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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


    and nothing hurts when I'm alone, Sabrael
    #1

    There were still days that she felt like a ghost.

    There were only so many times she could let herself be broken and remade, only so many times she could seek out those few, rare individuals that knew how to spark that feeling of being alive inside of her, before she accepted that it was just a patched-up bandage. She found old lovers – again, and again, and again – and she let herself be swept up in that darkness and that out of control spiral, but she knew the crash that came after the high would take her deeper than rock bottom.

    But she would rather be there, open and bleeding, than to feel like nothing. 

    She was still lost in this new Beqanna. She didn’t understand them, she didn’t understand their lands, she didn’t understand their wars. And they, in turn, did not understand her. She was unremarkable in comparison to most of them; strikingly white, and frozen in time by her immortality, but otherwise entirely plain. They did not know how strange it was that she could now stare at them with bright, impossibly dark eyes; that once those sockets had been hollowed and scarred, the wounds inflicted by the same dark god that had gifted her these new ones. They didn’t know that she had once been queen, that she had once been almost something, if you could even call it that.

    And of course, she doesn’t tell them.

    When she comes across the peculiar ravine drug into the ground, she stares at it with a tilted head. The scent that the creature had left behind reminded her of her dragon daughter, Casimira – reptilian and flame-kissed, terrifying and magnificent – and as she was so prone to do, she follows the danger rather than turns from it.

    She is greeted by the roaned face of a stranger, and, typical for her, the first thing she notices is that he is handsome. The second, is that she doesn’t know him, which is not surprising. She knew so few of them now. When her pale lips pull into a smile, it is faint but somewhat amused, the lilt of her voice ringing against the stillness of the cold air, “Well. You weren’t what I was expecting to find.” She is perhaps too bold when she approaches him, pressing past the boundary of where most would stop. No matter how many times she has been burnt, she cannot help but to still test the flames, and she holds his gaze with the intensity of her own as she draws up alongside of him. Everything about her could be read as soft and kind, but she was still infinitely reckless, and she looks up at him with a cocked head and a leisurely smile, “I’m Ryatah.”

    Ryatah
    even angels have their wicked schemes


    @[Sabrael]
    Reply
    #2

    Sabrael

    Sabrael looks at the spot of cleaved earth for a long while, lost in thought.  How easy it had been to flick his tail and leave a lasting mark on the place he had all but forgotten.  How effortless it had been to take out his frustration by breaking ground without hesitation.  Is that all he is now, a beast driven by instinct alone?  Is that who he wants to be, a creature who lashes out without provocation, careless and senselessly violent? 

    There is something infinitely satisfying in destruction, even he can admit. 

    Worse, though, is the guilt that comes after. 
     
    Worse, because he clings so desperately to the spark of morality he can’t snuff out, even with his smoky breath and hunting eyes.  Worse, because he sees the faces of his mother, his father, his grandparents, his siblings, Wallace, melting without his control.  He paints pictures in his mind of what he could do unrestrained.  The pictures are all red.

    He’s pulled from his reverie by the sudden approach of another.  She’s nearly beside him by the time Sabrael realizes she’s coming, as lost in his own dark thoughts as he is.  But she doesn’t stop there.  The mare pushes into his space, far closer than anyone has been in a long time, but he doesn’t shy away.  Maybe she’s far-sighted?  He makes no indication that he’s surprised by her unexpected appearance, but her words do catch him off guard. 
     
    “Oh, that?  His gold-tinged eyes shift from the mare’s to the ravine and back again, faux-surprise lighting within them.  He rolls a shoulder as if in a shrug.  “Maybe monstrously large and plague-brained beavers?” Or an emotionally-charged, oversized lizard hell-bent on a homecoming to Nowhere, he thinks, an self-indulgent grin twitching his lips.

    “Sabrael.”

