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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


    Memory is a crazy woman \\ Gale, any islanders
    #1
    "Snooth." She's talking to herself, rubbing her nose against the smooth, sun-warmed, skin of... well, she does not know what the thing is, its shape is vast, it goes forever, like a fountain of wall erupting out of the sandy ground, and the shade it casts stretches hungrily for the sea. There is something familiar to it, something like the fish she has seen occasionally, stranded and stinking on the sands (and even she has thought better than to wonder about their taste, and so she struggles to put the name and shape to the thing in front of her) but it does not share their putrid smell. She presses her hungry tongue to it and it tastes like blood; hard, smooth, still hot, gushing from the island at a glacial pace, and something like worry clenches her heart. Her home is bleeding and no-one has noticed but the little white-eared mare. She presses herself against the iron of its blood, as though to seal the wound with her body, but only causes deep furrows in the sand with her hooves.

    Tears burn her yellow eyes and darken her red-gold cheeks, springing out of the impotence of her attempts, out of panic, out of a strange sense of the unfairness of things that doesn't quite touch on anger because Crackjaw never wholly remembers things well enough to be angry. Instead, she sobs quietly, bruising her own skin against the chipped sides of the orca statue she has found and cannot understand, and wonders where are the others, the man with the stars on his hide, and the blurred, vague shapes of those others who live here, whose faces are lost, blurred and distorted and forgotten. She knows there are others, but cannot recall if she has ever seen them, ever meet them.

    Has she? No, maybe she is wrong, maybe it is only Aedan with the sea salt flavoring his skin like tears and his soft voice, perhaps there is no-one else, and perhaps he has left, too. Maybe they've all gone because the island is dying and only she has stayed behind, foolish and forgotten, to stem the slow tide of its death, to be crushed and broken under unyielding oceans of heavy blood. She does not think of fleeing, the shining sea beckons but she does not know how to swim, and can only scrape sharply angled teeth against the orca's side, chipping away flakes of paint that cut her lips and tongue until she bleeds, too, and leaves thin smears of red across its cracked flanks.

    Crackjaw


    @[Gale] yeah, I dunno what this is, please enjoy lol
    Reply
    #2
    Gale
    run away with me--
    lost souls and reverie

    running wild and running free


    There are a great deal more things to be done as Chief of Islandres than there were as leader of the Island Resort. When the only equine residents were himself and his sister, the formalities and protocols of diplomacy were far from his mind. This place had been their hideaway. Now though, as the sound of voices grow more audible and the trails through the forest grow wider, the realization of his responsibility begins to settle.  He should go to the other lands, he knows, see what has become of them. There are other ways that would include not leaving the island, but Gale is eager for distraction, and the chance to travel across the entirety of Beqanna is not an opportunity he will pass by.

    Having just returned from the first trip – to Loess – Gale is eager to fill his growling belly with a late evening dinner of mangoes. Some of them had started to ferment, he knows, the best to eat before a long sleep like the ones he plan.

    The pegasus lands on the black sand beach, folding his wings neatly as he slows from a gallop to a brisk walk. He veers east once he has slowed, and is heading toward a shadow trail through the woods when something catches his attention.

    It’s the iamge of one of Islandres’ massive wooden statues, appearing in his own mind as though he were witnessing it firsthand. He frowns, and the trail appears again. He’s never seen them from that angle before. The novel view of an object he’s seen a thousand times is intriguing, and his expression is curious as he heads down the beach toward the carvings.

    The curiosuity becomes concern as the sharp taste of blood reaches his nose, but as he hurries toward the chestnut mare, he can see no large wounds or blood on the sand. No, the only blood is one her cracked lips, and it is hard to differentiate the salt of the water and the salt of her tears.

    “Um…” He says, stepping around so she might see him more clearly even in the evening light. “Uh, What’re you doing? But also could you stop?”

    @[Crackjaw]

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    #3
    She is lost, lost to the death of the island, and her own, too, but she cannot comprehend her own mortality - though, like a child, she understands that others can die. She does not know there is magic in her blood that prevents her from dying where others would were they as thin as she has been. She does not know that the separation between this life and the next has been worn so thin that others cross it at a whim, and this, perhaps, is best because it would only confuse her. Still, she has seen others die, and some dark, instinctual place inside her tells her wordlessly to be wary of death, because someday she, too, might see its face.

    It is not likely, but she does not know, so she presses her thin frame against what she believes to be an island's wound as if the hard edges of her bones could staunch the flow, and she bleeds and she cries, unwary, until a voice seeps through the cracks of her skull and oh-so-slowly, those tear-drowned golden eyes open, unfocused and rolling as a piece of the dawn sky shudders out of time and pulls away from the dying day to question her. Her attention lingers over the seashell curl of his horns and the stripes that fall over his neck like the first rays of sunlight creeping over the edge of the sea, and she does not answer him, but she does stop, distracted.

