• Logout
  • 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


    twisting on racks when sinews give way; any (one)
    #1


    and death shall have no
    DOMINION
    A few days’ distance didn’t make much difference to tragedy, as it turned out.  Dom was sore all over, her cracked ribs aching with every breath.  Bruises had formed where she’d been struck by falling rocks.  The gashes had scabbed over, but it would be a few weeks before she was in fighting form again.  Worse than all of that was the way her body reminded her more with every passing day that she didn’t have a baby to nurse anymore.  Like losing her whole world wasn’t enough, she had to be reminded of it with every step she took.  And it would get worse before it got better.  Not that any of it would ever be better.

    She ran, heavy hooves pounding the earth even though it hurt, even though it pulled on torn skin and aching bones and made her pant and grit her teeth against the pain of engorged mammary glands and the stretch of bruised muscles.  Pain was good.  Pain chased away flashes of memory, kept her from looking back at what was gone forever.  And maybe she ran to punish the earth too, beating out her anger and her fury and her desolation with every strike of hoof against ground.

    There were no new stars in the sky to mark the passing of her happy little family, no dancing soul-lights twinkling up above to show they’d made it safely into the next world.  All stupid stories from her father’s lying tongue, spun of liquid silver and the cruelty of hope.  Vicious, insidious hope that sank into hearts and minds and told tiny ears life was something sweet and beautiful, full of endless potential even when darkness loomed on the horizon.  All lies.  Life was always only ever ending.

    She wouldn’t forget again.

    Dom ran for miles, far from the lake that had once again become her landmark at the end of the world, the one familiar place when everything else was in ruins.  She ran until the pain twisted into something sweet, and then she ground to a halt, tossing her head and snorting her frustration.  Didn’t matter how hard she pushed her body.  It wouldn’t change what was true.

    Sadly, she wasn’t quite stupid enough to stand still after a run like that.  It would certainly accomplish the goal of making her body hurt in ways that didn’t remind her of earthquakes and falling rocks and dead bodies, didn’t remind her of bright green eyes dulled by agony, and two words that haunted her sleep.  “Hurts, Momma.”  Even now, she wasn’t about to cripple herself to chase away a few more ghosts.  So she walked until her breathing slowed, her heartbeat came back down, and the burning in her muscles faded before she finally stopped and took stock of her surroundings.

    Almost dawn, the sky just starting to lighten on the horizon.  Another cloudless night full of the same old stars was drawing to a close.  Still cool and damp after the violent storm a few nights past, and the grass was rich and green from the rain.  A few trees looked newly fallen, like the willow by her lake where Tarnished had found her, scorched and split by lightning, half of it crashing to the ground while the other half stood.  Dom blew out a bitter breath at the symbolism, shook her head, and followed the curve of the land to a stream so she could quench her thirst, maybe grab a mouthful of grass before she set out again.



    No more may gulls cry at their ears
    Or waves break loud on the seashores;
    Where blew a flower may a flower no more
    Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
    DOMINION BY SAMSHINE | HTML BY MAAT
    Reply
    #2
    We do what we must,
    Because we can.


    What do you call a girl who doesn't lose?

    It is not that she is lucky; there are many whose lives are a series of near-misses, tragedy avoided in an invisible ripple of random chance. But Camrynn is not that; she misses nothing, and what might seem like random chance is never random.

    In a world that seems like chaos, where gods play chess with mortals and shake the ground beneath their feet for amusement, Camrynn is the exception to the rule. There are no rockslides in her life, unless she causes them. The ground will never collapse beneath her, and even if it did, she would catch herself. Even time bows to her, bending backwards, splitting and curling around itself like wood carved by a chisel.

    She is a magician, and she wields her power with constant grace. It is part of her, another limb, an extension of her very soul. It can harm, it can heal, it can give and it can take. She is like a god made flesh, all the luck in the world condensed into a single point, random chance that is never random. Always in control.

    And always aware, so that when Dominion runs, Camrynn feels the footfalls echo, hears the sad heart beating. It is not hard to discover what compels Dominion forward; the mare wears a part of her story on her skin, and still more inside her body. Camrynn can feel it all, the lacerations and the bruising, the aching fullness of a missing child, the rush of pain as the running continues, and the lack of release when it ends.

    In an eyeblink, Camrynn is invisible, an unknowable presence overlooking the stream where the running-mare stops to drink. She finds herself impossibly drawn to this creature, like a Greek nymph of old to a human. They are from different worlds, the two of them, and Camrynn can smell her loss – she reeks of it like death. She can almost see the ghosts that surround the woman, carried with her like an invisible mark, breathed anew with every breath she takes, vivid and vibrant as a scar.

