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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


    [open]  no gentle word could wake me from this slumber; any
    #1
    leliana

    I could hear the thunder and see the lightning crack
    and all around the world was waking, I never could go back

    It is strange to be a thing made new.

    She has spent so much of her life helping others blossom, helping others find renewal and healing, but she herself has never focused on her own. She had run herself into the ground. She has worn herself until she was threadbare and sick with it. She had given away all the pieces of her heart—losing the core of it.

    So how strange then that she is to be razed to the earth and built again entirely.

    She marvels at the new magic in her veins, at the way it pulses with a life of its own. It makes the healing of her past—that strange and wondrous magic that it had been—feel so trivial, so weak. She struggles to comprehend how she had spent so much of her life dedicated to what now feels like dust in the wind.

    She isn’t sure how she gets to the River. 

    She doesn’t remember traveling, however she did; all she knows is she is standing there before she knows anything else. It is dark, but she doesn’t struggle to see. The details of the landscape are as detailed and fine as if the sun hung high in the sky, but even this does not surprise her. None of it does.

    When she had been a girl, her gifts had been wonderful things. She had marveled at them. She had been in awe of them as they had unspooled from her chest and she had been overjoyed when she had finally learned how to harness them—but this? This doesn’t strike any chord in her chest.

    It simply is.

    There is a fraction of a frown as it crosses her features but it is swept away as she lifts her fine head, peering into the churning water. Once, this had been a place of beauty and sorrow and grief. It had been where she had met him, where she had come to mourn alone, where she had given birth to her daughter.

    But these are just facts and figures.

    They mean nothing to her.

    (They should, they should.)

    It is dust in her mouth, nothing compared to the heavens spinning out into the edges of her veins. She breathes deep, tasting the stars on her tongue, and tips her head back, staring out into the abyss.

    [ no more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world ]



    @[Kyra] - in case you want to post. <3
    [Image: avatar-1975.gif]
    the heaviness in my heart belongs to gravity
    Reply
    #2

    my soul is in the sky

    The land is just a land, the place just a place. The River holds no meaning for her, but neither does the Beach though it should. It was the place she was born, after all, the place where her mother died in the very next breath. It should matter, but the world has always been so much bigger than a place or a horse she never truly knew. The world was the sky to her; it was the wind and the birds and the rain; it was freedom.

    Her mother was nothing more than a construct in her mind, a collection of stories told to her as a child. Those stories were, likely, far from the truth. They painted her mother into something perfect – too perfect – to be believable. Perhaps her mother had been good, but no one was perfect, and Rae knows she will never know the truth of her mother or her father. No one had even been able to tell her stories of her father except that he controlled lightning and her mother controlled electricity. Together they made Rae, who simply controlled the sky.

    No, she did not control. Controlled was the wrong word. Rae was the sky. Her breath was the wind, her heartbeat was thunder, her tears were the rain.

    Rae has never been made new, for she has always been the sky, but she can appreciate the simplicity of the world in a way. She can feel the sky as this mare must now feel the cosmos, though the concept of earth is still a foreign thing to Rae. Rae may not have magic, but she was born made of the sky, and so she knows the taste of it well enough.

    Her birds catch sight of the mare who simply appears by the river tonight. Beautiful they tell her, though they give her nothing more than that. It’s all Rae needs though, because not everyone catches the attention of her birds. They are her eyes and ears now, her friends in Beqanna. She’s made few other friends, not that she has tried. She blames no one but herself, and cares even less, simply because she has not tried. Perhaps one day she would try, but today, she cared only to meet the mare that interested her birds.

    Leaving her cloud behind, Rae takes to the sky again, following the direction of the birds that had first spotted her. Clouds had a tendency to drift, and Rae had gone farther than she realized, but still it does not take her long to find the other mare. Her sight may not be great at night, but she doesn’t need it up here to navigate.

