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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]  i've never fallen from quite this high; Aegean
    #1
    He wakes with a start just a few hours past midnight.

    It had been the dream again, the one where his bones grow thicker and his wings begin to shrivel into his shoulders. Too much time spent on the ground, Pteron tells himself as he works to steady his breathing and the rapid pounding of his heart. After a moment he stretches out one wing to look at more closely. Still there, he finds, and surely no shorter than when he’d fallen asleep. The moonlight casts odd shadows across the ground around him, and the creak of moving wood sounds overloud.

    There will be no returning to sleep tonight, Pteron is quite sure.

    Instead of pursuing rest the pegasus stallion rises from where he’d been leaning against a jutting boulder. He has found no suitable place to nest despite his months in the woods, but this place is as good as any. Still, he is not reluctant to leave it the way he recalls being loathe to rise from his beds in the rushes of the Pampas. Was that childhood, he wonders, or had the Pampas truly felt more like home than the Taiga does?

    This is a question that plagues him almost as often as the dream. To put it from his mind, he breaks into a canter nearly from a standstill. His bones (they can’t really be heavier, can they? Surely that is a figment of his dream?) and muscle complain loudly, but soon adjust to the relentless pace that the tobiano holds. He travels through the unpopulated redwood forest, places rarely touched by hooves other than those of the fallow deer. His pace is dangerous, and though he tumbles once with a loud crack and his leg hangs briefly at an impossible angle, he does not slow.

    Not until he breaks into the open meadow that separates Taiga from one of the Hyaline rivers does he stop. Ahead, the peaks of the mountain kingdom rise into a sky that is just starting to glow with the early light of dawn. Sweat streaks down his pale sides, and plasters some of his blue mane against his tobiano neck. His breath is heavy but he is a young stallion in the peak of health with an unnatural speed of recovery, and soon enough he is eyeing the high-altitude trails leading into Hyaline with a considerate eye.

    He’d been planning on turning and running back through Taiga, but he has never been to Hyaline. Now seems as a good a day as any, and surely it will be a respectable hour of the morning before he finds the lake and valley that he knows are the main part of the kingdom. Knowing that relations between his home and this place are unsubstantiated, Pteron makes no effort to hide his presence. He keeps to the trails with the heaviest use, moves with no special attempt at silence, and remains perfectly visible.

    @[aegean]
    #2
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Aegean had lived a relatively secluded life for someone so enamored with the world.

    But the people he has always remembered those he has met and no one more than the young boy with the wild adventures in his eyes. He has thought of Pteron often—more often than he admits to himself—and he cannot help but wonder if he had woven an illusion of him when he sees the now young stallion make his way into the kingdom. For a second, he is still, his purple eyes dreamy and far away even as they focus on the shapes of him—even as he watches the way that he walks in with a deep-rooted confidence.

    But he would not be able to weave the details of the man into life.

    His memory is now hazy on the edges and he does not trust that he would be able to bring him into such stark reality now—let alone with the touch of maturity that has settled into his bones. 

    Aegean feels his pulse race slightly, a sudden and wonderful feeling, and he smiles as he walks toward the other, the sunlight catching not the milky glow of him and making him all the brighter for it.

    “Pteron,” he says the name slowly, as if relishing the syllables. “It feels good to say your name again.” His dark purple eyes study him—not bothering to hide his appreciation or curiosity—and then find his way to the other’s face, his velvet lips pulling into a gentle smile. “It has been too long, friend.”

    For a second, he glances to the side and there is a brief illusion of the two of them as colts with their filly friend, walking along the Silver Cove beach and Aegean breathes in the salty sea air before it fades, watching as the wind catches the edges of it and drags it away. He exhales and then looks back quietly.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    #3
    Ahead of him, the dawn light has just crested over a ridge. The shadowed trail ahead of him is suddenly bathed in the day’s first and softest sunlight, and Pteron smiles to himself at this chance to watch the sun rise with the mountains to frame it so well. Yet his attention is quickly pulled from the vista and toward the pale figure that the sun has just revealed. At first Pteron has just noticed the long streaks of remaining shadow on the trail ahead, and had followed them with his olive gaze as the shadows grew wider and eventually culminated in a set of amethyst hooves.

