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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


    i feel a bad moon rising | any
    #1
    the rain that falls upon your skin
    it's closer than my hands have been

    This is the way of things, Lepis had been told so many times; this is the way things are between men and women. There will always be someone younger, someone prettier, and a good wife turns a blind eye to it and raises their children. Her mother’s voice, kind and gentle. Had the navy mare really been right this whole time? It seems unfathomable, and yet, Lepis stands where Heda had always said she would if she ‘ruined the peace’, if she spoke out against the natural order. Had she really let herself think that Wolfbane was different? How deeply had she deluded herself in the half-dozen years they’d spent together?

    Is Lilliana even the first? She wonders. Or is she just the first he was caught with?

    Caught up in her thoughts, the dun mare wanders without noticing where she is going. By the time she really looks around her, she’d standing in the riverlands. Lepis doesn’t quite remember crossing the water, yet the long ends of her tail are stiff with ice, and her legs are terribly cold. The spring sunlight overhead is not strong, but she finds a nice rise and spreads her wings to catch the best of it anyway. There is a soft breeze, filled with the scent of damp earth and new growth, and it tugs and toys with her long hair and the stiff feathers of her wings. There’s a faint itch just between her shoulders, where bit of winter hair hasn’t quite fully shed, and despite twitches of her skin and shoulders she cannot quite rid herself of it. Rolling here in the common lands seems a dangerous idea; who knows what lurks in Beqanna in these trying times? So instead she huffs irritably and digs a shallow furrow in the wet earth with her hoof.

    She unearths a round bulb, one end already burst open in growth. It’s familiar, but she lacks her friend Noah’s skill with identifying flora. A flower, she is sure, and decides that she will take it home with her, and see if it might grow in Loess. Her own thought surprises her –does she already think of Loess as home? – and in the moment of distraction, she crushes the bulb beneath her hoof. The soft give of it fills the navy-haired mare with chagrin, and she rolls it away with another sigh.



    lepis, comtesse of taiga
    queen of loess
    | queen of sylva | queen of the south
    lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio




    @[leliana]
    @[LELIANA]
    Reply
    #2

    it's just what happens when your heart goes ablaze

    Leliana knows of Lepis, but mostly only through whispers and whatever information she has been able to unearth through the reach of her magic. It is not a fully-formed knowledge but just the shape of one. It is the shadows of something—a breath of knowing—and she can only begin to guess at the feelings that tangle in Lepis’ chest when she thinks of that ill-fitted war. At the blood that now stains Leliana’s hands, despite all of the best of her intentions. She thinks that she can understand. She watched her husband fall into the volcano. She watched her daughter walk to meet her in the afterlife. She knows the loss.

    Still, she also knows the pain that the woman feels now.

    She knows what it is to be cast aside. To watch the one that you love morph into something entirely new.

    She knows the type of singular pain when it is torn apart in your hands. When it turns to dust.

    So she doesn’t shy away when she sees the woman by the river, even though there is a part of her gentle heart that twinges with fear of what will come. Instead she walks slowly up, the flowers blooming in her mane—the crimson of it curling gently around her jaw. “Hello,” her voice is mild, easy. No matter what she has ever felt in her life, she has remained skilled at staying steadfast, at hiding such things.

    Her hazel eyes watch the other kindly, looking down at the crushed flower beneath her hooves.

    She considers, for a moment, using her magic to revive it, but she restrains.

    Let the woman have her outlet, she thinks. Let her have this destruction.

    — Leliana —

    Reply
    #3
    the rain that falls upon your skin
    it's closer than my hands have been

    Though Lepis has never laid eyes on the red-haired woman in front of her, she knows exactly who Leliana is. A bay mare with flowers in her mane as red as her hair, smelling of ash and the jungle. This is most definitely the magician of Tephra, walking toward her from downriver. There had been a time when Lepis might have struck the woman down (or at least tried), but that had been when her own wounds were fresh, when hate was providing immediate balm to the grief that ravaged her. But hatred – and vengeance – are hard to hold on to for very long, not without burning herself up too, and those fiery emotions had slipped away with the seasons. There is still a Gale-shaped hole in her heart, but it is no longer broils beneath her skin, no longer drives her every action and shouts for the justice.

