble like it were only made of smoke and ash.

    What was it to live without the twin oaks and their dappled shade, or the mound of churned earth just behind them that housed her mother’s bones (or, maybe, starlight catacombs) under veils of wildflowers? What was it to live without wading in the river with the warmth of the sun on her back and that wild oak with the twisted trunk just off to the right, witnessing everything?

    What was life without Moselle?

    Today she is trying again, weaving through the bramble and bracken with purpose. From deeper in the thickets she can hear wheezing, and she holds her breath even if she’s not certain she wants to live through this.

    Because her mother came from the stars, and it had felt like all her life it had been just for her.
    Because she can’t leave her here alone.

    Because.

    A light in the darkness,” she repeats, her mantra — her lifeline. And then, when she rounds a curve in the path and sees him before her, an impermeable mass shrouded in shadow:

    Are you alive?


     

    ⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛





    @[Tiphon] I hope the new thread is okay, but let me know if you want me to edit and add to the original with the plague situation and all.
    Reply
    #2
    BUT HOW COULD YOU KNOW THE SWEETEST SUFFERING
    OF MOVING ON
    Fascination glimmers in his molten eyes as he exhales a warm breath into cold, wintry air. The plume of vapor winds and twists, dancing in front of him before dissipating like it never existed. Another exhalation resumes the show, holding Tiphon’s attention and distracting him from the surrounding disarray. There is beauty in everything – one must simply find it. As much as he trembles underneath the oppressive hand of winter, he still looks endearingly at the frost-kissed branches. Beqanna is drowning with disease and mayhem shackled to its feet, plummeting much like Pangea had decades ago.

    Pangea, yes, he remembers that. Even Ischia!

    The names of the lands somehow ring a bell, and they had a touch of familiarity when the awakening voice mentioned Beqanna.

    A consideration to help floods through the gates of his mind, swelling him with an unlikely expectation that he can heal them all. A light in the darkness – that is what they said he is, right? Yet the idea wracks his body with anticipated exhaustion. Could he do it? Perhaps, but he is still just trying to remember how to walk, run, and fly.

    His wings sweep down, cupping the frigid wind. The feathers ruffle, but he quickly tucks them back to his sides, feeding off their additional warmth as the sun hides behind another cluster of gray clouds.. Tiphon peers up then back down when a honeyed voice kisses his ears and melts away the ice. Are you alive, she asks, and he cannot help to look over his shoulder to confirm whether or not they are alone. First his left, then his right, but he sees no one. Her gaze settles delicately on him and he hesitates while determining the validity of everything he sees, hears, and feels. Humming thoughtfully, he brushes his muzzle along a foreleg then levels his gilded eyes on her. ”I think so,” his voice is inquisitive, not entirely confident. What if this is a dream and the abysmal darkness from where he came is still his reality?

    ”What about you? Are you real?” He edges closer, lured by the enticement of contact. Her body heat extends its fingers toward him and pulls him in until his muzzle caresses the gentle curve of her shoulder. ”You’re real,” he breathes in a low whisper, his eyes drifting shut as he eases back, putting a small amount of space between them again. ”What happened?” And he allows his gaze to drift across the meadow in indication before settling on her again.


    TIPHON
    STARLACE AND INFECTION
    Reply
    #3
    Eilidh

    Eilidh hopes that he is breathing, but she had heard the wheezing that came from the copse and steadies herself to learn an she might not like. It was hard to see him before, and when she’d called out into the night she hadn’t been entirely certain she wasn’t only asking the shadows, but a single, silvery veil of moonlight reaches down through the night then and a halo of light illuminates him. 

    Eilidh sees then that he is beautiful instead of sick.

    “A light in the darkness,” she whispers again into the night, clutching these five words like a prayer. He reminds her of a beacon, white and gold with gently feathered wings, and for a moment she quietly wonders if death can really come so easy — if he is here for her, to call her back home to the stars. If Moselle has sent him.

    She would leave before her next breath if it were true.

    “I think so,” comes his answer, though not entirely confidently.
    “What about you? Are you real?”

    When she looks up to meet his gaze, Eilidh tilts her head to the left ever-so-slightly in contemplation. If he had asked her before the moon had taken it upon itself to cradle his face in the palm of its silvery hand, she would have answered: "Yes". Now she isn’t sure. Maybe she isn’t real. Maybe the sickness has already taken her. Maybe she’s translucent, floating outside of a corpse she does not notice, nothing but a ghost destined to haunt this same meadow, again and again and again, until she dissipates into the river and its mist.

    Would it be so bad?

