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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


    [private]  Bloodfeather || Lepis ||
    #1

    WOLFBANE

    The ground was soft enough that burying their baby had been easy. Soft, dark mounds of dirt covering up white feathers, dipped at the edges in blue. Each time Wolfbane closes his eyes he can see it, can feel the wet soil and how he longed to crawl inside that hole and just stay there with his son, let them bury him as well because he felt dead. Empty.

    He hadn’t wept on the day of his return, bringing home what was left of their child for Lepis to see. The others, Gale's siblings, shouldn’t have been allowed to look either but Pteron was old enough so Bane let him have his way and hear his mother wail piteously. Tiercel had been at his wife’s hip but now the boy was a ghost. Quiet, contemplative, like Wolfbane was before he’d fled Tephra so long ago. He expects he’ll lose another son soon enough.

    Eyas had been out in the Forest and he’d yanked her home. She’d tried to press a bit of happiness into him and he’d snapped, grounded them both midway and told her the news. Now every time his daughter’s flintlock eyes flash in his direction he senses a darkness there; his doing as well.

    He was supposed to be the their patriarch and protector, but now he’s an animal who can’t cry and the buildup of those tears is hardening into ice inside of him.

    Watching the sun go down at the southernmost point of Loess, his blue hooves sinking into the scorched brown sands of the beach, Wolfbane touches the sharp edges of Gale’s memories that live on inside his mind. They’re painful things, but the ache and loss is so real and necessary right now that it consumes him. He’s obsessed with the end, always the end and how it plays out, how it could’ve (no should’ve) been different.

    Even the familiar sound of his partner approaching doesn’t stir him to look back. Not this time.

    United with Lepis || Warrior of Loess || Father to Five Four



    @[Lepis]
    [Image: Wolfbane2.png][Image: 3bCHvj.png]
    #2
    Gale is not the first son that Lepis has lost.

    But he is the first that she has allowed herself to mourn, and that makes the ache of Gale’s absence all the more bitter. To obscure her emotions as she had the first time feels like a betrayal to her blue boy, as though she would be blurring away her memories of him as well as her pain. So she remembers him in the days after they have buried him, and does nothing to temper the flood of emotions. Joy, amusement, frustration, pride.

    He’d been so little.

    There had been so much of his life ahead of him.

    Now there is nothing.

    Nothing but a small mound in the red earth and a gaping emptiness in the center of her chest.

    She has pushed Pteron’s concern away and smiled for the twins, but she has not yet spoken to his husband. No words have passed between them since he returned with what was left of their littlest boy. There was nothing to say, not at first. And now, breaking the silence feels nearly as insurmountable. She has almost reached out a dozen times, but the fear that he might not reach back has quashed it every time.

    “It’s my fault,” she says into the dusk beside him. “I should have been watching him, should have stopped him but...” But Tiercel had been trapped in the maze, she can’t say. It feels like an excuse, and there are none.

    @[Wolfbane]
    #3

    WOLFBANE

    “Don’t.” He bites back first, and then softer, “Don’t say that, Lepis.”

    Why? He wonders, holding perfectly still in the silence that begins to grow afterwards. Does she truly want me to blame her? But he knows the answer. She endures suffering differently than her husband. Possibly better. And if she isn’t to blame... then he is. How can you see past that kind of fault in your partner?

    “I’m glad you weren’t there.” Wolfbane looks back, unreadable in expression as he gazes into her. Her skin is like fire, aglow in the orange light that washes over everything around them. The blue of her wings seems darker, like brown ash. “You couldn’t see the way he looked. Didn’t hear the way he screamed.”

    Stiff and unyielding, his mane straightens itself when he turns away again. “If you saw how I… how I let him fall, Lepis… ”

    Too sharp. The pain is blinding, so he closes his eyes against it and breathes deeply.

    “I’ve led this family into nothing but mistakes.”