    There is no justice for accidents, for slips of fate, for little boys who didn’t listen when their parents tell them to keep away from a battlefield.

    Instead, the dun mare does what she can to ensure that there are no more battlefields for them to find. Or at least, she had thought that was what she was doing. It is a recent revelation, and Lepis has not yet determined if it is even a true one. Wolfbane is the one who has told her, after all, told her with claws pressing into the scarred flesh of her neck. At the time, she hadn’t doubted him. But now?

    Now she doubts everything.

    So there is doubt in Lepis when the other mare comes closer, and it deepens when the nearness brings an unexpected scent along with it. If not for that, the two women might have stood there, mild and steadfast and showing each other nothing that they did not want to. Instead, Lepis is unbalanced by the scent of her husband and reminded all at once how tenuous her control has been since his departure.

    Her composed mask, once so adeptly hiding the doubt, falls away to reveal a wry smile. It is small and mostly self-deprecating, and flashes just for a moment before Lepis speaks.

    “You’re a magician. Is there a cure for this?” Even as she says it, the winged mare is not sure what she even means. A cure for a broken heart? For a wayward husband? Her blue-grey eyes flick toward the gurgling river, swollen with spring snowmelt and expanded far beyond its banks. Her next words are less bitter than the first, but she does not look away from the water when she says them. “I’ve a great many flaws, but I did not think being an inadequate wife was one of them.”

    @[leliana]



    lepis, comtesse of taiga
    queen of loess
    | queen of sylva | queen of the south
    lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio


    Reply
    #4

    it's just what happens when your heart goes ablaze

    Leliana knows what it is like to feel pain.

    She knows what it is like to nearly split apart with the raw edge of it. She has lived her entire life with some memory of it—some ache in her heart, stones in her chest. She remembers what it was like to watch as Dovev’s memories returned to him, as she watched him leave her for the past. She remembers what it was like for Vulgaris to drive him and their daughter from Loess in favor of his sister. Watching Dovev return and being asked, time and time again, to heal the ones who captured his heart. Watching as her husband’s memories were wiped and he was replaced with something cruel, something vicious and cold.

    She knows the pain that radiates from Lepis and the echo of it reverberates throughout her.

    “There is no magic that can heal this,” her voice is quiet, steady, despite the way that everything within her twists around her own pain, the shared pain, the ache at knowing someone else was feeling the same. “I could have saved myself so much heartache had there been a way to cure it.” Her lips barely quirk into a shadow of a smile, but it fades from her crimson mouth before it can take hold, before it can stay.

    For a minute, she falls quiet.

    The silence stretches between them and her hazel eyes go to the river, watching as it pounds against the riverbank. The roar of it is nearly enough to drown out the memories that rise in the back of her mind. The winter she lived here when Loess was no longer welcome to her. The day she passed out when healing Warrick proved too much and the chaos of Vulgaris and Dovev fighting above her. She frowns and then turns back to Lepis. “I gave birth to my second born here,” she smiles, choosing instead to think of the good that had come from her time here. “It was so cold, and she was too early. I was so worried for her.”

    She wonders if she could continue. If she could tell her how that was the day she learned that some of the greatest joys in her life could come from her darkest hours, but such things feel trite. Because she knows the weight of pain and she knows that some of her darkest hours did not end with such joy.

    Some hours were just dark.

    Some things just hurt.

    — Leliana —

    Reply
    #5
    the rain that falls upon your skin
    it's closer than my hands have been

    The answer that Leliana gives is not the one that Lepis wants to hear. It is the one she expected though, and it is not as though there is any less amount of hope than the nothing that she already held. Yet somehow there is still disappointment, a sense of sinking.

    She lets out her breath in a single sigh, the heat of it steaming even in the spring time air.

    “I thought not,” Lepis replies. For a time they watch the water together, each of them reminiscing. This is not a bank that Lepis has stood upon before – perhaps that is why she has ended up here. She has no memories of this river, no emotions weighing heavy on her at the sight of the sunlight flashing on the surface or the glittering backs of the fish that leap above the rapids.

