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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


    Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, Heartworm/Irisa
    #1
    my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
    she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
    Tumbling or Floating.

    Falling or rising.

    Constellations whirl past (a collection curved back and mirrored – horns; a sprawl of limbs and leaves – a tree where she had waited), guiding her through this permeation; but they must just be tricks of the dark, or otherwise things she is holding onto from the living, because when she looks behind (or in front) of her, there is no light, but nothing. There are no stars blinking or pinholes of sun, nor warmth from these things that should flush her skin.

    But then, she cannot feel the air brush her girth, either, though she knows she is in transit.

    She thinks she is in transit.

    (She spills, or scales, onwards.)

    Ever towards something, or maybe a permanent nothing like this. Falling or rising.

    Or staying still, doomed to be suspended in a dead, black womb. Father? It echos here. Gyrates off the nothingness and suddenly she realizes there must be definitions to this place. There must be surfaces off which her calls can bounce; there must be ends and beginnings and if there is, then it is not dead but some other way of living.

    Father?

    (He had wanted her to feel alone. Now alone is what she is, through and through. Imprisoned in a cage of his own making… or her’s. Or someone cruel and careless. Or something who sees nothing and thinks it attractive. A blind god? A pale death.)

    Father? She takes a step forward but there is nothing to say that she is moving. No way to orient herself.

    Her head hurts.

    Father? It comes to her from all directions, every one of them sad.

    (Had she been so sad?) She realizes, she thinks, she cannot see from both eyes. Her head hurts, more to the left than to the right (if there is left and right here), where he had bruised and battered her face and sent one eye askew – he is a true expressionist, the way he wields asymmetry.

    Father? Maybe she is lost but she sees no way back so she stands still. Nothing to be done.
    and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.


    @[Cassi] - I left the scene... utterly black and decriptionless, because it is Heartworm's place, after all, and Nyxia was just 'in transit' to the dream having not yet been 'sucked in', so I suppose you can powerplay her (kind if) entering or the dream unfolding? This is wonderfully weird. :]
    Tarnished x Heartworm
    Reply
    #2
    tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more;

    It becomes easier, to stay.
    She never leaves the land. It is green and she is a god, here. Sometimes there are memories – a image of a skull, bells chiming, a stallion she once loved – but she smothers them. She buries them and smiles and if she smiles hard enough, lips peeled and teeth bared, she can forget.
    Heartworm said let there be light and there was, light all over the land – her land. Her paradise.
    (There is a memory that the animals lost their language and the world crumbled. It is not a sweet memory. She buries it.)

    Her daughter is here, eternally young. She is real, and Heartworm holds her close every night. She has wings like the birds they play amongst and her life has never been so full, so sweet.
    (There is a memory of a man hurting her, taking her, of bells chiming. It is not a sweet memory. She buries it.)

    It is their land – a vast expanse of forest, filled with beautiful animals, snow-white deer and panthers dripping in jewels. Lions lay with lambs. It is always sunny. There is never a nighttime. Heartworm is never a skeleton, here.
    There was a stallion, once, but then there is a black spot in her memory and when it disappeared so did he.
    But never mind that, because she has her daughter, rainbow-sheened and smiling.
    Never mind that, because she is a god of her own making, in a paradise she will never leave.

    No one else should speak, here.

    (Father?)

    It comes on the wind so faint she might have imagined it. But something else – a remnant of the times she’s forgotten – makes her skin prickle. She calls to Irisa, beckons her to her side, places her lips to the girl’s soft skin. It is okay. It is her world.

    (There is a memory of another girl, a spill of lavender against the white. A girl left behind because she was not part of this. A girl whose name she never learned. It is not a sweet memory, but it is not an ill one, either. She thinks of her sometimes but says nothing to Irisa.)

    She calls out to the voice – the girl – and lets her into the world, though she is scared, though she clings to Irisa like a life raft.
    “There’s no father here,” she says and she can’t quite look at the girl, the girl looks too much like Irisa (it’s the eyes, she thinks, they have the same eyes).
    “Who are you?” she asks – demands – and then, “how did you get here?”

