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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


    when two worlds collide; ashley/any
    #1
    now you're staring at a queen.
    Most days, she is fine.
    Ea spends most of her time moving, alone, walking through the dense forest and wading in the Ischian pools. Sometimes she swims -- short or far distances, it doesn’t matter; she’ll swim as far it takes for her to forget. And most days, she does: in the moments she gets lost in conversation, or when her body is taken over by exhaustion, she can barely remember who she is.
    Each day, she remembers less and less.
    She remembers how Ramiel felt pressed against her as they slept (she can even feel him, sometimes, and sleeps so soundly), but can’t quite remember his scent. She remembers Sela’s laugh, and the way she wiggled her body as she walked, but were her eyes a dark hazel, like Ea’s natural eyes, or a bright gold like Ramiel’s? Of course she remembers Kha’s eyes, hazel and deep and sullen, but he so seldom spoke that she can’t remember if his voice had matured yet. She even remembers things she wishes she would forget: how cold she could be to Ramiel, when all he ever wanted was to love and be loved by her, and when eventually he began to recoil from her touch, she only returned it in kind. How often she would snap at Sela when the young girl annoyed her. How she ignored Kha far more than she should have, because he was so different and his unknown made Ea uncomfortable.
    But Ea was not special. Her loss was not unique, especially after the Reckoning. You would be hard pressed to find someone in Beqanna who had not lost something, whether it was a family member or land or magic. Ea still had Sabrael and her new Ischian family. Who was she to complain, really?

    The silver girl seeks him out alone. Of all the co-leaders, Ashley is the safest bet for company: Tiphon is hard for Ea to speak to one-on-one, for obvious reasons, and she had yet to see Phaedrus on the island. She knows that Ashley had ruled the Dale once, long ago, but not much else about him. She finds the buckskin not too deeply hidden within the jungle -- the ground is still more sand than dirt, but there are enough fallen twigs and sticks that there is no way Ea could have snuck up on him; the crackling beneath her feet tells on her.
    “Ashley, hello,” she says as she approaches, her smile forced. Tight. She inhales audibly, starting to say something else, but decides instead that she lacks anything to say.


    [sorry it ends so abruptly but I finished it on my phone just 4 u Heart]
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    #2
     
    He is not caught unawares. He could have sensed her anywhere as long as she was upon the island. He thought it would always be that way. That he could sense her. Feel her. Ea’s power over this land was less in a leadership capacity, and more of a beacon. She was the one that they all looked to for a sense of the old world, what had been before it had been razed to the ground and then plunged under the water. Others said that he was a fool for spending more of his time with fish than those of his kind on land, but that was where home was.
     
    That was where –his- kingdom was. But for the time being, Ashley found himself ashore in the innermost parts of the jungle, looking for life along the pond as he sniffed along the paths looking for tender shoots and the roots of mushrooms to eat upon. His nose to the ground, his ears behind him; his tail flipped upward and he tucked his wings tighter to his sides as he heard her approach and felt his blood quicken. She had chosen him of all to seek. She was as the myst pelting the shore. Elusive and beautiful. But one of those rare times she retreats from  her abode in Ischia, she comes and finds the man who might have some idea of what she is going through—or who might just tear her head off—or might just wrap her up inside himself and take her for his own.
     
    He was capable of all those things, and was not sure what his future with this woman would hold, but he knew that with the way she constantly made him feel, that she would mean something to him. He had promised to serve her, after all. And he is not one to serve anybody. But he schools his features and dampens his agitation that for the first time in an age, he doesn’t know how to feel about anything. So he’ll just pretend. “Ea. Hello. It has been some time. What can I do to help you most?”
    ashley
    I walked the path, it led me to the end.
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