    Her navy ears flick back at the sound of Leliana’s voice, and though she is slow to turn, she does. The red-haired woman speaks of a daughter, and Lepis is reminded of what she knows of the other mare. Very little, other than that hers is not a joyous story. Or rather, the journey had not been; the heartache that Leliana spoke of is surely in the past. Her husband has returned to her from the dead. Some of the stories even say that she went and got him herself.

    Death, it seems, is an easier foe than disinterest.

    There is more to Leliana’s story, Lepis suspects. There is probably a happy ending – a baby girl grown strong. A family reunited, many happy children born afterward. That she does not finish it says more than if she had. Not about her own tale, but perhaps about Lepis’, about the way that it has ended.

    “I thought he went to Tephra,” she admits. She’d thought he would seek out Vulgaris; the two men were close. Starsin had told her otherwise, and for a few weeks she’d lived in denial. Sometimes she longs for those weeks back, when she hadn’t known, when it was easier to believe that a friend would lie than to accept the truth. And after she longs for them, she berates herself for the fool she is.

    “Tell me the rest of the story,” Lepis says to the river, “I hope there is a happy ending. I could use one, I think.”

    @[leliana]


    lepis, comtesse of taiga
    queen of loess
    | queen of sylva | queen of the south
    lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio


    Reply
    #6

    it's just what happens when your heart goes ablaze

    For all that they have found themselves on opposing sides before, the two women who stand here in this moment have more in common than they might think. The grief that they have shared, the way that they have felt their hearts break along the same fault lines. There are who would truly be able to comprehend the sorrow that has permeated Leliana’s life, but she cannot help but feel like Lepis might be able to.

    So she has no desire to lie to her.

    No desire to sugarcoat a truth that she herself has had to swallow too many times to count.

    She says nothing at first when Lepis mentions Tephra and continues to look out at the river, feeling a faint frown crease her brow, the weight of it settle in her chest. “There is—to this one, at least. Vulgaris came back to us this time and took us home after months of being unwelcome there. My daughter survived, but I fear that such beginnings buried a bitter seed in her. She has returned home, but there is pain in her.”

    She swallows, thinking of the darkness that has taken root in Sabbath—the anger.

    “The happy ending is knowing that she is alive, that she is whole, but happy endings do not mean perfect ones.” She rolls her shoulder, trying to come to grips with it. “Still, I will take them all the same.”

    Again, there is silence as she contemplates for a minute.

    When she does speak again, her voice breaks the silence suddenly.

    “Wolfbane did come to Tephra,” she admits, finally tearing her gaze away from the rapids to fully hold onto the gaze of her companion in this moment. “He told us about his internal battle, the demons and the curse that he is fighting. I did my best to help him. To help him control it.” She shakes her head and there are tears in the corners of her eyes although she does not let them fall. “I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t able to build walls around it—to stop it. I wasn’t—” she cuts off and swallows. “I am so sorry.”

    — Leliana —

    Reply
    #7
    the rain that falls upon your skin
    it's closer than my hands have been

    Lepis does not bother to replace the façade that has fallen away, and she does not hide the quiet sigh that passes through her navy lips as she watches the rushing current. There is no need to, not when she’s already exposed her still-tender wounds. Not when Leliana is willing to share her endings, even if they are not as happy as Lepis might have wanted to hear.

    She should have known, the dun mare thinks. In all endings there is some sort of sadness. In most beginnings too. Hers was no exception, and perhaps for that reason she has strived so much to make the opposite true for her own children. She wants for them everything she does not have, every happy ending she did not get. And yet, she grapples still with what those might even mean, and how she might keep up the façade even when it crumbles around her.

    Already she has distanced Celina, and Elio grows more withdrawn every day. Eyas and Tiercel are gone, Gale is buried in Loess. Even Pteron has grown more dim in the last few weeks, refusing to share the origin of the shining burns he wears for a few hours. Lepis has done everything she had thought was sure to provide a happy ending, and still she has failed. Leliana’s words are wise, Lepis knows, but they are not what she really wants to hear.