    The pale woman is so close that he can feel her warmth.  Or perhaps it is only her inviting and open face that is like a real and palpable thing.  Whatever it is, he feels almost relaxed as he stands next to her.  It’s a rather new feeling for him.  He can’t know the relevance of Ryatah, can’t possibly realize the connection his family had shared with the old Dalean queen of a time Before.  Most assuredly, she doesn’t know that the man who stands before her is the many times over grandson of Alaunus, the diplomat who had been one of the most vocal opponents of her ascension (though in time, became one of her most loyal subjects – enough so that they coupled and produced a son).  It has been many generations since that time and so few are still around to remember it.

    Even Beqanna itself doesn’t look like it used to – nor do her people.

    Monsters like Sabrael now dig their claws into the land.  And their tails.

    The speckled stallion eyes Ryatah with open curiosity.  She’s bold, if she’s walked up to him even while suspecting what he is.  Not all monsters are as thoughtful as he.  Some wouldn’t hesitate to crisp and gobble her up before the first syllable of a pleasantry slipped from her mouth.  She’s lucky he’s a reformed dragon.  Or at least one who sates himself on flesh from distant shores far away from here.  Still, he can’t help himself from sending a ring of smoke into the air above their heads.  It’s a confirmation for her, if nothing else.  Plus he enjoys showing off for nice ladies every now and again.  “I heard the world was healed and had to come back and see it myself.  What are you doing here?”       


          

     





    @[Ryatah]
    Reply
    #3

    There had always been something not quite right about her. The innate sense that many had that told them to run from danger had always worked more like a magnet for her, pulling her closer instead of urging her away. The faster her heart beat, and the hotter her blood rushed in her veins, the closer she wanted to get. She was a fool, inside and out, too reckless and daring for one otherwise so mild and sweet. It didn’t always make sense, how she could somehow be submissive without being meek, or how she would so easily bend to their will without fully breaking. Nothing about her made sense, but it was all part of the thrill she was always chasing.

    She had no way of knowing, of course, the intricate connections that she would have to the dragon-stallion before her. She was drawn to him the same way she was drawn to all things fearsome and powerful, and maybe someday this weakness would be her undoing, but naively, she doesn’t think it will be today. “Far stranger things have happened, but, somehow that scenario seems highly unlikely,” she laughs as she says it, shaking her pale forelock from her eyes. She can feel the way he watches her, but she is used to those inquisitive stares. Perhaps she is too perceptive from all those years without her sight; she had learned what the weight of eyes on her felt like. She had learned what it felt like when they roamed across her, usually lingering on the scarred sockets, but sometimes following the slopes and curves that lay beneath the oddly smooth porcelain of her skin.

    In her blindness, she could pretend to be oblivious. She can see it now, however, how he is perplexed, and maybe even a little amused at her boldness. Even without his dragon form she is so much smaller than him, a delicate structure of bone and muscle, fragile and begging to be broken; he could end her so easily, before she could blink those almost-black eyes, but he could never comprehend that that’s what appeals to her.

    She has been torn open and dismantled and rebuilt, body and soul; she has lived with a shattered or half-stitched heart, and the twisted part of her never feels more alive than when she is afraid and bleeding and wondering if this is the time she doesn’t come back.

    She doesn’t expect it from him – doesn’t expect him to appease to that sick part of her – but she isn’t afraid of it happening.

    “I don’t think the world is ever truly healed,” she watches the ring of smoke as it floats from his mouth, casting him a silent but satisfied – because her suspicions were confirmed – glance before continuing, “but the plague is gone, if that’s what you mean.” She shifts closer, until she can smell the spice and smoke of him, but she refrains from touching him, even though the temptation is laid so neatly before her. “Same thing I’m always doing,” she says, as if that in itself is an answer. To anyone that knew her, it would have been; some would have laughed, most would just shake their heads. She was incredibly predictable in her chaos, and she hardly cared anymore. “Usually I come here to find...old friends. But every now and then I stumble across someone that could be a new one.” She tips her head just slightly, glancing up at him through the white of the hair that frames her face. “Where do you go when you leave?”

    Ryatah
    even angels have their wicked schemes


    @[Sabrael]
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