    But he moves forward like he knows her, and ascertains that she is anyways when he touches her. She almost winces. It’s been so long since she’s felt someone else against her skin, and it ignites a coalition under her skin that protests for more; she almost steps into it, into him — like please, save me. Of course she looks at him delicately; nothing about her is strong — not her small, waiflike body, not her fragile bones or bleeding heart. That’s why she is here in this meadow. That’s why she has chosen death, again and again and again.

    “You’re real,” he breathes.

    Painfully so, she is reminded.
    The stars have never felt so far before.

    “What happened?”

    It is her mother’s soft, dark eyes that look up at him in these moments. So much of her had belonged to Moselle first; her lips, her skin, her dreams. How does she translate into words all the terrible ways this world is ending? How does she look into his beautiful face and not see disease creeping in to ruin it? How can she express that the danger now is all around them, that it lies in wait between the molecules and next to the atoms of everything?

    It would be easier to say His name, but she can’t bring herself to conjure even the letters of it. Somehow she knows who is behind it, even without witnessing it, even without being told — like he had breathed life into some dark mark bred inside her bones (the only thing her father ever gave her) the day he had come for her mother; the day that she had buried her in the earth.

    “You have to go,” she cannot say ‘we’ — not when she has stopped shoulder-deep in the river water a thousand times before this.

    “Everyone is sick. Everyone is dying.”

     

    ⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛





    @[Tiphon]
    Reply
    #4
    BUT HOW COULD YOU KNOW THE SWEETEST SUFFERING
    OF MOVING ON
    He would have welcomed her into his arms; he would never turn away the intimacy of an embrace, or even just a steady, long touch. How long has it been? Truthfully, he isn’t quite certain. The abysmal darkness held nothing for him – no love, no touch, no conversation. Silence and solitude reigned in the void from where he rested, awakened only by a strange voice in these troubled times. To be here, with her, makes him question reality, but the tangibility of her flesh gave him hope that this is all true and not a dream.

    She is his anchor.

    Despite the morbidity of the world around them, Tiphon still offers a feeble grin until she warns him to leave – not them, he notices. Only him. ”I couldn’t leave without you,” he whispers in the foray, setting aside their roles as strangers. In a place of chaos and turmoil, friends are most necessary. Her company, at minimum, can brighten the dismal tone engulfing him. Even as her voice mingles with solemnity, Tiphon tries to reel her from it. He nearly touches her again, craving the warmth of her skin, but he refrains as he looks to either side. Many have fled, but there are still quite a few stragglers who seem unfazed by the outbreak. Are they truly in so much danger?

    Yet, even as he considers the magnitude of the sickness, Tiphon remains rooted here, to this moment with her.

    His brows quiver worriedly, his eyes searching her face for the answers and questions that remain unspoken. ”I can’t run away,” he admits with a deep heaviness, ”I need to help in any way I can, while I can.” He’s unsure whether he’s immune to the spread, and while he doesn’t want to test it, he also doesn’t want to abandon all hope. The pull in his heart tethers him to the land of suffering, but he is also aware of sanctuaries scattered around Beqanna. ”There are safe havens. We could find one, together, and I can try to help.” Whether she will acquiesce is another challenge of its own.

    He considers it, considers her.

    ”Why are you here?” The question slips before he can even grab and take it back, like water through his fingers. It hangs sharply in the space between them, quietly demanding an answer. ”Why didn’t you flee?”

    And while he desperately wants to know, he also fears the answer.



    TIPHON
    STARLACE AND INFECTION



    @[Eilidh]
    Reply
    #5
    Eilidh

    “I couldn’t leave without you.”

    He could though, couldn’t he? He could, because despite a warm familiarity that lingers there in the dark of his eyes they are only strangers; he owes nothing to her for stumbling across him in the darkness, as though he were a lighthouse and she was lost at sea. He could, because in this new world that still looks like the old one strangers don’t give each other anything except for sickness.

    He tells her he can’t run. He tells her that he knows that there are safe havens (and somehow, for some reason, she doesn’t question how he knows — it just makes sense). He asks her to run with him and save the world, and while Eilidh admires him for his own unique perfection, how his heart is as kind and pure as his face is beautiful, she doesn’t have it in her to pretend.

    Eilidh knows better than anyone that not everyone can always be helped.

    “Why are you here?”

    And all it takes is only four words, and four syllables, to bring her back to autumn. She doesn’t even notice what he asks her next because all that she can hear is the gentle shake of hardened leaves as the rattle and fall from the boughs of a tree that exists only in her memories, a tree that looks like it might be on fire for all the colour that it carries. He might notice her eyes glazing, or it might be too dark to see how vacant they become when all she sees is the way the sunlight refracted then off the dew in the long, meadow grass and shone it gold. She can still smell the tangle of his sweat mixed with earthy decay.

    (Tell me, Eilidh. Why are you still here?)

