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  • 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


    [private]  Through a rough and crashing wave [Illum]
    #1



    The shift in personality began with the loss of his voice. Yanhua held onto words these days instead of speaking them so fluently and kindly as he’d done before Borderline’s “death”. They seemed hard to come by, when once he’d spread them freely as rainfall over a dry and parched earth. There had always been plenty of ears to listen back then, young ears and old alike who wanted to hear everything he had to say, but these days that much has changed. Saturnelle and Wit, his youngest offspring, are growing and leaving the boundaries of their home - they had gotten lost as well, thanks to an attack from a WolfSpider’s den in the darkest heart of the shadowy forest.

    His response to the affair and to most everything else was short: “Do not go back.” He’d told them, and that was that.

    The once roaming hybrid finds himself attached more than ever to his loved ones. He leaves the gist of patrols to Reynard whenever the younger stallion wants them, and spends most of his quiet hours silently thinking in the presence of Amarine.

    His words have turned inward on themselves, into thoughts that gather among the corners of his colluded mind, growing webs of their own from being forgotten under new piles. He thinks and thinks some more, about what had been and what might’ve, wondering about the realism of his world and those that lived in it. He had hardly noticed the young chicklet that’d taken up roosting in his forelock weeks ago, back before he’d met the strange child at the borders of Taiga. Now the thing was halfway grown and his forelock was a mess of tangled hair. It clucked above him, ignored for the most part, as he trod the darker deer paths through a heavy fog on the western edge of Taiga.

    He was searching for answers, hoping to find some lost remnant of the past that could confirm his suspicions of the present, when he began to drift into the parts of the redwoods that a specific family clan inhabited quietly for years. The ‘shadow clan’ (as he’d taken to calling them) had been in this sector for as long as Yan could remember, and he did well not to disturb them unless absolutely necessary, given their proclivity toward a quiet, withdrawn existence.

    This evening, however, was different.

    “They all went on the quest.” He murmured mostly to himself, the young hen between his backward-curved horns pecking tenderly here-and-there at his glowing strands of hair, arranging them as she liked. “But did they all come back?” He frowned, filling his head up with more questions that never seemed to have answers.

    YANHUA
    Image by Ani2ad


    @[Illum]
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    #2
    ILLUM
    Home is something that he hardly recognizes anymore. Where once it had been just forests and fog and a layer of pine needles so thick the ground felt constantly springy, now it was something new and more, and in some cases, worse. He was not particularly fond of the canis araneae that seemed most heavily drawn to burrowing beneath the largest redwood trunks, in fact he had taken to avoiding those trees when he could. They reminded him too much of the misshapen creatures that had roamed in the dark, strange twisted things carved from nightmare and made only to hunt. These hybrids were not dissimilar in the way they were a contrast of body parts that hardly seemed logical, or the way they aggressively defended the same dens they built along pre-existing pathways.

    It would be easier to kill them if not for the way they carried their odd mewling pups on their backs.

    Perhaps the strangest changes of all are the changes to the place he haunts most frequently. It is an empty nook in a low area of the Taiga, a spot sunken as though at one point it had housed a giant tree that fell or burned and left a gaping openness in the ground where it’s roots had been. There are other trees around it that serve to blot out any unwanted sunlight, but the ground underfoot is green and grassy and lacks that acidic layer of sap and needles so plentiful in other places. Most noticeable are the crystal flowers that bloom and thrive and grow in the constant night that bleeds from his proximity. In the dark that always surrounds him, they would be as plain as anything else in this ancient forest. But the swarms of fluttering lunaflies that trail him like wayward stars illuminate the crystal blossoms with their delicate glowing bodies until this tiny meadow is like something out of a fairytale. Iy is a beauty wasted on someone like him.

    Even without the shadows whispering against his awareness, he would’ve known that someone approached by the sound of clucking that accompanied them. Clucking. Clucking? There is the briefest moment where the gauzy, dark male frowns and looks about slowly, his face a mask of both wariness and incredulity in equal parts. In the quiet that greets him it is easy to wonder if he had imagined the sound in the first place, though he has not a single idea why his mind would drift to birds. He had no fondness for them, even despite having wings of his own. But then the silence is broken again, this time by the voice of a man he does not recognize. Someone who isn’t family, then. Curious.

    He slips from his little meadow, from the flowers and the lunaflies, though the latter trails him and the dark night that surrounds him like a wide bubble. Despite that his home is feeling less like him, he is still unwilling to share it with strangers. “If they went on a quest,” he says, easing out of the dark to pause near the odd, muttering male, “then they likely came back changed, if they came back at all.” There is nothing cruel about the way he says it, though nothing gentle either. Then, with a frown on a mouth as dark and star-strewn as any night sky, he frowns and settles his gaze on the bird roosting between the males horns. “You have a bird on your head.” The night deepens around them, and he ignores the lunaflies that come to perch along the indistinct silhouette of his back. “I can knock it down if you would like.”


    @[Yanhua]
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