[private] roll the bones; yadigar - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: Explore (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: The Common Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=72) +---- Forum: River (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=82) +---- Thread: [private] roll the bones; yadigar (/showthread.php?tid=27997) Pages:
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roll the bones; yadigar - breach - 10-09-2020 BREACH I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in RE: roll the bones; yadigar - yadigar - 10-12-2020 YADIGAR there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got. In another life, he would have let his heart run free on its stampede of rage and hurt and sorrow. He would have let it burst at the seams and finally tell her to her face that he cared for her so deeply. They would fall in love and start a family, and eventually retire to some quiet corner of the world away from everyone else. But in this life, he choked the breath from his emotions and smothered his heart in its cradle. He feels nothing. He is nothing. When Yadigar lifts his head from drinking, he recognizes her silhouette despite the way her body has changed in death. Some part of him had wondered what became of her, yet the concern never found its way home in him. He approaches her just the same, however. “You died again?” he asks before carefully combing the leaves and twigs from her mane with his pointed teeth. Of course, he hadn’t mentioned her absence to anyone else. Yadigar still preferred the idea of her ruling over the east even without his naive little heart thumping nervously against his ribs for her. He extends a leathery wing over her back in a loose grip to keep her from losing her balance. “My father also died. Unlike you, he did not return,” he explains with a brief downward twitch in the corner of his mouth. There is plenty more he could tell her, he supposes, but he decides not to bombard her with all the news. He could only stomach so much when he first awoke, himself. “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you.” RE: roll the bones; yadigar - breach - 10-28-2020 BREACH I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in RE: roll the bones; yadigar - yadigar - 10-29-2020 YADIGAR there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got. Even if the heart is frozen in some terrible scream, he remembers how it felt when it called his ribs home. This time last year, she left butterflies in his stomach and their ghosts still haunt him now. He can hear the pause in her voice when she answers and he wishes he was still the same Yadigar who walked all that way to Taiga with the witch from the west. But hadn’t Straia warned him that ducking all that pain would cost him something equally precious? He can’t even find the bitter remorse for it, now. She says she’s sorry and he’s surprised at the chuckle that escapes his lips. Even his father’s enemies mourned the loss of him. But he can only shrug his great shoulders as he tries to scrounge up some words. “There will never be anyone quite like him, for better or for worse,” he muses as his milk-white gaze drifts anywhere but her face. Then Breach reminds him that she is no damsel. He supposes trying to guard someone who has proven to be immortal would be rather silly. Still, the idea of her dying yet again doesn’t sit right in his mind. The exquisite agony of surviving seems preferable to that of departing. “You don’t need much of anything, do you?” he asks with a smirk as he looks down at her. Her question makes him discard the expression, however. Yadigar considers how to answer as the seconds stretch by them. He thinks of how badly he wanted her to make him a bird so he could leave this awful world. He thinks of how he stayed there beside her even when she said she couldn’t. “All of me but my body. The opposite of you, I suppose,” he finally says once the silence grows uncomfortably thick. “Or maybe I should say it’s all slumbering somewhere in me. But I remember how I felt before.” And then he stops himself because the rest of it is all useless talk. RE: roll the bones; yadigar - breach - 10-29-2020 BREACH I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in RE: roll the bones; yadigar - yadigar - 10-29-2020 YADIGAR there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got. He imagines all of his old emotions are still exactly as he left them behind the dam that holds them. His love for her is still wandering the streets of his ghost town heart, just waiting for him to come home. It paces until its path wears the pavement right down to the dirt beneath. Someday, all that dragonfire is going to eat through the frozen prison. And when it does, it will find all that devotion waiting. But for now he lingers in the hushed air of apathy while she extends her neck. Yadigar sucks in his breath when her lips meet his skin. The warmth of her surprises him and he wonders if he has ever allowed anyone this close before. Some part of him wants to snap its teeth in warning out of old habits that linger just beneath his scales. That feral impulse is an echo of when his life revolved purely around a desperate need to simply survive. He doesn’t know how to exist in a world that bears him no ill will. “How did I feel?” he repeats, wondering how he could begin to describe the monsoon that used to rip through him every day. His wing grips her tighter without his noticing. “I felt awful. I felt homesick even when I was home,” he begins, stumbling through the memory. He swallows hard. “Except when I was around you. Then I just felt hopeful.” Yadigar never permitted himself luxuries such as dreams or wishful thinking, but it never stopped that dreadful sense of longing from slipping through. It burrowed into him and never lost its hold when she was near. No, love sank its teeth into him like a dog that drew blood and liked the taste. “I loved you, I did. I do.” RE: roll the bones; yadigar - breach - 10-29-2020 BREACH I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in RE: roll the bones; yadigar - yadigar - 10-29-2020 YADIGAR there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got. He has often thought his life was a cruel joke that dragged on and on until everyone lost interest in the punchline. And now he’s standing here, in front of the undead queen, professing his love with a heart that has lost its way. His father is dead and he is free and yet he has never felt so trapped in his life. All the fire and the fight has gone out of him, leaving Yadigar as a damp tomb for everything he ever wanted. And now he has it all. God, he wants to hate whatever he’s become. He watches her with a fog-filled eye as he studies her outline with uncomfortable detachment. When she confesses her love, nothing stirs in him. Nothing exhales with relief or joy or thrill. It all just festers where it is. His jaw clenches as he tries to pry some warmth from the depths of himself. There has to be some withering ember left for him to build a wildfire from. But he has nothing to give her, now that he’s so willing to give. “Your heart will starve if you choose me, Breach. My love is a famine,” he warns her, carefully touching his lips to her brow. “Foxes chewing their own legs free from traps are happier than I could ever make you.” And then he kisses along the curve of her jaw because at least he can feel how warm and soft her skin is. Even fresh from the river and dusted with her own grave dirt, he’s content to taste her now. “Say you don’t want me, Breach. Don’t let me haunt you.” RE: roll the bones; yadigar - breach - 10-29-2020 BREACH I'd bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there so take all the wind from my lungs if you're out of air RE: roll the bones; yadigar - yadigar - 10-29-2020 YADIGAR there’s a hole in my chest but it’s mine, baby, it’s all i got. All his affections now are cheap imitations of the things he’d like to give her - costume jewelry when he could once afford a treasure trove. She’s broken herself open and let him see everything she has kept tucked away. Breach has an entire foreign country just yearning for him inside her, and he can’t bring himself to map even the first inch of it. So he traces his finger across the places he carved her name and tries to find the aftertaste of his adoration. The defeat in her voice makes his face twitch. It would be a kindness to leave her here and find his way back to the Cove, back to the brood of children who look up to him now. He need never step foot in her kingdom or see her awful, beautiful face again. And yet he stays. And yet he lets her kiss him. He kisses her back. The eye swirls to life in its own defiant way, but the future it foretells remains unchanged even if the world around it has bent - it shows a hundred different lives that are all engulfed in fire. And in every one, it is always her, and she is always with him. Whatever other outcome could have been is lost, now. “Then all that’s left of me is yours,” he says as he bridges the small space she creates between them, allowing her no reprieve from this moment. Yadigar touches his teeth to her throat and it is an oath, that he doesn’t bite through. “When my brothers and sisters are grown, I will leave the Cove to live at your side.” He doesn’t dream of a family or the way Hyaline might look, but he does try to imagine what sleeping beside her might feel like. He wonders if she talks in her sleep and says all the things she won’t admit when she looks at him. |