    There are parts of her that fear the answer, too.

    She draws herself back into the present again, but doesn’t know if she can bring herself to tell him the answer out loud. It wasn’t always so difficult. That day in the autumn under the violent red boughs of a maple tree where they had lain side-by-side against the earth with the dappled light to warm their skin, it was almost easy.

    “I don’t know if I want to be saved.”

    And there it is, the confession she hasn’t been bold enough to even admit to herself, even silently inside the safety of her own skin. She’d made excuses. She’d crafted careful metaphors using ghosts, and haunts, and cities, and stars — but they were all lies.

    So, here it is, laid bare: her truth.


     

    ⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛





    @[Tiphon]
    Reply
    #6
    BUT HOW COULD YOU KNOW THE SWEETEST SUFFERING
    OF MOVING ON
    He didn’t expect her answer to hurt as badly as it does. The words cut deeply into him, leaving raw gashes in their wake. A look of surprise nearly peeks out from behind his forelock, but the long silence is enough to betray him. Everyone wants to be saved, or so he thought. In passing, he has witnessed the blood dribbling from nostrils, the bones painstakingly poking through emaciated bodies, and the fever-riddled trembles. It frightens him. Never before, to his knowledge, has he seen such an epidemic. In truth, he wants to run now and to cower from the plague as it ravages across Beqanna, but his feet are rooted. While a sliver of cowardice lives inside them all, it’s his pride and sense of purpose that seemingly dictates his moves and decisions.

    Here, with her, he will remain.

    In his chest, Tiphon can almost hear the drumming of his heart as the world passes them by with hardly notice. A fleeting glance sees a lumbering stallion, but his eyes immediately return to her – whose name still remains unknown – and he steadies the thrumming pulse of his blood. In this moment, right now, it’s only her that matters. Even if he may be the only one to care, even if for only the extent of this conversation, Tiphon can at least brighten the world up a little with love, care, and adoration.

    A failed judgment almost slips past his lips. Nearly, he tells her that she is wrong, that she cannot possibly believe that, but who is he to make such claims to a stranger? What strife, beyond this, has plagued her to a point that it has dismissed her will to stay healthy and to, possibly, survive? A sigh slips through him like the steady winter gale. A feeble grin tries desperately to waver the concerned expression of his face. It barely reaches his eyes before a rolling cloud shrouds him in shadows. His body remains alight as though having absorbed the sunlight from before this plague. ”Maybe you just don’t know yet that you want to escape, that you actually don’t want to stay here.” A shrug ripples through his shoulders, hope filling his thoughts as she looks at her.

    ”Please tell me,” he adds with a gentle tenderness, ”what is your name?”


    TIPHON
    STARLACE AND INFECTION



    @[Eilidh]
    Reply
    #7
    Eilidh

    Of course it’s too soon.
    Of course it’s too bold a statement to lay on the shoulders of a stranger.

    She isn’t certain why she’s said it at all, why today, wrapped in moonlight with him is the time to let truth spill out between her teeth and through her soft lips — enough of it to drown him with.. Eilidh regrets it almost instantly, because she can almost feel the ways that she wounds him, so evident and marked is the pain expressed through the lines of his face.

    For a long while a silence settles between them, marred only by distant hacks and groans; the sick.

    “Maybe you just don’t know yet that you want to escape, that you actually don’t want to stay here.”

    He wants to believe she is something that she isn’t — strong enough. The truth is that now, with those caged words finally free and in flight, she has never been so sure of anything. Why else would she meet the river, again and again and again, and never cross it?

    Likely, it is too late for her anyways.
    Likely, the sickness already has her.

    But maybe it isn’t for him.

    “You’re right, of course,” she says, with the gentle shake of her head as though she means to snap herself out of this wrongful conclusion when she is only really lying through her teeth. He is too beautiful, too simple and pure to be swallowed by this; her light in the darkness. He could be saved, at least.

    Maybe she could do this one last thing.

    “The river is this way,” she moves to step around him, pointing with her nose through the path just beyond them that weaves haphazardly through the night. She can almost hear the water already, the soft trickle of its movement over rocks and around gently expanding fragments of ice that look more like shards of glass; a symbol of peace amidst the calamity of the contagion.

    And though the night is well upon them, though it holds everything — ground, sky, landmarks — cradled in its soft, velvet arms, she turns down the shrouded path towards the river.

    Eilidh would know the way with her eyes closed by now.

    “My name is Eilidh. Who are you?”
    Or what, are you?

     

    ⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛





    @[Tiphon] This post brought to you by fever, so apologies if it doesn't make any sense.
    Reply
    #8
    BUT HOW COULD YOU KNOW THE SWEETEST SUFFERING
    OF MOVING ON
    She regrets her confession, but Tiphon embraces it.