    United with Lepis || Warrior of Loess || Father to Five Four



    @[Lepis]
    [Image: Wolfbane2.png][Image: 3bCHvj.png]
    #4
    A month ago they’d been planning to leave Loess, and now even the idea of being too far from the grave is terrifying. She feels as though some intangible bit of her heart is buried there in the earth, the part with which she’d once held Gale. Even now, facing the sea, she knows just where to turn to see the burial site. The navy haired woman wonders if Wolfbane knows too, but cannot not ask.

    Lepis tenses at the sharpness in his voice, but does not flinch away as she once might have in their early days. Instead she waits, waits until he finally turns to look at her. Her blue-grey eyes are shadowed by dusk and sorrow and her blazed face shakes side to side as he speaks, as though doing so might somehow make his words untrue. He turns away again, and does not see her quiver at the image he describes. She is glad she did not see it, but that does nothing to hinder her imagination. She has pictured it ten thousand times.

    A soft blue figure in the ashy sky, tumbling toward the glowing earth, fear in his young eyes.

    For a long moment that is all she sees. The pain is visceral in her chest, but she refuses to quell it. Nor does she soften that the anger that rises to replace it, a balm that she finds far preferable.

    “You haven’t.” She says when he speaks of leading their family down a trail laden with mistakes. “You haven’t.” Lepis says again, reaching out to press her muzzle against his shoulder even though she half fears he might pull away.

    “You didn’t let him fall,” the mare continues, her voice slowly beginning to feel as tight as her chest. “But what if...what if someone made him fall?” Speaking the words aloud feels somehow freeing. They no longer spin about in the back of her mind, a question that she dare not think of. Lepis has never doubted her husband’s story, but something has never made sense. Gale was a strong flier, at least for a boy his age. Why would he have fallen out of the sky? Was he hurt? By whom?

    The questions lead back to a single answer and one emotion: Tephrans and Fury. Different from her hatred of Sylva, the two emotions have fed off each other in the silence after the death of her son. They are absent in her expression (she is a master of this, after all) but she makes no effort to hide her physical reaction, the tensing of her muscle and the clenching of her jaw. The mask is unconscious, but she does not hide her emotions from her husband the way she might in company.

    @[Wolfbane]
    #5

    ALL THE DOUBT YOU'RE STANDING IN BETWEEN

    There’s something about being isolated that soothes him. An invisible blanket that he can wrap securely around himself, keeping others out as it comforts him in agony. He deserves it, anyways. Deserves to feel distant and untouchable because right now all he wants are those fragmented memories. Their child lives in the past, a place he can’t go to, so he’d rather not be functioning in the present.

    Lepis refuses the infallible truth though Wolfbane denies it silently, and despite the tense way she lightly reaches out to comfort him he doesn’t pull away. Maybe he should, but he doesn’t. He only listens to her in the way a stone statue listens to chatter around it for untold years; the pegasus stands silent and firm, breathing in and breathing out, feeling the acute wrongness of doing so while Gale couldn’t.

    what if someone made him fall?

    The question was ludicrous.
    At first.

    No, he refuses it, impossible, and then that same scene pieces itself together from the fragments of Gale’s last moments and replays with horrendous clarity in his mind. Wolfbane blinks against the threat of tears, shakes his head and tries to keep himself composed while he remembers what he saw. It isn’t until the last few minutes - the ones where Gale is suddenly incapacitated, careening wildly out of control - that he begins to feel a hot, ugly emotion simmering to life inside of him.

    What if someone made him fall?

    The golden ears on top of his head flick back; he breathes quicker now, feels the way his lips twist and curl down into an angry sneer. Hate flames up inside of his gut and stays there, wrenching apart the sad stupor he’d been sinking into these past few days. “Someone did.” Her mate growls, he’s sure of it now. “Leliana will want peace,” He spits, ears still pressed into the curve of his neck, “Castile may give it to her. I can’t… I can’t live here if that’s the case.”

    Huffing, the striped stallion turns to look at his wife. The anger in his vision is pointed but not at her. Never at her. She’s too much of his body and flesh so they share a clenched jaw and burning desire for revenge. “We need a plan.” Bane begins, “And we need power.” He finishes.

