[open] Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: OOC (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=24) +--- Forum: Archive (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=81) +---- Forum: Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=98) +----- Forum: Tephra (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=85) +------ Forum: Ischia (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=87) +------ Thread: [open] Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any (/showthread.php?tid=28142) Pages:
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Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - Starsonder - 10-24-2020 starsonder RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - quell - 10-25-2020 Sometimes he comes to back to his island birthplace, spends hours and even days lounging in the eternal warmth and sunshine. It is a place of peace, quiet, and solemnity. But eventually, the memories of his childhood start to return at the familiar sensations of dried salt on his skin and the squawk of parrots. Then, with dreams of blood-red water and thrashing hooves haunting him, Quell leaves Ischia behind him for the next few months. Today, he stands at the rim of the caldera where his father swims. He is trapped there, the black colt knows. Trapped and unable to emerge without aid. He hopes that someone is making sure that Ivar does not have aid, but that is the responsibility of those who’d trapped him there and not of Quell. There is a glint of gold in the clear water below, and the colt steps away, shaking his dragon wings uncomfortably as he moves farther away. Those wings disappear by the time he stands on the sandy shore, and the rest of his body changes as well, adapting at the touch of the water into something more aquatic. The leopard seal that Quell has become dives beneath the crystalline tropical water, his speckled shape sleek and quick in the water. He might have splashed about for a few more hours, but he is distracted by the sight of someone crossing on the sandbars that connects Ischia to the mainland during the low tide. She looks young to be crossing alone, maybe Herrin’s age or even younger. Quell, at the grandfatherly age of three (in a season or two), is perturbed by this. Where is the parent, or the responsible older sibling? What if she falls into the ceynote? Quell, who’d hoped to fly back to Sylva before nightfall, sighs in resignation and swims toward the shallows. He clambers back to the Ischian shore as a horse again. At least, as much a horse as a winged and partially-scaled young colt can be. The gold and white markings that stripe his legs and wings glitter with saltwater that runs down his furred sides and then his scaled underbelly as he shakes himself dry. ”What’re you doing here?” he asks, not nearly as polite as a real Ischian would have been. Yet despite the gruffness in his voice, his dark gaze does not focus on the filly herself, but rather on the absent responsible party who has allowed her to run wild. “Do you know where you’re going? Who told you to come here?” @[Starsonder] RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - Starsonder - 10-26-2020 starsonder RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - quell - 10-26-2020 Are you one of the water horses, she asks. Quell, who has been rapidly scanning of the distant Tephran shore in hopes of spotting another horse coming behind, immediately ends the search and returns his brown-eyed attention directly to the apricot filly. The colt expects to find distrust or fear on her face, but instead there is awe. Awe, and then wonder and doubt, flicking across her face and voice almost too rapidly for Quell to read. The sensation is overall unsettling, and he stamps one scale surrounded hoof firmly on the damp sand in an effort to ground himself. Now his frown is turned on the girl, who has the wits to sound concerned. Good, Quell thinks. She’s new here, it seems, even uncertain that she’s come to the right place. The black pegasus is very glad that he’d chosen to follow her, because the filly with hair like corals might be just the kind to get lured into a trap. “Yeah this is Ischia,” he says, and his frown softens into narrowed eyes and a curious twist to his white mouth. “But you gotta be careful in these parts. Don’t go swimming in the water on the island with anybody you don’t know, okay. There’s some…water-horses that aren’t so friendly.” Kelpies, he thinks, the carnivorous counterpart to the breathtakingly lovely nereids that rule these tropic shores. He lets the canines of his teeth shift to those of his pinniped body, pointed and over-large in his equine mouth, and he shows them when he runs a nervous tongue across them. “This place is real nice otherwise though.” Quell adds with a shrug of his winged shoulders. “It’s real pretty. Nice food. Good swimming.” Swimming he’s just warned her away from, he realizes, and falls suddenly quiet. His golden-tipped ears flick uncertainly, and he takes a sidestep toward the sea. @[starsonder] RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - Starsonder - 10-27-2020 starsonder RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - quell - 10-27-2020 Quell begins to nod when she repeats his words, his sidestepping paused with a single hoof in the air. Nod until she teases, at least, and then he plants his feet more firmly in the ground. He is serious! Why he must always be the thoughtful one eludes Quell, but this girl, like his friends, underestimates