    Nor does she need night vision to spot the mare. Her birds were right, she is beautiful indeed, a sunset splashed into the darkness. Rae nickers, landing softly nearby, tucking her wings to her side and she closes the remaining distance on hoof. “Hello,” she says, warming the air around them slightly to remove the bitter chill. “What do you seek up there?” she asks, gesturing to the place the mare gazes. After all, the mare gazes into Rae’s domain, and in this, perhaps she can help.

    rae

    image


    @[leliana] - hi Smile
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    #3
    leliana

    I could hear the thunder and see the lightning crack
    and all around the world was waking, I never could go back

    She feels her coming before she arrives and does not question just how she does. She just knows it in her bones, some piece of her recognizing the weight and feel of her presence. It is strange to be given all of these pieces of knowledge and no explanation of what to do with it, how to leverage it.

    It is strange and disconcerting and yet somehow right.

    In Loess, her eyes had burned like magma and the volcanos of her home; it had been fitting, a mark of her rebirth in the fires that raged in her veins. Here, her eyes have cooled to the silver of the stars glittering overhead—but they still glow, that moonlight around her pulsing ever so slightly with her every breath.

    She brings her attention back down to the earth, to the woman of gold and ivory and cerulean. She studies her for a moment, taking in the way she warms the air curling around them and how it responds to her, how it seemingly is her—how it simply ebbs and flows in time with her very being.

    “Is it strange that I have the answer before I have the question?” Her lips curve upward, but the motion is more of an automatic reflex than any true emotional response. Still, the result is lovely all the same; the beauty that had once been stripped of her, drained from her, has flooded through her once more. She is rich mahogany and curves and lovely—more lovely than she had ever been during her previous life.

    “Rae, what leaves you rooted to the earth when your heart is up there?”

    The question comes to her lips before she even has time to wrap her mind around it. It is merely there, dripping and hanging in between them, but she doesn’t question that either.

    Perhaps she is simply curious to learn everything she can.

    Perhaps she wants to know how to remain grounded when everything within her is splintering apart.

    [ no more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world ]



    @[Rae] <333
    [Image: avatar-1975.gif]
    the heaviness in my heart belongs to gravity
    Reply
    #4

    my soul is in the sky

    Rae doubts she would want more knowledge of the world than she already has. She can feel the sky and the birds and the direction of the wind. She cannot imagine feeling the earth too and all the creatures that call it home. For one, she has no interest, but secondly, it seems simply like too much. To know it all, to feel it all, seems like a weight she does not want to bear. A weight that a girl made of wind and rain and storms cannot imagine wearing, a weight that feels too much like roots.

    Then again, perhaps it is not roots at all. Perhaps it is like the wind and the sky in its vast, wide expanse to know so much. She will, likely, never know what it is like, though she does not lament this not knowing. What she does know is enough, and she wants nothing else.

    The idea of roots sometimes sits with her though. Rae spends so much time watching them live that she has begun to wonder what it is like to live tethered to the ground and not to the sky. Some part of her longs for the companionship that comes with it, but she cannot fathom giving up the sky and has not yet begun to figure how one might be able to have both.

    Is it strange that I have the answer before I have the question? comes the reply, and Rae finds that her lips curve into a a wicked little half grin. “No, not in this place.” This place meaning Beqanna. Rae has seen so many places. In some, magic is even more rampant than here, though in many there is little to no magic at all. Beqanna sits on the upper end of “magical” so to speak, and as such, Rae is not particularly surprised by this mare.

    After all, Rae is the wind and the sky, and they are limitless. She has seen it all, and so, it is hard to surprise the sky-dipped mare.

    The next question is more personal, though again, not shocking. Rae literally wears her heart on her coloring, on her obvious affinity for the sky down to the bird-like way she moves and flies. She is something just slightly other, but only slightly, and her heart seeks more. “Curiosity,” she answers simply. “The birds found you noteworthy. I find that they are usually right.”

    More too, this curiosity of roots blooming in her heart, though she does not know the words to express them. Likely, she does not need to say them at all though for this mare to simply know. There is something to the idea of living, of family and friends, sometimes in all that that shapes you and keeps you grounded. There is something more than the kinship of birds and the wildness of the wind in all that that calls to her, but the sky calls even more, and she cannot settle, does not know how.