    HEARTWORM


    I am Too Lazy to make Irisa an account so hence a heartworm post. the place is basically an idyllic paradise - very sunny, lots of greenery, fantastical creatures, etc.
    Reply
    #3
    my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
    she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
    The darkness is weighty. It feels like wet blankets over her eyes.

    (Nyxia blinks – darkness begets darkness.)

    She stands still for a while. For minutes and hours and days. Her head hurts. It is something she is holding on to. Something she is taking with her because she cannot figure out the extant knots that entangle her fingers and hold her back; it’s a vestige of a moment that she cannot make right, yet.

    (It’s a jigsaw of skull, slipping past her outstretched fingers. These memories, like  so many bright things, cannot live here. Not in full, in this in between made for her and her alone, where she finds herself caught as if in a web. Where she exists and does not all at once, pulled apart by warring gravities – life,Father?; death, his gift to her; and something she cannot understand. Something that swirls and sweeps like a tide, searching for her.)

    Father? She closes her golden eye, the other is shut by the swell of the bruised flesh around it.

    When she opens, they are two, because here there are no vestiges of violence left bare. Bright light clouds her vision as darkness had before but she does not turn away from it. She breathes it in, sweet and warm, and takes a sure step on soft footing. It reminds her of her faraway cradle of moss and windflower. A breeze runs over her hips, a soft touch that she turns into and yearns to chase. She pirouettes in place, glancing up at the whirl of green and pastel wings. She turns and turns – bird songs, like woodwind instruments, meet the low chirp of bejewel insects – until she feels dizzy and giddy and stops on shaky legs, smiling.

    And there they are.

    (Father? A sticky part of her mind clings to it even in paradise.)

    ‘There’s no father here.’

    (Her gut clenches.) “Oh,” she says softly, sinking back into her heels. “I…” (...know you.) She blinks, turning her golden eyes first to the woman and then the girl. (We once lay in a tangle together.) “I’m… Nyxia.” The girl’s brow wrinkles and despite the peace that stains every fabric of this place, she pulls her chin to her chest and a tear traces her cheek. (She is holding onto these, too.) But here it twinkles like a star, and where it falls it is eaten up by something lovely.

    “I think I got lost. So I came here.” (Came back here.) She looks up, her golden eyes meeting the colourful girl's – selfsame.
    and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.
    Tarnished x Heartworm
    Reply
    #4
    tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more;

    Irisa has none of her mother’s hesitancy, instead she looks at the girl who had materialized with a new interest. There is a way she stands, a discord that chimes between her and the world she stands in, a discord Irisa cannot entirely articulate but rather senses, feels in her bones.
    (There’s something else, too, a certain yearning when she looks at her, the way we ache for stars and the sea from whence the most basic parts of us were borne, the yearn of our bodies recognizing something it knows.)

    Mother hisses there is no father here and Irisa knows there’s a name, because mother mumbles it sometimes in sleep, sometimes moans it like it’s a thing upon her. She knows she came from somewhere but the details are obscure and faint and she’s never pressed the issue.
    She doesn’t remember being in the womb but she can almost recall floating, warm, limbs tangled with another.

    The girl offers her name - Nyxia - so Irisa smiles and offers her own before mother can tell her not to.
    “I’m Irisa,” she says, “and this is my mother. Heartworm.”

    ***

    Heartworm cringes when her name is offered. She doesn’t want any of this. She tries to dream the girl away but nothing happens, she is too real, too solid, she does not bow to her whims the way the rest of this world does.
    (She’s never entirely understood this world. She doesn’t think about it too much. There is a lot she doesn’t think about.)

    “You shouldn’t be here,” she says, and hates the croak of her voice, the fear that laces it like arsenic. The animals sense her distress and raise their strange heads, inquisitive. They are all linked to her.

    ***

    Irisa glances at her mother, shocked.
    “Mom!” she says, appalled, then looks at the girl again.
    “She’s kidding,” she says, “we don’t get a lot of visitors.”