    There is a brief moment that almost seems like clarity when her sunshine eye find the shocking blue of his and her jawless head tilts like some unfinished, nightmare thing, pink tongue curled so its tip presses against the ridges of her upper palate, her teeth grown a touch too long, a touch too sharp, with nothing grind against and keep them flat. There is a moment, and then it is gone, swallowed again by sea-mist and confusion and a sort of vague awe. In the evening light, the winged stallion glows like a god of the sky and although she has already forgotten what he has asked of her, she knows that he has come almost certainly to punish her for some forgotten misdeed. Why else would she be crying? Why else would the taste of blood still ring bright on her tongue? Her white ears fall limp, angling oddly out to the side and her head drops low, just below her withers.

    "I... s-- sothy."

    And she is sorry, enough so that she stumbles over the word with its hard Rs that she cannot pronounce. Hot tears spring up again in her eyes, but she does not move away, not from the island's slow bleed nor from the spectral blue pegasus, though she seems to sink deeper into herself and the tangle of her mind the longer they stand in the silence of the dimming day.

    Crackjaw


    @[Gale]
    Reply
    #4
    Gale
    run away with me--
    lost souls and reverie

    running wild and running free


      His words put an end to her odd gnawing at the wood, but she doesn’t answer him, and Gale’s dark head pulls back uncertainly as she looks up at him, then lowers her head. There’s something wrong with the bottom of her face, he realizes, though exactly what he is not sure. Having seen most of the ways that anatomy can go wrong with his own regenerating body, Gale is not disturbed. Well, not disturbed by her hanging tongue, but he is noticeably distressed by additional layer of strangeness that her apology adds to their interaction.

    He allows the silence between them to stretch, uncertain exactly how to respond to this display. Eventually, when a soft whisper in his head reminds him that the tide is coming in and she’ll soon be wet if she remains, and Gale speaks.

    “You don’t have to be sorry,” the pegasus tells her. “But you do need to move. The tide is coming in, and if you don’t get washed out the crab’s’ll find you when it goes back out with that blood there.” he gestures with his muzzle toward her own cracked lip. His knowledge of that last is only recently gained, having fallen asleep on his side in the sand after his most recent round of the Alliance. Though his injuries had healed, the blood remained, and the crab had pinched a very tender part of himself after Gale had accidentally rolled over onto it.

    @[Crackjaw]

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    #5

    "Clads?"

    Her broken head tilts to one side, unsure what he means. She can't picture what a crab might be, but it must be something terrifying if he is worried about them, and the thin mare yanks her muzzle back from its low place, pulls it high and tight to her narrow neck, golden eyes shining bright with a new concern. What awful things they must be capable of if this god of the Dawn has come to warn her against them? Her skin shudders. She had been so sure this was a good place, and starry Aedan raises his family here. Do the crabs not come for them? She wavers, wonders if she can find her way back to the safety of his nesting place. The path she has traveled feels lost in a fog, in the mire of her brain, impossible.

    They're coming, and her gaze drifts out to the encroaching sea, hiding monsters beneath its placid surface, beneath the calming blue and the gently rolling waves, in the deep caverns where water is the sky and the ground is shadow and horror. Darkness leaps out of the fog and for a moment she sees what is not there, what is not real; a dark tentacle writhing across her field of vision. Crackjaw squeals and strikes out with a fragile, white foreleg, punching a divot in the sand where nothing at all eagerly cuts out of the water and tries to ensnare her, and the spray of sand that flies up against her belly makes her leap sideways, hocks pulled up high to avoid the hungry suckers of the hallucinated limb. The jolt of her landing knocks the vision away, but not the terror that makes her heart race and leaves her panting, her prominent ribs stretching dull skin.

    "Nah clads. Nah." She bares sharp points of her ragged teeth at him,"Nah." *

    One foreleg remains curled beneath her like a nervous dog, the other legs tremble with the strain as her attention finds him again. She has no way to defend her life against monsters except for her inability to die which does nothing to stop her suffering, and though the holes in her memory save her from recalling the tragedy of her life, she doesn't forget her vulnerability. It drives her closer to him, closer, but not enough to touch because he is not her benevolent night-sky friend, and it is surely unwise to touch a god without permission.

    "Help?"

    Image by footybandit



    @[Gale]
    *translation: No crabs. No. No.
    Also, i hate that you can say Ps with your tongue because it makes it look like I forgot she doesn't have a bottom lip lmao
    Reply
    #6
    Gale
    run away with me--
    lost souls and reverie

    running wild and running free


      She doesn’t seem to understand, and Gale takes yet another step away. The distance is comforting. Gale’s wings shuffle uncomfortably at his side, and then flare out at her unexpected squeal. She jumps to the side, dodging something invisible, and any comfort that moving away from her had given him is washed thin. It drains away completely as she moves toward him.

    Though nothing about her suggests that she is dangerous, Gale is very certain that he does not want her any closer. His wings – bright, white, and feathered – flare out to his sides, held high and imposing. She’s seemed a little intimated before, perhaps she will keep her distance if he can recreate whatever it is that had kept her away before.

    “Help?” He repeats dumbly, startled by the request. “Help with what?”

    @[Crackjaw]

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