    He knows it is Aegean, even as his gaze still flicks upward, toward the eyes whose color reminds him of the crocus hearts back in Loess. The white horse was born the same spring as Pteron, and though Pteron knows that he has grown much in the time since their last meeting, he finds himself hoping that he has grown as well as Aegean has. There is a brief moment, just as his eyes take in the impressive spread of antlers that crown the stallion, that Pteron is uncertain whether he wants Aegean, or simply wants to be Aegean.

    Neither emotion is especially concerning, and the young stallion processes them both with an easy smile.

    “Yours is not a face I’d thought to find here,” Pteron replies, briefly eyeing the soaring peaks of Hyaline that are far from the low coast where they had met. “But I’m not disappointed.” There is a lively glimmer in his eye that suggests he is much more than not disappointed, and he recognizes much the same emotion in Aegean. The tobiano pegasus has remained rather still since first catching sight of the antlered stallion, but he turns his head at the gust of saltwind.

    A familiar scene plays out in a familiar way, and Pteron’s olive eyes watch it curiously. He knows enough to have put together that Aegean is the sibling of the only other illusion-weaver he knows; the faint scent of the white stallion’s visit to Loess had stirred an unexpectedly sharp pang of regret in the dun stallion – Aegean had been so close and he had missed him. Their craft is similar, but the image of the Silver Cove is not exactly like anything Oriash has produced, and he briefly wonders if the two of them had played vision games like his own younger siblings.

    “What are you doing here in Hyaline?” He asks. “Do you live here now? Or just visiting? I’ve heard the queen here is very...accommodating.” Pteron grins at that, amused by his own wit. The high peaks have been a haven for youth and beauty since their discovery; the recent shift toward more liberal behavior is not entirely shocking. It is intriguing though, and Pteron had been hopeful he might at least get a glimpse of the fabled golden queen.

    @[Aegean]
    #4
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    Pteron is so similar and yet so different from the boy that he had been and it stirs Aegean’s heart. He feels a sudden pang, something that twists and tugs, and he just smiles, letting the emotion rest easily in his breast. He has never truly known love beyond the deep infatuation he has felt for so many and it is easy to let the admiration and intrigue take root—so easy to let it consume his greedy heart and eager eyes.

    “I am glad. I would be heartbroken if the sight of me caused disappointment.” His voice is, as always, nearly melodic in its delivery—poetic in the way that he plays with the syllables, letting it ring like silver bells on the edges and then dip into the rumble of the ocean in the middle. It is feminine and masculine and blurs the lines between the two in a way that he has always enjoyed—always appreciated.

    It is a quickening of the blood, a sharpening of the moment, and Aegean just enjoys each second of it, letting the tension between them stretch and ripple—taking pleasure in it. There was no rush and he does not pretend that there is. Instead, he is patient, calm, seeping in the moment. Savoring it.

    “I live here,” he explains simply. Looking around and seeing that milky cast of his own glow on the ground beneath him. “I was meant to be raised here and would have had the plague not struck. It feels fitting that I would find my way back here.” He does not explain how he does not feel like he has roots in any given place—how even now, he does not feel rooted to this land, even though he enjoys it so.

    It is a strange thing to love the world and yet not feel part of it.

    “Kensa is lovely,” he affirms, thinking of the beauty of their leader and how stories of her must have gone so far. Would others travel to see her? To admire her? He could not blame them if they did.

    “Are you here to see her?” He grows curious, gaze sliding back to him.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)



    @[Pteron]
    #5
    Pteron smile is slow, but twists up into amusement as his companion speaks of heartbreak at his disappointment.