    In this, she cannot help the mare keep her world from splintering. Rae’s world has always been this way, and she simply chooses one.

    rae

    image


    @[leliana]
    Reply
    #5
    I rise from my scars. nothing hurts me now.

    There is part of Leliana that beats like wild wings against her chest.

    There is part of her that wants nothing more than to throw herself out into the wild wind that is Rae’s domain and live for years. She wants to lose herself into the winds and the seas and then discover who she is in the crossfire. She cannot find the source of it within her anymore. There is something lost, something forever changed. There’s something that has melted and reformed and left her alone—alone.

    Looking at Rae now, she can almost feel it. She can barely brush her fingers against the edges of it and taste the normalcy of it. When she was just a girl with a quiet gift of serving others. Before she swallowed galaxies and was lit afire. Even all of the drama and complexity, even all of that was simple.

    So simple compared to this.

    “Curiosity,” she repeats, mulling it over in that detached voice of hers, letting her eyes wander to the horizon and beyond. The silver begins to bleed from her eyes again, replaced with the molten gold of the volcano of her home, of the fires that burn within her—such a contradiction to a body of plant and vine.

    “Your birds are kind creatures then,” she says as she brings her golden gaze back to her companion, but she does not necessarily know if being noteworthy is a kindness anymore. So much remains unknown.

    “Where will you go from here?”

    She cannot imagine that Rae would remain here forever—not when she was so clearly made for the wind and the sky and the endless pull of adventure just around the corner, just waiting around the bend.

    In this, Leliana feels jealousy and want and a wild, persistent longing.



    @[Rae]
    Reply
    #6

    my soul is in the sky

    She has never know anything but the wild wind, has never lived except as a servant to herself, has communed only with the birds and the clouds. Rae knows her world, and she knows it well. What she doesn’t know is the world she stands on now, but oh, how she has watched it, wondered as it, envied it in a way. How could she be like them though, when she was so unlike them? Yet, was she truly so different? Here was this mare coming apart at the seams and yet she ruled a kingdom, found roots somewhere even in the midst of such impossible change. Rae did not understand the purpose of the war (she may not have been in it, but she certainly didn’t miss it), but she wondered about it constantly.

    Simply put, she wondered what it would be like stay.

    She laughs though as this mare called her birds kind. “Some of them are kind, yes,” she says, leaving the rest unsaid but obvious enough. Her birds were much like her, wild and improbable and they served only themselves (they served her as a favor and as a friend only when it suited them, and she never forced them). It is sometimes a kindness to be noteworthy, and other times not. In this case, Rae was not sure if it was either, but rather simply that this mare was something other and in need. The details were lost to Rae, but the edges of it were clear enough. You didn’t need to be magic to see truth, if you knew how to look.

    The next question is innocent enough, but Rae is silent for a long moment, her eyes too drifting to the horizon she knows all too well. It’s a horizon she lives in, and she has circled the world so frequently she has begun to wonder what is left that she has not yet see. What is left, really, is the ground. “I don’t know. I have begun to wonder what it is like to have roots. How do you do it?”

    Funny, that this mare envies what Rae considers giving up. Funny, that Rae has begun to long for what this mare considering shedding.

    Everyone always wants what they do not have.

    rae

    image


    @[leliana]
    Reply
    #7

    Leliana may envy Rae but she would likely never understand her. Her entire life, she has been the grounded one. She has been quiet and reserved and so deeply invested in the homes and lives she has been given. She was the still waters next to the raging fire of her sister and when Exist sparked into life and pulled down the heavens, Leliana was a quiet shadow behind her—loving deeply but quietly.

    Regardless of everything that has swirled around her throughout her life, that has remained the same.

    Even in this impossible chapter, the core of her remains so grounded.

    But she does not pry into the mare’s mind or try to pull her apart like a puzzle piece. Instead, she merely enjoys what she can see and appreciate the whole of her. She smiles softly. “It is easy to have roots,” she thinks, but then corrects herself. “It can be.” Because getting roots wasn’t the problem so much as keeping them. Keeping them took work and focus and sacrifice; it took nurturing and protecting.