    HEARTWORM
    Reply
    #5
    my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
    she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
    She is not made of this fabric (stained pretty, bright colours; bejeweled and dripping with the woolen softness of eskimo kisses), of that they are all keenly aware. She can feel it, just as she had felt out of place and odd in that dark void in between – they are used to the company of each other and the things of her making. 

    Nyxia is another thing, entirely, made of other stuff.

    Made but not kept.

    Her presence here rends the air around her mother like the toll of bells, splitting the peace and quiet. She is an intruder on these strange and distant shores. (She is something like a sickness – a mutation of a virus that had been here once before – that in any other case would have been swarmed by the leukocytes of her mind and destroyed before ever having been seen.)

    But she has been here, in some way or another, before. (She cannot remember it, of course. Sometimes she dreams of something like it, when she lays her head down and her eyes drift shut. When she regresses back to that dark, suspended place.) Held inside, tight against another, for months of swaying and growing (growing around each other, a lattice of legs and necks). Made in a dream… a strange one, one that had so careless let him in…

    (This place has a compromised immune system.)

    “Irisa,” she looks a little younger than Nyxia does, because her mother likes her that way. “Heartworm. Nice to meet you.” She had never asked father about her mother. Hadn’t thought to. (Hadn’t been given a chance to.) What would he have said? (‘Because there are very few things in the whole of Beqanna scarier than me.’ He had said that once… had it been true of here as well?) How could he have explained any of it to his doe-eyed daughter?

    It had been more important to just protect her and love her. He had found her, expelled from this place (two births – one after the other), alone and had been a dutiful father ever since. He is a good father. The lavender girl shifts uneasily, her eyes moving from Irisa’s as Heartworm speaks. She can feel the fear. She had known fear… Nyxia’s brow wrinkles and she blinks, “oh.” 

    (Birds with beautiful, glittery, fanned tails perch and stare. Great, big cats with glowing stripes and friendly eyes turn. This world is wary.) Irisa speaks and Nyxia smiles, drawn back to her, but she cannot help but wonder aloud, “where should I be?”

    She breathes and feels this place change; if she can be cast away once, so can she be cast out again.
    (—she remembers sand under her hooves. Lightning cracking a beautiful, blue sky. A motionless body. Smoke in the air and… a tree, where she had waited. She had thought it had been father, but it hadn’t been him at all...) “W-why… am I… here?” she whispers, staring at Heartworm expectantly, her breathing coming faster and heavier. Panic.

    (Her head hurts. The vision in her left eye blurs and wavers.)
    and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.
    Tarnished x Heartworm
    Reply
    #6
    and the walls kept tumbling down
    in this city that we love

    There was darkness, in their conception.
    Darkness, and bells chiming.
    But Heartworm does not – cannot – think of these things, because they are but the topsoil that covers even worse skeletons
    (skeletons that you once were)
    and she has long cast the shovel away.
    Let dead things lie, and the past is a dead thing.
    The ache of birthing is a dead thing, the two bodies tangled that poured from her are dead things, his lips on her neck is a dead thing.

    They are in paradise, now, where smiles are set and graves forgotten.

    Heratworm flinches as they say her name, as if they might recognize something - someone - that she had once been.
    The air shudders around the girl.
    (The birds fell sick and she could not help them. The animals lost their language and gibbered at her because she was the god and she could not help them. A mountain crumbled. God!)
    She cannot have dead things in this place, even though it’s a place built because of them.

    ***

    Irisa knows none of this.
    But the memory – the warmth, legs tangled – itches at her. She wants to know why something in her skin calls out at this girl, this stranger who isn’t supposed to be here.
    Irisa has never known resistant – all the animals play with her as if she is their own – so she shows no hesitancy as she walks to the girl, wings folded at her back. Behind her, mother moans something – it almost sounds like don’t - but Irisa pretends not to hear.

    She is not a worldly girl, but she is a smart one.
    She knows her mother’s face better than she knows her own, knows the particular architecture of her bones, and she sees glimpses of it in the stranger. She examines her, curious – up close the similarities are more apparent.