    “It never would,” he promises, and even though he chuckles around his words Pteron is quite sincere. “The very opposite, really.” The dun stallion shares his happiness with the antlered Aegean, his brows raised in a mirror of Aegean presenting his illusion a few moments earlier. There’s a question in his green eyes, curiousity in how his pale friend might respond to this display of Pteron’s own gift. He does not often share his emotion, feeling that it is a weak imitation of the gifts that his mother and sister possess. As a warrior, he thinks that something offensive might have been better: fear or hopelessness or cowardice. Today though, he is happy to have happiness, to be able to project toward Aegean an insight into how very not disappointed he was to have found him here.

    With Pteron able to project only one emotion, Aegean is spared the many others that flutter through the blue-haired pegasus before him.

    He lives here, says the moonglow stallion, and Pteron flicks forward curious ears to take in the brief story that follows. So Hyaline is to Aegean what Loess is to Pteron – the home that should have been. Instead, both of them had sheltered in a new place, shielded from the illness that ravaged the world around them. The pegasus considers asking how he likes it, if it really feels like home, but his tongue stills before the words fall. And if it does, how. How does Pteron make a place feel like home, because he has tried and tried and failed. He cannot push himself to admit this yet, not to Aegean who makes his pulse thrum and who has shifted Pteron’s tastes to tall, pale, and impossibly beautiful ever since their first meeting in the Cove.

    “It’s beautiful here,” Pteron says, having stepped forward to where the trail falls away. The valley below is still bathed in darkness – only the rim of the mountainous bowl glow red with the dawn. Somewhere is the lake, he knows, but rather than look for it he turns back to Aegean, preferring to trace the peaks and valleys in his face. “I can see why you’d choose it.”

    The mention of Kensa is somehow startling, as though Pteron had not been the one to name her only a few moments before. He swallows, knowing he’d been staring and unable for the first time to find the charisma he so often falls back on.

    “I wasn’t.” He admits, “I didn’t mean to come here at all, really. But then I was there at the river and the wind was right and it was just bright enough and so I just decided to come.” Such impulsiveness is frequent behavior for the piebald stallion; it is the reason he’d first gone to the Silver Cove. “I wanted to see what it was like here. I’ve never been to Hyaline before.”

    @[aegean]
    #6
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    There is a strange otherness to the moment that Aegean cannot quite name. It is something that slips under the surface and wraps around the base of it; he feels it like a current in his pulse and a jackhammer to his heart. It is an uncomfortable feeling and yet he feels completely comfortable relishing it. It is disquieting to know of the way that his body betrays him and yet he finds that he quite loves the feel of it.

    Without thinking, he takes a step forward at the feel of the happiness flicker through him. It is a brighter feeling than he is used to, the keen edge of it unlike the gentle glow that his own joy takes. Aegean feels the edges of his velvet lips curl into a smile, and he takes a step forward again, closing the distance between them. “Is that you?” his silver bell voice questions. “I didn’t know that you could do that.”

    His own gift responds to the illusion without thought and around him, the stars seem to fall from the sky to fill up the spaces between them. It happens slow at first and then all at once until it feels as though they are swimming amongst them, darkening the night so that the faint glow of dawn is barely seen anymore.

    “It is beautiful,” he confirms, although his purple gaze does not leave the young stallion in front of him. When he admits that he wasn’t meant to be here at all, he just laughs—rolling his shoulders. “Then that is a glorious mistake of fate for me.” For a second, the silence between them stretches until he can feel the tension ready to snap. “I can show you around if you would like,” but he makes no move to leave.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)



    @[Pteron]
    #7
    For a long moment, Pteron can feel the breath catch in his throat, trapped by the anticipation that follows his projection. He briefly hopes he has failed, but as the soft edges of Aegean’s face turn upward into a smile, he knows that he has not. That sweet relief last only a heartbeat, and he has barely time to release that held breath before Aegean comes a step closer.

    “It’s me,” he replies, marveling how clear his voice sounds despite his internal chatter.“I don’t do it very often,” Pteron adds.