    Still invisible and unheard, she moves toward the woman. She is drawn like a moth to a flame, impossibly curious. She could take it all away – dull the pain, heal the wounds, erase the memories, maybe even bring back what's been lost. But she doesn't. At least, not yet.

    Still invisible, she whispers. "Though they go mad they shall be sane," she pulls the words from the wind, testing them as a poet might, as though considering them before committing them to paper. Her voice is like velvet, warm and soothing and heavy.

    The first rays of sun crest over the trees, and the shadows seem to tremble and speak. "Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;" the words are so personal it almost feels as though they're whispered into Dominion's ear, the poet's uncertainty replaced by an almost infinite tenderness.

    The magician herself appears well behind Dom, eerie in the early-morning meadow. It is at once sudden and expected, as though she has just appeared and as though she has always been there."Though lovers be lost love shall not;" the velvet voice is clearly hers, clearly coming from behind Dom, inviting the mare to turn and look if she has not already done so. A black mare stands before her, with eyes the color of the angry sea. Kelp and seaweed streak her mane and tail, and a thin line of gemstones and diamonds decorates her left cheek like a strange necklace. She looks a little bit like a shipwreck, like a storm-tossed jewel, like a water goddess.

    The next line is spoken with a profound sadness and warmth, but softly, so softly it could almost be a whisper. The stormsea eyes are heavy as they look to the mare.

    "And death shall have no dominion."


    C A M R Y N N
    Why? Because I can

    Image copyright MariannaInsomnia
    Reply
    #3


    and death shall have no
    DOMINION
    “Though they go mad, they shall be sane.”  The words echoed through the air with a familiar cadence, jolting through Dom like lightning striking straight through to her bones.  Spoken in a stranger’s voice, the words were soft and warm, heavy with curious consideration as though they were conjured from the ether.  Or from the collective memory of her dead people.  Her words rang with truth, and Dom felt them sink into her, wrap around her like she’d wrapped around her children, holding them close and cradling them next to her warmth.  She felt that madness, shivering up her spine and lingering in the back of her mind, a road she could throw herself down if she wanted.  If she clung to the ghosts that traced phantom touches along her sides, bumped against her flanks, murmured words of love and longing in her ears.  But the words were right.  Madness was not her path.  Not today.

    “Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again.”  She was drowning in the cold, bitter sea, the last of her people sinking beneath the waves rather than waiting to be slaughtered.  Choosing defiance instead of surrendering to the hungry hounds closing in on a dying race.  All of them, sinking through the sea.  She had died that day, saying goodbye to the woman she had been and claiming a new name and a new life as she rose to the shore.  The words are a caress, something deeper than that of a lover, reaching past her skin and into her soul, into her past, and capturing a truth only two others had seen.

    Dom turned her head, her heart racing, her lips moving along with the next line as a stranger spoke words she’d thought lost forever.  Words she’d almost forgotten.  Words so goddamn appropriate it made her shake.  “Though lovers be lost, love shall not.”  Three lovers lost, and now three new lives stolen from her by a world too heartless to hold them.  Ayita, the gentle dancer who had won her heart so long ago, soft and fragile in a world that only had room for the strong.  Ben had coaxed her into giving their daughter the name of someone who had touched her soul, and the moment she was born Dom could see echoes of that dancer’s soul in her.  Derian, fire and hope and passion untamed by heartache in their youth, hardened and twisted into defiant determination by the time they threw themselves into the sea.  She’d lost them both long ago, and held onto those words each time, taking strength from the truth of seven short words uttered time and again by her people as they bid their loves goodbye and searched for their new stars in the sky.

    She’d forgotten them with Ben.  She’d forgotten so many painful lessons of her youth while he held her.  He’d made her believe the world was safe and she had nothing to fear. She’d forgotten about lovers lost, about lives in constant danger, about hunger and thirst and sickness and death.  And she’d forgotten those seven precious words.  Her grief-stained green eyes met the incarnation of the raging, bitter sea, and she remembered.

    The stranger’s voice was soft and compassionate as she spoke the last line, but Dom raised her head proudly, drawing strength from familiar words she had claimed as her own.  Her voice was sharp with resolve, determination, as she spoke in time with the stranger who saw into her soul.  “And death shall have no Dominion.”  Her grief broke, shattering on those words and falling to the ground at her feet, and for the first time since she’d ended her daughter’s suffering she felt…free.  The ghosts that haunted her started to fade, and though they would linger in her memory they were no longer shards of glass slicing into her with every breath, every step, every beat of her aching heart.

    “Thank you,” she said to the raging sea made manifest, standing tall for the first time since the earthquake that had ended the lives of everyone she’d loved.  “I needed the reminder.” The wounds to her body would heal in time. Her soul was slowly starting to, helped along by words from her childhood and a lifetime of surviving no matter who else did not. She would not forget again. "Seems you already know who I am, and I won't ask how." Probably only be baffled by the explanation anyhow. "I can't say the same about you. So. Who are you, then?"