    Nyxia stammers out a question but Irisa mostly ignores it, asks a question of her own.
    “You look like us,” she says, “not exactly. But you do.”

    ***

    “Don’t,” Heartworm moans as Irisa leaves her side, but it feels like the words were drained from her. And she can’t stop her. Her beautiful girl, her dream girl, now standing side-by-side another girl, one who stinks of a reality Heartworm denies.

    Irisa says it because she sees – of course she sees –
    (they have the same eyes)
    but Heartworm pretends she doesn’t.
    She is very good at pretending.

    “You have to go back,” she says. Her voice is almost gentle.



    Irisa
    tarnished x heartworm


    Reply
    #7
    my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
    she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
    Her skeletons shift.
    (where should I be? … where do I go?)

    They’ve not been buried yet. They are bathed in smoky darkness. In cool, wooded air and brushed with sand. (Her skeleton calls. It is still covered by the fine veil of purplish horsehair, one golden eye stares down to the earth, the other, into bruised flesh. Maybe heat still clings to it. Organic, self-made heat – depending on how time flows here. 

    It is still, like a doll, without breath and having spent its final, jerking spinal reflexes. 

    Maybe father has found it by now.)

    “Wait…”

    (A dead thing.)

    Irisa steps away from Heartworm, and Nyxia wonders on the touch of those wings – on her back, her chest, her face. On the colourful sheen that made her a keepsake, more fit for this place. She smiles, trembling, as Irisa’s curiosity meets Nyxia’s waste – this could have been much sweeter. She blinks another tear, and this one is less lovely, indeed. 
    They were made, together, in one dark coition.

    “Yes.” She replies, their studies leading to the only conclusion there ever could be. Don’t you see? she might ask Heartworm. Pleed. But young things can often feel the inflexibility in others. And Irisa yields, and they move like a tide. Nyxia breathes in, “cool.”

    She was never meant to be here. This paradise was lost to her years ago, but she had never missed it. Ignorance can be bliss, and their bliss had been consumed like a mirror – only Irisa’s animal friends had been much more fantastical, and Nyxia’s had ended in brutality. 
    Such is war.

    Heartworm speaks, and the lavender girl flinches. Her head hurts mightily. 
    Her gaze shoots to the woman, narrowing. “I don’t know how to get back,” she whispers, her jaw tight. And for the first time in her life, there is some rancor in her voice. It tastes bitter. (Anger, the bedfellow of fear – and there is fear in abundance.) “I was looking for father and then I got. Lost!” She shrieks the last word so inadvertently that she steps back from Irisa and turns her head away from them, closing her eyes.

    (He had been shameless. Uncovered. Naked. He had come to her in the night and had spoiled her. Spilled her? He had wanted her to feel lonely, and now…) She turns back, slightly sheepish, the left side of her face swollen and discoloured. Bloodied. Crusty. Her left eye cannot be seen now, it is damaged and hidden under gross mounds of engorged skin and skewed brow- and cheekbones.

    (She was never meant to be here.) “W-what did you mean when you said, you ‘don’t get a lot of visitors’? That makes no sense… And it sounds boring. You should really visit me in the Meadow or the Desert, sometime,” she chirps lightly, trying to assuage any unrest from her outburst.
    and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.


    went there, hopefully this is all fine.
    Tarnished x Heartworm
    Reply
    #8
    tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more;

    All around her, skeletons, and she hasn’t a clue.
    Irisa is rainbows and sunshine, living amongst fantastical creatures. She wears a rainbow on her body and takes flight with the birds, laughs and dives amongst them. She is brightness is a terribly concentrated form, shaped in ways even Heartworm doesn’t understand.
    She’s never seen a skeleton. Never seen the night sky, either.

    All around her are haunted things but she doesn’t know darkness so she doesn’t know to look for it, doesn’t know that the particular architecture of the forest is not supposed to quake so, that lions should not lay down with lambs.

    Death isn’t so much as a concept.