    A flicker at the corner of his vision pulls his gaze from Aegean – are they to be interrupted so soon? But it is only a falling star, one of many, and Pteron watches with wide eyes as they fall around and between the pair of young stallions. He makes no effort to hide his wonder, and the expression on Pteron’s face is nearly childlike in its marvel. That Aegean has made the stars come down to earth seems impossible, and yet the violet-eyed stallion glows in the light of them. In the summoned darkness, Aegean blazes like a moon among the stars, and Pteron cannot tear his eyes away.

    He wonders if he might be asleep, and this entire trip nothing more than a dream. E has dreamt of Aegean before, after all, but they had all been adolescent things, full of imagined passion and fabricated heat. They had been carnal things, and yet this inexplicable need to reach toward his companion feels most like touching an eggshell – soft and tender and delicate. Yet that is not right either, for Pteron has never been captivated by a nest the way he is by the boy in front of him.

    It is Aegean’s laughter that breaks the spell of silence, the offer to show him Hyaline. Pteron almost refuses – even opens his mouth to say so – because to see Hyaline would be to look away from its most splendid attribute. But as he blinks away the brightness of the starlight around them, the part of him that has dreamt wickedly of Aegean whispers, and Pteron nods instead.

    “I would like it,” he tells the antlered stallion. “Could I request a special tour, though? I’d like to see your favorite places – Aegean’s Hyaline.”

    Pteron takes another step forward, and though he knows that Aegean will soon turn to lead the way to...wherever, he allows himself to enjoy this brief moment where they are near enough that they might touch – if either reached out.

    @[aegean]
    #8
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    The two remain suspended in time and it is what Aegean imagines it would be like to fall into the deep, deep blue of the ocean—the weightlessness he feels when he meets the olive green of his companion’s gaze. “I like that you don’t do it often,” he breathes quietly, and he is grateful for the way the darkness feels like a cocoon, the way he doesn’t need to raise his naturally quiet voice to be heard here.

    “That makes it special.”

    He doesn’t know why it feels important to have something special between the two of them, but it does, and he cherishes it—cherishes the feeling of sharing something. For someone like Aegean whose heart knows no limits (who understands no boundaries), it’s a queer feeling and he sinks into it slowly. Let them have this one thing, he thinks, and when his eyes flick up again, he thinks, perhaps two.

    Pteron takes another step forward and the space between them grows more tense, taut, and Aegean does not hide the way that he looks at the other boy. He wonders what it would feel like to drag his mouth over the silken skin of his neck, to find that dip of his throat, to know—to know. But in much the way that they remain suspended, he finds that he is afraid of disturbing the calm waters of it. Afraid to break this moment when it feels so absolutely and completely perfect being trapped in the middle of it.

    “I would show you anywhere you’d like to see,” he says earnestly, his velvet lips curving just slightly, his amethyst eyes not blinking or moving away. “Although this may be my favorite place now.” They are so close that he imagines he can feel Pteron’s breath, can imagine it rolling across the space between them, and he takes a while to break away, to finally let the closeness and seclusion snap for the tour.

    But, eventually, he does.

    With a soft exhale that sounds like a sigh, Aegean curves his antlered head outward and feels the weight of space open up between them as he steps forward to lead the way. The tension remains a palpable thing and he feels his stomach clench with it as he parts his illusions like curtains, the heavy fabric of the stars and constellations rippling to let them pass. With a breath, the galaxies that spin by their sides turn to the ocean he has imagined them floating amongst and they walk as if on the ocean floor, surrounded by the finest specs of algae and the faint call of the humpback whale, shadows dappling the floor beneath them.

    Aegean smiles as he angles his head toward Pteron.

    “I am afraid most of my favorite places live within my head,” his breathy voice ends on a laugh as he turns his gaze outward again and it is only when they reach one of the more secluded shores of the lake that he lets the illusions fall away completely. They ripple and fade to let the pink glow of dawn wash over them, casting the water in that beautiful glow. Aegean stops, the water lapping at his gemstone hooves and finds Pteron once more. “It’s calmest during the morning. It’s when I love it best.”