    “I’d rather have perfect ones,” she replies, but there is a wry twist to the edge of her smile that shows she knows her rathers are inconsequential.

    Lepis is replaying those endings, spending the silence that stretches – not uncomfortably – between them with imagining better ones. The triplets, playing tag in the woods of Taiga. Marni teaching Celina to fly, Pteron introducing his littlest brother to the Ischian girl who’d come to visit. Herself, watching them all, the warm weight of Bane’s neck across hers and the feel of his satisfied smile as he does the same.

    That thought - foolish, useless thought that it is – breaks the silence. Or rather, Leliana does, but Lepis is not so naïve to think the magics that swirl through Beqanna do not play a part in it. Her blue-grey eyes turn toward the red-haired mare, and a frown deepens the dark lines of her navy-marked forehead. She listens, her dark ears turned forward, silent, her expression frozen.

    And then she smiles.

    “It wasn’t him,” Lepis exclaims, the wonder in her voice matched by the sheen of unshed tears in her pale eyes. Not sadness, not like Leliana’s, but joy. “It  wasn’t him!”

    A non-sensical reaction to learning her former spouse is cursed, to be sure, but it is her true one. And yet, the reaction is short lived, a brief bit of happy realization that is crushed by the crashing wave of what Leliana has said, and what Lepis already knows. There is no cure for it. Even death does not stop it. They had fled from it, leaving Beqanna behind, and yet it has caught up to him still. It is gradual, she remembers, and the long, long absence from Taiga suddenly becomes clear. She frowns, trying to remember, and then –

    The night he’d come home without his wings, smelling of death and blood and pain.

    “Death can’t kill the curse,” she says, repeating words her husband had whispered to her on a dark night, curled tightly around each other beneath the stars of their hideaway. “Death can’t kill it,” she says again, more softly, and realizes she’s looking back at Leliana. “Don’t be sorry,” she tells her, and the tears of joy slip quietly down her cheeks, joyful no longer. “There wasn’t ever anything you could have done. It’s too late.”

    If she’d realized sooner, Lepis thinks, if she’d pressed him rather than accepted his quiet refusal. Maybe then they could have done something, but no longer.

    @[leliana]


    lepis, comtesse of taiga
    queen of loess
    | queen of sylva | queen of the south
    lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio


    Reply
    #8
    Leliana

    Leliana doesn’t bother to correct her or even contradict her. She would rather that her endings be perfect too, but she learned a long time ago that happiness in her life would be fleeting. She had moments of it, to be sure. She had beautiful, shining moments where it seemed that it would last forever—that she would be able to bask in the sunlight of her joy for the rest of her life—but they never lasted. Each and every one of them was accompanied by its own sunset and then the darkest of nights—the longest of midnights.

    Which makes this brief interlude of peace all the more sweet, all the more terrifying.

    So she doesn’t say anything, just falling into silence after her apology and then watching as the other mare begins to glow with joy. A brief frown flutters across her features—uncertainty about why Lepis would be so happy when she bore such sad news—but it is quickly chased with the dawning of the same understanding. After all, did she not feel the same joy when she realized that Vulgaris had not been acting of his own accord but because his memories had been wiped? Did the sorrow not also come with relief?

    Her frown waivers slightly but a smile does not follow because Lepis is quickly following the trail of her own logic to its next conclusion—to one that does not come with such joy, with relief.

    She takes an instinctive step forward and then, remembering herself, stops.