    ***

    Heartworm wants to scream. She considers killing the girl, but she cannot – there is still something of a motherly instinct about her, and besides, what would this world do if blood was spilt across it?
    (She remembers the flies in the bird’s eyes. When they started to die. It won’t happen again.)

    The girl turns her head and she sees it, the ugly contusion of her face. Someone else hurt her, too. Instinctly, Heartworm tries to glamour over it, change the girl, but the wrongness of her resists it, rejects her as a body rejects an organ.

    She can’t be here. Can’t. She’ll poison the land.

    ***

    Irisa looks confused.
    “We are in the meadow,” she says. Indeed, it’s a glorious meadow, lush and colorful, all flowers in bloom. Overhead, a bird as large as her mother glides.
    “And there’s no desert. Though mom can make you one, if you want,” she adds.
    She feels a bit bad for the girl. Maybe whatever happened to her face messed with her mind a bit, too.

    ***

    The plan forms and it makes her sick.
    Wake up. Reset.
    No. This is real.
    But—
    If she believes it for a moment, if she pulls herself from the reverie and takes the girl with her, she’ll be gone. She can’t find her way back twice, surely.
    Reality, like a sickness, itches at her skin as she watches the girls in a mute horror, unable to speak to them.
    Try to wake up.

    HEARTWORM


    I'm thinking to make her go away heartworm wakes them up and then irisa refuses to go back or something? idk
    Reply
    #9
    my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
    she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
    She feels it, like a hook behind her navel, yanking; the muscles of this place are trying to pry her shade from itself. It is violent. And she is scared. “...there’s no desert. Though mom can make you one, if you want...” “No!” She does not mean to yell. Not at Irisa! But she does not want a desert. She does not want to leave, not yet. Not until she has understood it all.

    But she is being rejected...

    –bright emerald green. Cornflower blues. Lavenders and sunflower yellows. 

    –darkness. Heavy, aching darkness; airy, breathless nothing.

    (–somewhere, far away or nearby, lungs sting with a pull of breath. A skeleton shifts. A moan issues from cracked and dry lips and then is silenced.)

    The lavender girl blinks her golden eyes open. (Her head pounds.) Brilliant big cats pace and watch her, alarmingly intense. She eyes them wearily, now. She does not feel safe. Not completely, not now that the creations here have seen the queerness of her presence. The world bears down on her. The smell of blood imparts itself in her nostrils, intermingling with the sickliness of flowers and perfume – and she realizes, now, that it is coming from the ruin of her face. Drops and trails, passing down like thick tears over her cheekbone and chin. Congealing in her fur. She is not lovely. She is ugly; she is even less made for this place now than the first time she was forced out.

    (There is still blood! Maybe, somewhere – far away or nearby – her flesh is still plump and warm. Maybe he had failed like he has only one other time.)
    “Not this Meadow, but mine,” she replies softly, pleading. (Understand.) But she does not know how to break this place for Irisa. How to show her home. She does not know how to explain father, or –

    (Somewhere far away or nearby, a muscle shifts. Twitches. Screams in agony and is stilled. But it is cool and soft and it smells like moss and windflowers.)

    “...I have to go, soon,” she almost mouths it, it is so quiet. She does not know how she knows it. But it is true. She is in transit. She was always in transit. She looks back to Irisa, sullen-eyed and grief-stricken. She cannot leave her… again. She knows this, too. Though she does not know how. That this would be a terrible thing done twice-over.

    “Won’t you come?” it comes out like a croak, just as she stifles a sob.
    Tears and blood make their careful passage down her cheekbone and chin, hanging there like strange jewels and then drip. (Things like these have never wrought beauty, no matter where they fall together.) “I think I am alone, wherever I am.”
    and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.


    so I'm going with either she never totally died or ~*beqannamagic*~ she's been revived and is coming to (in the forest), so now she's kind of.. ready to leave? like Heartworm, if you like, maybe can feel that she is easier to push out or is getting there. so if you'd like to wake them up or where ever you feel like going now <3
    Tarnished x Heartworm
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