    The words play like strings of a harp in his mind, echoing across the walls endlessly, beautifully. Although the notes of solemnity weigh them down, there is still an elegance in the way she admits that perhaps she doesn’t want an escape. At least, he thinks, she didn’t outright say that she wanted to die.

    Maybe, just maybe, that’s what happened to him. Death may have choked him of air and dragged him into the black void where he rested amid nothingness. It was torture. It was lonely.

    When Tiphon regards her, it’s still with a look of hope. She is letting slip her grip on this life, but he is here to hold her hand even if for just a moment. Even as she confirms that he is right, that it could simply be ignorance, he cannot help but wonder if she is genuine. Deep in his bones, he assumes not. He considers that she is rescuing him from the inner workings of a darker place, but he plays along with a smile and nod. ”Yes, the river,” he takes a place at her side and takes notice of how easily she navigates even as nightfall looms ever nearer. An occasional glance finds her, softly illuminated by his own aura, and he takes note of every line and every curve of her face. The way her eyes map out the world and lead them to a place they’ve seen multiple times before.

    In the darkness, when she is distracted, Tiphon frowns.

    His own gaze roams to the grotesque trees and their bare branches then to the withered ground where so many have walked. Periodically, his body or wing brushes against her, but it’s enough reassurance that she is there and guiding his foolish self into a world he doesn’t remember. ”Eilidh,” he again looks at her when he utters her name into the silence. There aren’t even crickets chirping or owls hooting in preparation for a long night. Everything is quiet except for the muffled thuds of their footsteps. ”It’s a beautiful name,” he admits coolly with a crooked grin. ”I’m Tiphon.” It’s still so new, such a fresh thing, to hear his name spoken from his own tongue.

    Even just the sound of his voice is alien.

    ”Why?” He suddenly asks, unable to further contain the curiosity that is swimming to his surface. ”Why do you want to stay?” In reality, she doesn’t have to tell him. It isn’t his business, but he tries to make it be. She, by coming to him in the chaos and offering a soft hand, has become his interest, his own cast line of hope. Without her knowing, he clutches her name tightly to his heart and memory, never wanting to let go.


    TIPHON
    STARLACE AND INFECTION



    @[Eilidh]
    Reply
    #9
    Eilidh

    They chase the night together, weaving through the tangled branches of trees left sagging under the weight of snow as though they’ve always done it. For some leg of the journey she takes the lead, glancing across her shoulders now and then to find the light hitting the tops of her cheekbone and assuring her that he is still real and not a figment of her own exhausted imagination. It’s good that here and there the shadows fall across his face and disguise his expressions, that way she doesn’t see the war she’s begun inside his bones.

    Because if it’s possible for words to become swords with sharp and steely edges, then it’s possible that she herself has become a warrior, or a gladiator, because there are so many wounds that she leaves on his skin where there should only be sentences.

    She thinks that they are done talking salvation, but it is still bubbling under the surface of his skin unseen because the way he says her name as they are walking makes him an artist in her eyes; how he draws out the shapes of each letter across his tongue until what comes together is a masterpiece. He tells her it’s a beautiful name, and she thinks that it must be if he decides it. He should know, shouldn’t he?

    I’m Tiphon.”

    She doesn’t speak when he offers his own, not to taste the syllables of it, or drink down the sound of it like wine though there are parts of her that reason to. She keeps it safe regardless, tucked neatly in the plot of empty land between the things that are special to her and the things that don’t make sense. Tiphon.

    A light in the darkness.

    And then he asks her why she wants to stay, as though shrouded in the contagion he can’t see the beauty of midnight in the meadow; how time seems to stand still, how even the crickets could find peace here. The answer is easy. Moselle. It comes, her name, to sit anxious on her tongue before she knows that swallowing it down is even an option.

    “It means light,” she confesses in the dark, referring to her name and full of truths tonight. She doesn’t tell him about the way that her mother’s eyes had softened every time she had ever spoken it out loud, as though reminded of a promise she should never forget. “My mother is here,” she says before she can stop herself, but she doesn’t say that she exists now in a shallow grave beneath a mountain of earth that Eilidh herself had moved for her; she doesn’t say that she is bones and dirt.

    “She’s all that’s ever felt like home to me. If I leave I’m just left to listen to my heart calling me back.”

    Then the slow trickle of water comes from nowhere, and the world opens up for the river before them. She pauses on the bank, her muscles wound like tightly coiled springs and here and there they flinch under her skin and betray her hesitation. She meets his eyes then, turning her cheek again to find his light.

    “Do you know what that’s like?”

     

    ⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛





    @[Tiphon]
    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)