    She half expected to hear the name she'd once shared with the cold, bitter sea that had swallowed her and spit her back up again. A name she hadn't heard in a lifetime. Mara. Of course not. Of course not. But there was something haunting, something utterly supernatural about the strange woman who had appeared out of nowhere with words Dom hadn't heard since she'd crawled out of the sea to collapse on a strange shore over four years ago. A reminder just when she'd needed it most. And death shall have no Dominion.


    No more may gulls cry at their ears
    Or waves break loud on the seashores;
    Where blew a flower may a flower no more
    Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
    DOMINION BY SAMSHINE | HTML BY MAAT
    Reply
    #4
    We do what we must,
    Because we can.


    It intrigues her to see the tragedy peel off, breaking apart like a statue in an earthquake. Ironic that the same thing which did so much damage – an earthquake, a rockslide – could now be part of the healing process. A metaphorical sliding of rocks, a disruption of despair, a moment that shakes you to the soul and clears away the dust and decay, sweeping out the attic like a perfect vibration to attack every cobweb – in this case, it would appear, two wrongs do make a right.

    No, it won't all be better, not yet. Camrynn could make it so in a million different ways, but the one she's chosen is, she knows, the only one that's right. To heal the mare with her own words, words plucked from wind and memory and time, is the only right way to do it. There are some things that even Camrynn will not toy with, some ways of the world that even she does not dare upset, and this process of healing, this slow recovery from numb sadness, is one of them.

    As she speaks each word she feels what the mare feels, sees what flashes past Dominion's eyes. She is almost astonished that there is so much packed in to four short years – so much history, so much life lived, and so much death. She's more than 50 years old herself, but she knows nothing of loss, especially not the depths of it that seem to swirl and eddy around this mare, like she is a magnet for tragedy. As they speak Dominion's life is largely laid bare to Camrynn's eyes, her history retraced like steps along the beach, like a trail of breadcrumbs. But these crumbs don't lead home; the lead away from death and sorrow, and they are not bread, but the drops of sadness that leak out, the tears that Dominion has left unshed throughout the entirety of her life. But Camrynn can see them – Camrynn can see everything.

    It's fascinating, to say the least.

    In another situation she might be tempted to use that knowledge, to twist it to her immediate advantage. But here she understands that it is best kept under wraps, best tucked away in her encyclopedic mind, waiting for a time when it would be ripe, ready to be picked like a perfect poison apple. And perhaps that time would be never; perhaps Camrynn would never have a need to control, never have a need to manipulate or influence Dominion in the future. Perhaps the mare might feel a debt to her now, and perhaps that would be enough.

    Or perhaps not. Camrynn is a magician, and aren't they all capricious?

    "You're welcome." the hint of a smile curls at her lips. She specializes in delivering exactly what is needed; it's another one of the beautiful gifts of magic, the power to speak what needs to be spoken, to do what needs to be done, and all without a single word of direction.

    "You won't ask how, but I'll tell you anyway." her voice is still warm like velvet, like the embrace of sweet sunshine on a shoreline, a dramatic contrast to her storm-tossed appearance. Her tail, heavy with kelp, drags across the grass as she steps closer. "Those words follow you, Dominion. Anyone can hear them, they just need to know how to listen correctly." She smiles, and her eyes shift to a deep grey. Listening is her specialty – she hears so many things, spoken and unspoken, so many whispers in the night, so many things they don't even know they're saying. They speak with their words, their bodies, their minds, and their souls, their past, present, and future – and some, like Dominion, scream out with all of the above.

    "You shouldn't know me. We've never met. And even if we had, I can be hard to recognize." She says the last with a hint of gentle amusement. "I'm Camrynn." She states it simply, plainly, as though she is describing the weather. Let the mare ask more if she wants, it is just the two of them and the sunrise. The black magic-mare has all the time in the world. She thinks to ask about the name that floats from Dom's mind - mara - but files it away. She has no desire to scare the mare away with the things she knows.

    She lets silence hang for just a moment. "Tell me, Dominion, do you have any idea where you are?"


    C A M R Y N N
    Why? Because I can

    Image copyright MariannaInsomnia
    Reply
    #5


    and death shall have no
    DOMINION
    "Those words follow you, Dominion.”  Dom tilted her head, considering what the goddess of the raging sea had said.  More than that, she thought.  They more than followed her.  They flowed in her veins.  They fused into every breath she took.  Murmured into growing ears, uttered like a vow when tragedy struck time and again, screamed into the void as her people looked death in the face, those words were her heart, her soul, her name.  “Anyone can hear them, they just need to know how to listen correctly."  Her soul, laid bare for anyone to see.  Anyone with the eyes to look upon it could see her whole world, her life, her deepest truth.  

