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    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


    a man of true worth [any]
    #1

    Every man dies

    But not every man truly lives

    He is nobody now.

    But being nobody isn’t so bad. The absence of everything that has preceded his transformation to being a nameless horse is freeing in a way that Kellan can appreciate. Without a name of power, there is no responsibility, no worry or concern. He’s not sure if any of his siblings still remain, if any of their descendants still roam these hills. Family has become nothing more than a word to him. A concept that had enveloped and dominated his life was nothing more than a cloak he’d cast off long ago.

    Kellan can’t be sure why he comes to this place. Something in the back in his mind - a sensation that he cannot quite put his proverbial finger on. The way the shadows leak out from the crevices of the earth to take possession over every living thing, including himself. The pale buckskin slows to a halt, the slanting light of the evening casting his own shadow far out in front of him. The shape reminds him of another creature.

    Kellan blinks, dismisses the idea, and flicks a solitary ear to the side to see if there’s anyone wandering about near by. It’s been a terribly long time since he’s seen another horse.

    Kellan
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    #2
    The forest crowds close; Loam is too deep within it to tell if the hot bright morning is long gone. She is a creature of mossy nook and damp crevasse - an aberration of their species, because the light hurts her eyes and she prefers anonymity. Those short bursts of time spent outside the arms of wayward cedars and dark elms are aberrations themselves in her nature. She cannot explain why at times, she looks to haunt them with her pitiful company or perhaps she knows why but chose not to say.

    Loam is not overly fond of self examination; she is a basic creature allowed few comforts beyond a foal at her flank or thoughts of a buckskin stallion that made the sick red muscle of her heart quicken.

    She is deep in the forest, almost to her treasured secret glade and the scummy pond she stupidly drinks from. But something causes her to deviate from the chosen path onto a trail big enough for a deer or a little black horse like Loam, all rough shadow and sharp bony shape. Her pace never quickens, and she only stops once beneath a break in the interlocked boughs to crane her head upwards - a twilight sky pierces her dark emerald gaze. Then, that ‘something’ that first swayed her brain into changing course, is back.

    It is a faint thread of scent that picks at the edge of her memories, teasing in its familiar musk and though her pace still does not quicken, her heart does in sheer stupid deplorable wonder that she - Loam, of all beasts! - should feel this way: eager, for the first time in her life. She bursts forth from the thickest knot of trees like a bullet, all blurred black speed until she catches herself and stops just short of him. She gives a soft snort of surprise, her green eyes already greedily drinking in the sight of him and Loam, so unused to want or need, feels like she has to touch him to make sure he's real and not imagined.

    “I must be dreaming,” she mutters sourly to herself, her chin nearly tucked to her breast as she attempts to not breathe him in. It was too much. It was really all too much and then she bites his shoulder, the gesture mean, more so  than gentle (Ha! When is Loam ever gentle than when she has a tagalong foal at her heels?). “Hm, I'm not dreaming after all.” she mumbles, not the least bit apologetic for biting him. Loam feels a queer mixture of longing and loathing as she looks at the stallion, her eyes full of that pale buckskin pelt that she has an unnatural fondness for.
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    #3

    Every man dies

    But not every man truly lives

    At first, he thinks perhaps he’s dreaming. The scene seems so familiar, with the darkness infiltrating the corners of his vision until it materializes in the shape of the nameless mare. Kellan remains quiet, deer-like as he watches her pause for the breath of an instant before him. Is she daydream, or nightmare? He had dreamed of her once, (still dreams of her) the strange, liquid black of her skin melting to conform around him and suffocate him from existence. That had been a good dream, if he was remembering correctly.

    This creature is different though - not as questioning, not as unsure. Her teeth rake furiously across his skin and the buckskin’s eyes widen, head tilting away from her while he marvels silently over the sound of her voice. “Not dreaming.” He confirms, neutral in his response. If she were dreaming, then surely he’d be dreaming too, and Kellan finds that unacceptable.

    “You’re real.” He states solemnly, head reaching out to allow his nose to run smoothly over the curve of her dark shoulder. This is the only liberty he takes, reasoning it to be a fair exchange: bite for a caress. His eyes, rivaling the black of her own coat, close and he shakes his head. “It can’t be you.” He concedes, stepping away from her to determinately continue through the forest. He’s not quick in his retreat, only quiet and unswerving.

    “I’m not the one you’re looking for anyways.” Kellan calls back to her, stopping for a moment to catch his breath. Even here, now, so long since their first encounter, she still shook some part of him to his core. Kellan cannot understand it.