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)



    @[Pteron]
    #9
    Despite the chill in the autumn air, Pteron thinks he might be catching fire. Aegean’s words settle into him like the smallest of sparks, and Pteron thinks his entire body might be tinder, and the other’s violet gaze a fan to the flame. His breath is caught in his throat, and the internal blaze he feels makes him as weightless as Aegean’s imagined sea. Special, Pteron thinks to himself, special.

    He had wanted to take back his request, but the answer that the moonlight stallion gives makes it worth it, and Pteron wonders how likely it is that his body might simply catch fire and float away, like a bit of grass caught in the gust of a wildfire. Very likely, he thinks, if he spent much time in this company. Not even the sea that rises over their heads does much to quench it. It does grow quieter though, as his wonder builds again.

    There is little that might have torn his gaze from Aegean, but the view from the sea floor is certainly one of them.

    The starlight shifts to sunlight, dappled and muted by the water overhead, and silhouettes of creatures Pteron has no name for flicker overhead. He does not recognize the whale song for what it is, but it does resonate within him, a low and wordless song that brings a smile of wonder to his blue mouth. They walk down the mountain and into the sea, and Pteron looks back at Aegean to find that his white companion is a soft blue-green in the sealight, his antlers branching up not unlike the coral.

    Your head is magnificent,” Pteron tells him, knowing that the phrase is silly but too enthralled to think of something wittier, something better. “I think I would live there too, if I could.”

    The muted sunlight falls away as they come to a stop, trickling away into a gently pink dawn that tints them both a shade of rose. He is not looking at the view, but rather has once more let himself admire his companion and the way his violet eyes and amethyst hooves look against the dawn-colored paleness of his skin. Even his white mane is shades of blush and mauve, tinted by light and shadow in such a way that Pteron longs to reach forward and see what patterns he might make by rearranging the strands.

    Instead he blinks away the immediate need and soft embers that warm him from within, and looks out at the lake.

    Pteron had known that it was Hyaline’s defining feature, and yet he’d not expected this. Far larger than any water he’s ever seen, save the sea, it stretches ahead of them like a mirror. The dawn sky is reflected with barely a ripple, and the mountains that they’ve descended while underwater soar overhead. Pteron sighs happily, and looks back at Aegean when he says, “It is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen,” he tells him, and even Pteron isn’t quite sure if he means the lake or the boy or both of them together.

    @[aegean]
    i didn't spell check this but i will later <3
    #10
    Aegean

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead
    at least when spring comes they roar back again

    They walk quietly amongst the water and the sea and Aegean can only think about the rising tide of his own heart. He feels its pull low and deep in his belly, a magnetic thing, and the way Pteron’s presence hums near him. It’s like an electrical current—a constant buzzing that leaves him just a little drunk off it.

    When the boy compliments his head, there is no fluttering of lashes or shyness. Instead, Aegean just dips his head, white lips curving into an appreciative smile. “Yours is just as magnificent.” Then, with a sigh as he looks up again, he casually says, “And you do live in my head. You have for some time, in fact.”

    Ever since he saw him as a boy.

    Ever since he grew up with that queer memory dancing around the edges of his vision.

    Pteron has always been there—as constant as the wind.

    But he doesn’t linger on it, instead stepping forward to the lake and its undisturbed waters. He wonders if perhaps he should have been more clever in where he chose to bring him, but such things die before they ever take root in his heart. Instead, he just looks from its pure beauty to his companion.

    For a moment, he says nothing and instead just lets his gaze lock with the others, focusing on the steady rise and fall of his pulse, the strange way that all of Hyaline begins to slowly fade in the background.

    There is nothing but him, and Pteron, and the distance that feels so impossibly large.

    “It has never looked better than it does today,” he says, feeling a warmth blossom and then spread across his chest, sinking its hooks beneath the skin and lingering there as he feels his heart continue to thrum.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
    (I think I made you up inside my head.)





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