    She swallows and shakes her head. “I haven’t given up hope,” she whispers, feeling her own beat wildly in her chest. “I would have given anything to have someone trying to help Vulgaris when Carnage dipped into his mind and replaced him with someone I did not recognize.” She would have given anything to have someone there to help Dovev too, but such things go unsaid. “I failed the first time but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that can’t be done. I want to help, Lepis. I want to be able to do something.”

    but there you go again, turning golden, right there in front of me

    [Image: avatar-1975.gif]
    the heaviness in my heart belongs to gravity
    Reply
    #9
    the rain that falls upon your skin
    it's closer than my hands have been

    When Leliana steps forward, Lepis stiffens. She does not mean to, doesn’t want to, but there are some habits that never change. Most days, she can stifle them, but today, when the current of her emotions runs faster than the river in front of them, there is no chance of that. But she can soften the visceral reaction with a fragile smile, can force a quiet breath and the tension from her rigid muscles. The red-haired mare hadn’t meant anything, there is no violence hiding behind her worried face. Lepis is sure of this, even amidst all her doubts, and for a moment she just looks at Leliana.

    She has lost count of the myriad ways she has felt about the other woman, but few of them had been positive. Even know, there is a haze of resentment. Not towards Leliana, not really, but at herself, for being on the receiving end of the pity that she is sure she sees in those hazel eyes. There has been an overabundance of pity in Lepis’ life of late; the sour taste of it – the way it sticks to her – that she cannot seem to rid herself of. Once, hiding the scars had been enough. Now she broadcasts her hurt in unseen ways, and there is no length of mane that that can hide what she wears plain on her face.

    Wallowing in self-pity seems a natural response, and she has certainly done a good amount of that. Even when Leliana offers to help, her voice impassioned, Lepis only shakes her head. No, she thinks, there is not anything. Nothing can bring her husband back, nothing can cure this hurt.

    “There is one way to remove the curse,” the dun mare says, and her golden head turns back and forth; this is not an option she can consider.

    “But could you rip the beating heart from his chest? Swallow it, and accept the curse with it?” Because I cannot, her blue-grey eyes say so plainly. She can’t raise a hand to him, even knowing her husband is no longer anything but a body that the evil wears. Lepis does’nt say it, and yet still she feels the guilt as though she has.

    “Is that selfish of me?” she asks the river, “that I cannot bear to leave my children? To take both of their parents?” Doubt fill her mind, touches each word, flavors the quiet sigh that precedes: “Maybe I should. Maybe I could, and you could lock me away where I can’t hurt anyone.” Her breath shudders, the thought of captivity far deeper, far sharper than the guilt. Terror, even, dark and rancid. Could she really?

    She thinks of little Elio, and sharp toothed Celina, the triplets and Marni and Pteron. She could, Lepis realizes. She could, to keep them safe. She would.



    lepis, comtesse of taiga
    queen of loess
    | queen of sylva | queen of the south
    lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio




    @[leliana]
    Reply
    #10
    Leliana

    Leliana understands the woman in ways that she wishes she did not.

    She wishes that this was a foreign concept—that this hurt was alien to her. She wishes that she could just turn a blind eye to it and that it did not sink its hooks into the heart of her. She wishes so much that she did not have to steep in it because so much of it is a fresh memory that comes back on a wave of agony. But she doesn’t turn her cheek to it and doesn’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. She lets it soak in her instead.

    But the other mare is wrong in one aspect. It is not pity that bleeds from her when she looks at her but an empathy instead. She knows what it is to be the recipient of pity, to feel it press its hands around your throat and not relent. She would never turn such a heavy thing onto another.

    There is a moment of disbelief at the idea that the curse could only be overcome one way which is no victory at all. Was the curse never to be vanquished? Was it meant to live on forever—simply passing from soul to soul and ruining whatever life it may touch? It was too much to comprehend, too much to simply swallow and accept, but she doesn’t openly debate it. She just shakes her head slowly.

    No, she couldn’t rip his heart from his chest.

    She couldn’t accept the curse and thus curse her family.

    They have experienced too much already.

    “Your children need their mother,” she says simply. “You are not selfish.” She would never take part in driving the mare into the shadows. Would never lock her away, force her to live out her days with the curse blossoming like disease in her veins. “Beqanna needs you too.” This, she fully believes.

    No - there had to be another way. Lepis could not simply disappear.

    but there you go again, turning golden, right there in front of me



    @[Lepis] - hi, remember this thread? sorry for the horrible wait but i wanted to give you something to wrap it up.
    [Image: avatar-1975.gif]
    the heaviness in my heart belongs to gravity
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