    Kellan
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    #4
    How quaint to meet again by dusk; better the almost-night because she can only suffer so much brightness and he was always ever-bright to her eyes.

    Loam cannot shake that queer sense of longing all caught up in loathing. She is not meant for anything beyond dirt and death, and she cannot stomach the idea that he makes her want more than cobwebs and dust.

    He is right to think her a nightmare, but he quells the nightmarish tendencies in her with a stray black glance that burns through her like dying stars and newborn galaxies. Loam is fit to gasp but swallows it on a ragged indrawn breath that hisses out if her a moment later at his caress. He was forgiving where she was not, and his tender reaction to her scathing distress disquiets her further.

    She fidgets, preferring him to have lashed back at her but not this. No, never this. It was too much! Her nerves scream, raw and on fire the second he concedes that it is not her. Loam has never been denied and she is visibly taken aback by the way he retreats from her presence. She lingers, uncertain as he is not, and her uncertainty is mirrored in the fraught way her head swings from side to side.

    Loam almost tells him not to go but pride shuts her mouth. Good thing her feet are independent of her mouth because they move of their own accord (the heart’s doing really) and she falls in beside him in that moment he took to catch his breath. “But you are,” she insists, perhaps a bit too haughtily but her strange moods are tamed by his nearness. “You are,” she insists again, and brushes her lips against the place where she first bit him - it is as much of an apology as he is like to get but there is a moment’s sincerity in the sidelong glance she gives him.

    She doesn't want to say that it was always him who made the madness go away, but it was and all she can hear now is nightfall in the forest and every rush of their breath.
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    #5

    Every man dies

    But not every man truly lives

    What has he done to spark this sort of interest? That his subtle mannerisms could reveal a girlish tendency in in her? The shadow that he remembers could not have thought so highly of him as to come rushing to his side like she does now. But … what if? What if he’d had the same impact on her that she had slaughtered him with so long ago? His eyes slide curiously to where she stands, so solid and thrumming with life. He remembers how quickly she had cut through him with a single syllable.

    Kellan swallows.

    “You are.” She repeats; and with a numb, knee-jerk reaction, Kellan shakes his head. He cannot be. But, none of that matters because suddenly she is touching him again and this time Kellan feels that familiar ache in his bones. What harm can it do to please her, indulge her? Kellan knows he’d follow her anywhere, if only she asked. So instead he smiles - a pale, slow thing. “I can be, if that’s something you want.” He offers to her.

    This is the closest he’s ever come to his shadow. He knows that it may be the only time he can be this close. He’s experienced it before: this longing with her. She’d promised to see him again - or had he imagined it? Either way this meeting seems like a fulfillment of that promise, so he revels in the moment. This is the happiest he’s ever been.

    Kellan
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    #6
    If asked, she could never say exactly what it was about him that bewitched her like so. It could have been the vigor in the dark of his eyes (she notices how world weary they look now); the subtleties of muscle beneath the dusky tan of his skin. Maybe it was the quiet strength in him that cajoled her into submission, or the hint if gentleness that she was unused to. Whatever it was, she had never forgotten him - could never forget him as the days are long.

    Loam would always stop to stare at a buckskin, to see if it was him. It never was and disappointment had become cruelly familiar to her every time she laid eyes on such beautiful tawny fur. She learned that there are ways the heart - that stupid red meat in her - could soar at the sight of something longed for than fall so sickeningly far the moment it turned out not to be… him. She knew disappointment like she knew death and dirt - intimately, an ache that rilled along her bones. Like sad fish dying onshore, her heart flopped and gulped with want for him - he could be her everything, her foodwaterair.

    He smiles; it feels like the sun rising in the morning and it hurts her but she relishes the pain. Starving, selfish, she asks for more with the tenderest (which for Loam is a feat of sheer determination to not be malicious) touch of her lips to him. She doesn't tell him that she came like he asked,  to visit the falls, lurking as a shadow is wont to do at the edge of the rock and wood. Loam doesn't need to tell him because it's in the past and they're here, in the present. “Yes,” she murmurs, wanting to say it over and over in a strange new chant.

    “Yes,” she breathes against him, heady from the way his scent fills her nostrils - she needs the smell of him more than she needs air, her lungs are greedy and sucking. Loam, no lie in her voice as she repeats that mantra, is too selfish to ask him if that's what he wants.
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