risk. Quell, with his inherent caution, is more like his father than he realizes, but he sighs in quickly built exasperation at her too-accurate example. “Yes! The ‘eating you alive’ kind of way! You wouldn’t even know it, and then you’d be dead!” Impressing upon her the danger seems important, but he is not sure how she will react to mentions of gore. “Maybe I would! Maybe you’d deserve it for not looking out good enough!” He decides to add for emphasis, realizing as soon as the words leave his mouth that perhaps he has gone too far. Quell looks down quickly, following the line of dark sand out to the sea. He says, very softly and seemingly to the distant waves. “I wouldn’t though, not really. Even if you deserve it.” It’s as close an apology as he is comfortable giving for his outburst. The young colt is not accustomed to conflict (at least not the kind that isn’t a kick or a shove or solvable by one or the other), and it stirs uncomfortably in his belly. Leave, he thinks, leave or adapt. Choosing the latter, he looks back at the smaller filly. “I’m Quell. What’s your name?” He takes a moment to look more closely at the newcomer to Ischia. The splashes of white on her sides looks a little like the waves, and the iridescent look of it seems more than a trick of the ocean water that still dampens it. The brightness of her rosey sides is a contrast to the blacks and white and gold that Quell and most of his family and friends sport. She is without wings or scales, and no flowers grow in her mane nor are there flames around her fetlocks. She is quite different from anyone that Quell knows, the boy thinks. He's not yet sure how he feels about that. RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - Starsonder - 10-29-2020 starsonder RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - quell - 11-01-2020 Starsonder, she says, a mouthful of a name with a meaning he does not understand. She’d rather bright, he supposes, like a star. “You could choose your own name,” Quell suggests, “Like Scar or Dash or something else…cool.” The black colt is uncertain what sort of names a Tephran girl might find interesting or suitable, but he does agree that Sonder is a little heavy and Star perhaps too common with the frequency of the Beqanna God’s frequent presence. He has never questioned his own name, bestowed on him by his mother, though he thinks about it now. He ponders quietly, mouth twisting pensively. Overhead, the rustling of the leaves in the autumn light catches his attention and Quell raises dark eyes to the canopy. The shaded undersides of the leaves are darker than the morning sky, holding tightly still to the warm autumn night. Quell holds his dried wings a bit away from his body, allowing the fur and scales of his dark body to dry more quickly. His wings would hold the water against his sides and make him itchy after a few minutes, and he’d long ago learned the importance of drying off as soon as he’s out of the water. “Where are you from, anyway?” Quell inquires. He’s sure the answer is Tephra given the sandbars she’d crossed. Or perhaps Tephra was just the beach she’d left the mainland from. It is not as though Quell is well-travelled, able to differentiate the scent of one ‘strange place’ from the next. He is only certain she is from neither Ischia nor Sylva. His dark eyes glitter and his expression is curious. “Why’s somebody not with you to, you know, watch out for you so you don’t get eaten?” He tries to phrase it as inoffensively as possible, and glances at her surreptitiously from beneath his black forelock to see if he’s been successful. RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - Starsonder - 11-08-2020 starsonder RE: Ninety Three Percent Stardust || Any - quell - 11-12-2020 She says that ‘Scar’ is not a moniker she has earned, and Quell nods agreeably. It would not fit him either, he thinks, but perhaps in the future, when he is the victor of an alliance or a warrior king or something else thrilling and dangerous. The draconic horse has a great many plans for the future, it seems, though for now he is simply a leggy colt with dreams. He is thinking of these, a little distracted by his daydreams, when he is reminded that he’d asked Starsonder Longname where she’d come from. The answer is much more exciting than ‘just Tephra’, and Quell’s dark ears prick up excitedly as she says her mother left for the alliance. That she has been left, presumably alone, is less important, even with his earlier worry. “The Alliance?!” He repeats. “That is so cool! I’m gonna be in the Alliance someday, you know.” There’s confidence in the way he says this, as though his participation someday will be a given. That he has never had any training, never battled anything but his brothers and friends, is inconsequential. There will be time for that later; the Alliance doesn’t happen every year, after all. She’s never left Tephra, she says, and Quell is pulled farther away from his consideration of the Alliance and how he might earn the name ‘Scar’. “I don’t really know this island,” the winged colt says to her request for a tour. “I grew up on one of the smaller islands, but another family lives there now.” He’s seen them, a pair of Beachmasters and their children, but since finding them there has not returned to Kelpie. Perhaps the island even has another name now, he thinks, now that the patriarch of that clan has trapped in the cenote. “I just know you shouldn’t go near the big water hole, no matter what you see or hear.” @[Starsonder] |