    WITH WOUNDS THAT NO ONE ELSE HAS SEEN

    WOLFBANE



    @[Lepis]
    [Image: Wolfbane2.png][Image: 3bCHvj.png]
    #6
    “I’m ready to go,” she says to her husband one midsummer evening.

    The winds stream around their stone spire perch and ruffle the feathers of the pegasi’s wings. Lepis bends a blue muzzle in a futile attempt to smooth them, first her tricolored ones and then Wolfbane’s snow white. The movement is familiar and habitual, a mental balm as well as physical. Long shadows stretch over the earth below them – streaks of black against the red and yellow sandstone. This is the view she was raised with; the only one she’s ever really loved.

    Yet she is ready now, ready to find another one.

    We need power, Wolfbane had said.

    For Lepis, that power had at first been fiery rage. It simmered unchecked in her golden chest for some time, but as the heat of the season increased and the rest of Beqanna seemed to forget about the war, the flame had grown smaller. Let the rest of them think that a lack of smoke means that there is no fire, that Lepis accepts the death of her young son at the hands of Tephra without asking retribution, that the blue-haired woman would so easily forgive Sylva’s disrespect. Without power, she is nothing; no more important than a quiet herdmare, without rank or title.

    It is time to change that.

    The tobiano mares cares little for the lands beyond Loess. She’s been to few of them, never interested in staying long. They will change that now, she knows; soon a new place will be home.

    At her feet is a flat yellow stone. Lepis nudges it with the edge of her hoof, flipping it over to reveal that the opposite side has far more obvious ripples of red.

    “What do you think?” She muses aloud. “Yellow for Taiga, red for Nerine?”

    Lepis asks mostly for herself, but her blue grey eyes do flick toward her mate for confirmation. Nodding once – decisive – the dun mare reaches down, grasps the stone between her teeth, and tosses it up into the air. It spins through the sunset light for a moment, clattering down a few meters away with a soft puff of dust. The yellow side of the stone is tilted just slightly toward her.

    Lepis smiles.
    #7

    ALL THE DOUBT YOU'RE STANDING IN BETWEEN

    Yes, he thinks, time to go. Her bulky mate leans his shoulder against hers, the one she’s not fidgeting with, and sighs deeply. Summer was ending. The last dregs of warm, easy-going weather were draining away and the sun is setting a bit earlier each evening. Wolfbane blinks away the sting of a high breeze, settles into the comforting way she preens his feathers and not her own before nodding his agreement.

    They’ve discussed this move at length, several times.
    It might have felt raw to go too early after laying Gale to rest. Plenty of time has passed since then, though. Hyaline hosted a gala. The two kingdoms at war were silent again. But between Lepis and her husband nothing is forgotten. Their pain was unbearable until it hardened into resolve. Now they’re working on sharpening that feeling, honing it into a fine point.

    Bane is patient enough to see that spearhead one day thrust into the writhing bowels of the one who took Gale away from them.

    His wife asks a question that pulls him out of that dark place and into the present. She draws his inquisitive gaze down to the flat top of their spire, where many rocks litter the surface in all shapes and sizes. One in particular suits her interest. “Hilarious,” He smirks, flashing her a wicked grin, “all on the flip of a stone.”

    Neither Taiga nor Nerine would know what hit them.

    She swoops down. Grabs the two-toned item and flicks it into the air with a neat spin. The seconds tick by, leaving him transfixed on the way it flips head over end, red over yellow, Nerine or Taiga. They both watch it clatter and skid to a stop.

    “Age before beauty.” Her winged companion sweeps into a mock bow, turning near to his beloved. The glittering edges of his lips press against her temple. His wings flare in a brilliant flash of white. “See you there.” He whispers.

    In the next instant he plummets over the sharp edge and flaps away into the near horizon, leaving her the duty of informing their children while he takes the first flight towards their future.

    WITH WOUNDS THAT NO ONE ELSE HAS SEEN

    WOLFBANE



    @[Lepis]
    [Image: Wolfbane2.png][Image: 3bCHvj.png]




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