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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


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    [open quest]  dia de muertos - RESULTS
    #1

    and when i breathed

    my breath was lightning

    She can feel the veil as it thins, can feel the way it bends beneath the weight of them as they tumble back on out on the beach. A smile creases her face as they come back successful, though she knows that success alone will never quite make up for the things they have experienced. Some already knew death, others were far too young to taste the bitterness of him, but to come back regardless cost them something. The price was their secret though, a thing she would never know and a thing some selfish part of her did not want to know.

    Rhy calls to a power she hasn’t called on for so long, pulling at her ghost shifting to step through the veil for a moment. It is so thin she does so easily, eyes casting to the sky almost immediately, looking for the flash of blue that was her daughter. “Rae!” she calls, trusting the wind and the birds to take her voice and carry it far and wide, trusting her daughter to hear.

    She is about to make her way to the questers, about to thank them, when she feels something go wrong. The veil isn’t just thin, it is breaking, cracking, shattering around them. The noise is something else, a quiet rumbling felt deep in her bones. The veil is silent, an intangible thing that cannot be heard, only felt. The noise then...oh. It grows louder, made of shouts and whoops and the thundering of hooves as they carreen toward the beach.

    “RUN!” she screams, “RUN!” Rhy moves toward the group, trying to get them up, trying to get them moving. One is on the ground, his shoulder and skull misshapen. Rhy looks at him with wide eyes, unable to help. She’d never had healing powers and death did not grant her anything additional. She reaches down to lightly touch his good shoulder, trying to nudge him up, but her efforts are for nothing.

    The dead are coming. The dead are here.

    “No, she breathes at the sight of the first horse to cross the threshold. “No," she says more firmly, standing to face a mare she had fought so long ago. A war of magic and might, a war without purpose, and Rhy finds herself standing before the mare responsible. A mare who has become something else, something stronger, something so very other.

    Lightning crackles along the palomino mare’s skin as she shifts into a lion, but it doesn’t matter. Rhy is thrown to the side with only a mere thought, tossed into a rock where she crumples into the sand. She sees the other standing over the stallion with the broken skull, and then everything goes black...

    rhy

    the electric lioness of riagan and rayelle



    @[Mordgeld], for not responding and therefore not leaving the afterlife, you have become a ghost for one BQ year. During this year you will not be able to breed.

    @[Ryatah], to die and come back again is no small thing. For your sacrifice, you have become an angel. Please post in updates with the attributes you would like.

    @[atrox], you have given pieces of yourself time and time again. Now, you will be able to take instead. You have been gifted with soul summoning, the ability to summon up to two souls from the dead at any given time to serve you (3 spaces).

    @[Agetta], your love is pure and admirable, and your purpose to protect Beqanna moreso. For your selflessness, you have been granted light beam emission.

    @[Rajanish], crashing through the veil without a guide did not work, and you have sadly died. You will receive reverse ghost shifting, giving you the ability to travel to the land of the living once per BQ year. You may only breed during the October breeding season.

    Everyone else, you may choose any 1 space trait.
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    #2

    sometimes we want what we want --
        -- even if we know it’s going to kill us.

    Wait for the opportune moment.

    Well, this seemed exactly like an opportune moment. Straia hadn’t died, not exactly, but she’d faded into oblivion, which as it turns out, is death for a magician. At one point she’d been living in her mountains, lamenting the loss of the Chamber, and the next her mountains had become the afterlife and the loss of the Chamber was irrelevant. Funny how the world worked, and funnier still that she didn’t much care. She’d simply waited, as she has always done, for the opportune moment.

    The veil thins around her, poked and prodded at by too many horses with lost loved ones. Love. It wasn’t as though she’d never felt love, but she’d never understood the need that it caused. Something primal and crazy and raw, something consuming and driving and all powerful. Straia had loved her father, but that didn’t stop her from overthrowing him. She’d loved her sister, though she’d never been very good at being one. She’d loved Weed, and he’d come and gone just like real weeds do; there one moment and lost to the wind the next. She’d never pined for him in his absence, never worried he might not come back. Eventually, he did not come back, and she’d never even bothered to find him in the afterlife.

    Something around her changes though, the veil cresting past thin into something more like a bubble, something ready to pop at the touch of a finger. A raven appears and she sends it forward, searching for the exit, for the pop. It does not take her bird long to find it as the dead are so very aware, as they are already rushing.

    Straia cheats, of course, taking to the sky and finding herself on the beach in mere moments. This was a place she had never bothered to frequent, but all the same it is familiar. A small herd of horses is still on the beach - running away, perhaps, or doing whatever, for she pays them little mind. There are only two that catch her attention. Power thrums through her, morphed and changed, stronger than when she’d left.

    Straia can feel the ground beneath her, the way it shifts and sighs beneath the other horses, the latent power of the rotting bones. There’s something deeper in it than her connection to the fire raven that circles above her, something ancient and primordial. She can feel Beqanna deeply, her triumphs and her sorrows, her heart and her blood.

    A familiar face crackles with lightning, shifting into a lion before her. Straia remembers they once fought on opposite sides of a war, but she knows little else about the mare, certainly not her name. Only the old Jungle tattoo, that red flower blooming across her chest, gives away where the mare once called home. Before the other mare can pounce, quite literally, Straia flicks her aside, stretching magical fingers. It is so very easy. Too easy. Far easier than it ever had been before.

    Funny indeed.

    The stallion, still crumpled on the ground, bleeds life in a way she cannot see but feel. In this strange limbo, with the veil torn and the balance askew, she isn’t sure if he can actually die, but it seems like a kindness to try and put him out of his misery. For a moment, his chest will feel as if birds flutter beneath it, wings pounding against his breastbone. It is that feeling of anxiety that you cannot shake, birds trapped in a cage. It is only a moment though, a breath, and then his heart simply stops.

    Once, she’d have to squeeze, had to exert effort to stop a heart. Now...now it simply stops, and she leaves him to his fate. Better to be dead, to join the legion of ghosts tearing through the veil, than to be trampled by them. Straia does not look back, but instead leads the way into Beqanna, into a land she does not know and yet a land she knows. Beqanna’s life courses in her veins, their heartbeats drumming to the same beat.

    The Chamber may not be here anymore, but oh, she is home.

    -- straia

    the raven queen

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