    Good.  Let them look.  The corners of her lips tilted upward, just the barest hint of a teeth-baring grin that had stared down death and come out the other side every time.  Let them see.  She had nothing to hide.  “It’s a pleasure to…encounter you, then, Camrynn.  Maybe we’ll meet in the future.”  The sea shifted and changed, gentle one day and raging the next.  Soft and blue and inviting, stormy grey and crashing waves, it didn’t matter.  The sea was still the sea.  No matter her moods, she still rose and fell with the tides, ebbing and flowing but always the sea.  And Dom had another friend who could make himself hard to recognize.  She would learn, given the chance.  Or she would not.

    "Tell me, Dominion, do you have any idea where you are?"

    The question had Dom tilting her head again, glancing around with idle curiosity.  “A meadow,” she replied with a shrug.  “Somewhere in Beqanna.  In the shadow’s-edge of mountains, as it seems most of this whole world is.”  A few hours’ run from a lake surrounded by sheltering willow trees.  Farther still from a fresh graveyard filled with so many familiar bodies.  So much farther still from the cold, bitter sea and a world that had ended four years ago.  “Does it matter where I am?”



    No more may gulls cry at their ears
    Or waves break loud on the seashores;
    Where blew a flower may a flower no more
    Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
    DOMINION BY SAMSHINE | HTML BY MAAT
    Reply
    #6
    so you wanna play with magic?
    Does it matter where I am? To Camrynn, of course it doesn't matter. She is everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing, a beautiful contradiction writ large across Beqanna and even larger across the world. But to a mare for whom everything boils down to a single point of existence traveling along a linear timeline, why yes, she thinks it matters. Or at least, she thinks it should.

    "It always matters." she speaks gently, still smiling. "At least, until you can change it in a heartbeat." and in that heartbeat they are back at the willow, back in the storm, back almost in the moments just before Tarnished had found her, before she'd even met Camrynn. They are viewing it together, Dominion distinctly aware of what is happening, looking at the scene as though on a movie screen. Another heartbeat, and they're back where they were, returned to the Meadow as they had been just a moment before, as though they'd never left. Was it an illusion? Had they traveled through time? Does it really matter? That's the beauty of it – whether she weaves dreams in their heads or drags them along through gloriously warped time, it all turns out the same in the end.

    "It's a pleasure to encounter you as well, Dominion." she says, her eyes shifting to a gold as the seaweed falls from her mane and tail, disappearing before it hits the ground. She is just herself, just a black-coated magician once more. "And I do hope we shall meet in the future." It is an offhand comment, but she knows that it will come to pass. Both because she can see it and because she knows that she will make it so.

    In fact, it occurs to her to make it so right now.

    A blink of the eye, and the world has turned. She has always been one to manipulate time, to split it, rejoin it, twist it and re-make it as she wants it to be. For her, time is a plaything; she exists outside of it, fully capable of batting it around like a cat with a ball of yarn. But at the moment, she isn't playing with it capriciously. She's moving it deliberately, shifting things around so that Dominion's experiences with Nish, her decision to return to Beqanna with him, are all folded into her consciousness. The timelines are woven together brilliantly, artistically – she is a painter, reshaping things to suit her whim. She deposits them at the end of summer.

    And she smiles.

    Perhaps Dominion would see it as a new conversation. After all, the setting is dramatically different; the warmth of summer has given way to autumn, the leaves are falling from the trees and the fading sun brings with it a bite of chill. But perhaps she would also know, somehow, what had happened. Perhaps she would feel as though they were just talking, but would also command all of her memories. Perhaps it would feel like a strange cousin of déjà vu. Perhaps she would sense that something has been done, that the VCR has been put on fast forward, that the DVD skipped ahead a bit. But Dominion is the movie, and Camrynn is the one holding the remote – and watching with great interest.

    Today, Camrynn is a sky goddess. Tiny wings flicker at her fetlocks, feathers weave themselves though her mane and tail, and a great pair of white wings shaped entirely out of clouds arcs above her back. She is black still, recognizable as the sea-mare still, the same and yet different. "Dominion." she says with a gentle smile, as though it were an entirely normal conversation, as though they had simply encountered each other in the Meadow after an absence. "You seem to be healing nicely." she says with her velvet-voice, wrapped today in a tiny whisper of cloud. Her eyes are a bright blue, the sky to her clouds.

    Perhaps she means healing physically. Perhaps she means healing mentally. Perhaps she means both.

    Perhaps she means neither.
    CAMRYNN
    co-queen of the deserts, magical, mother of badassery
    Reply




    Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)