    How strange that something that could feel like an anchor could also feel so precious.

    How strange that it could feel like a prison and a blessing.

    “I have had several homes throughout my life,” she thinks. First, Tephra with her sister and her uncle. Then Loess with Vulgaris and their family. Then this very River when he had driven her out of their home. Then the Pampas when the plague hit and the Island when she was running from her past. “But I have returned to Tephra—to the home of my childhood. I fight to dig my roots deeper every day.”

    Because if she is to be a good Queen, and a good protector, then she needs to be grounded first.

    And it is only now, in this conversation, that she truly understands that.

    it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
    let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes



    @[Rae]
    Reply
    #8

    my soul is in the sky

    Perhaps that was the difference – Leliana was given a home and a life and Rae had been born into death and destruction. What had been there for Rae to tether herself to except her twin, who’d roamed with her for much of their early lives? Their mother died birthing the storm twins; Rae had been the wind and the rain, her brother the thunder and lightning. They’d been adopted, cared for, but the home of their mother and their savior had been ripped away upon their birth. The Jungle was gone, there were no lands to call home yet, just a world being reborn.

    And Rae? Well Rae, without her magic, was just a shell. Some are made greater by magic, but Rae was her magic and she did not exist without it. The twins left, and they did not look back for so, so long. But then again, what could they possibly expect to find?

    The wind had brought her back. Kry had finally settled, somewhere detached from his sister but they were never the inseparable type of twins. Rae had kept going, had kept sleeping on clouds to see where she awoke the following morning. One day, the familiar beach of her birth floated below her, the bones of her mother somewhere in the debris or perhaps, long washed away by the ocean.

    And she had stayed. Perhaps even then she knew the wind brought her back for a reason, that perhaps her heart longed for more than the life she had been leading for so long. She felt no grief, in those moments above the beach, for the mother she never knew. That was not her lot in life; Rae would never know either of her parents, and that was okay. She’d been shaped into herself by the experience of her life, and she didn’t long for things that would never be.

    No, she only longed for the possibility of what might exist in the future. Longed for and feared it all at once.

    The mare in front of her (whose name, she realizes, she still does not know) seems to, perhaps, come back to herself as she speaks of roots and home. “I should have been born in the Jungle,” she offers, her smile wistful. She knew the stories of it only, could only dream of the place her mother had served so loyally. “Instead, I was born on the beach as Beqanna shifted and changed. These lands are foreign to me. Even then, in my brief time here, they did not exist as they do now.”

    Leliana speaks of coming back to her home, but Rae had no home to go back to. She has never known home, has never had anything or anyone worth fighting for; no family, no friends, just the winds and the birds that share her space.

    rae

    image


    @[leliana]
    Reply
    #9

    Perhaps they were more similar under it all then they appeared. If they truly opened up to one another, you would be able to see the way that their hearts beat in tandem. Leliana had been given a home, but she had effectively been an orphan with her twin. She never knew her mother. Never met her father. They had been born together on the Mountain and then did their best to make a home, to carve out a place to sleep.

    Maybe the echo of that hurt is what keeps Leliana here.

    Maybe she feels the kinship, the way that they could understand one another, but she does not fully try to untangle it. Instead she falls into the rhythms of the conversation; instead she begins to let herself relax, to feel the ways that they are both alike and similar. She begins to let herself enjoy the moment.

    “I know what it is like to be born into a different world on the brink of change,” she says and there is almost a wistful look in her eye. There is almost something that makes her nostalgic for that moment when she woke in the cold with her sister, when she knew nothing but the cold and the wind and the way she had known that the soft nose next to her own had been the only thing she’d need in this world.

    Still, she understands how the blade can cut both ways so she just smiles.

    “I don’t know if you would ever want to find a home again,” she pauses for a second, her eyes moving up to catch those of Rae’s, “but if you do, then Tephra would always be open to you.”

    Her wings shuffle at her side, crimson and ivory feathers glistening.

    “You simply need to show up and ask for Leliana.”

    it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
    let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes



    @[Rae]
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