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    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


    this brilliant light is brighter than we've known; rora
    #1
    She stands quietly at the edge of the forest, a smudge of blue and white buried amongst the dark and shadow of the quiet woods. The forest was home, it always had been, it was safe and good and she had never ventured further. She had been born within the stone walls of a small cave, grey and warm and beneath the watchful eyes of parents who loved her very much. She had grown, too, within those same safe grey walls, until she was old enough to explore the world outside and her parents agreed to let her go without fretting too much.

    Until now, she had never considered leaving the forest. The trees and the caves and wildlife buried within had always been enough to satiate her need for new and the quiet hum of curiosity that thrummed always in the pit of that delicate blue chest. But ever since that woman, Marlyn she had called herself, had restored to Luster the gifts that she had not even known were missing in the first place, that curiosity had planted itself like a seed and bloomed, entwining itself through her veins and the marrow in her bones until she was made of it entirely.

    She peers out into the meadow, those small blue and black ears tipped barely forward beneath the tangles of the dark and corn-silk mane. It’s hard to say what it is she is looking for, but the small girl feels certain she will know it when she finds it. Quietly, cautiously, she slips forward through the trees, turning back to look only once at the forest that now fell away behind her. She felt a moment of uncertainty, a twinge in her stomach, but when she turned back to look out across the meadow again she found that the moment had passed.

    With a sigh trapped in her chest, an eager sound waiting to escape her lips, she bounded deeper into the meadow, disappearing (quite literally) in and out of the shadows beneath random, stand-alone trees. Beneath one tree, however, she finds a girl. She is small and grey like the belly of a storm-cloud, all dark and soft except for a whorl of white color on her forehead. In the shadows Luster inches closer, curious, and still completely invisible for reasons she cannot fathom but does admittedly enjoy. When she is close enough to see those sky blue eyes, bluer even than that dusky blue of her own skin, she smiles brightly (still invisible, though now she has forgotten this) and says, “Hello!” Her voice is like summer and rain, like sunshine caught in the beads of dew, “My name is Luster.” She eases closer, curious, and wide splash of sunlight unveils the soft blue roan of her hip and hind leg, all the way down to the short white stocking. “Do you live here?”
    so we let our shadows fall away like dust
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    #2
    You need never feel broken again.
    So much changed in one little moment, or in what turned out to be one little moment for Momma and Uncle Kade and everybody else but me maybe. Like I stepped outside of time for less than an instant, but it stretched into minutes and hours and days, long enough to travel through what feels like a dream now, or almost at least. It would, I think, if it weren’t for the ending. I didn’t get to stay until the end. I think she wanted to spare me that much, or he did.

    I could have tried to save her.
    But I didn’t.

    I’ve had a lot to think about, so much that for the first time ever, I snuck away from Momma and Daddy and even Uncle Kade, taking some time all by myself to let the thoughts rush around in my head faster than I can even think them. Just this humming cloud in my head of what ifs, fighting for attention and drowning each other out before I can quite hear any of them.

    I found myself a nice, cozy-looking tree to hide out under, buying myself time to think-not-think in the shade of its big overhanging branches. Except one of the humming thoughts is louder than the rest and actually reaches my ears. “Hello! My name is Luster.” I blink, tilting my head and turning to look in the direction the sound came from even though there’s nothing there but shadows.

    And then suddenly there isn’t nothing anymore, there’s--well still mostly nothing, but there’s a hip and a hind leg about the same size as mine. I lean a little closer, looking at the leg, staring at the darkness of the shadows to try to see the rest of the person as she asks, “Do you live here?”

    “Oh hi, Luster. It’s nice to meet you,” I reply, talking to the place the voice is coming from instead of the leg because probably it’s rude to not talk to somebody’s face even if the face is invisible and all you can see is a leg. “My name’s Rora. And goodness, no, this tree’s like a hidey hole I snuck away to. I live in Sylva with my momma and my daddy and my uncle uh-KADE-ee-an. Uncle Kade. Where d’you live?”
    Sometimes darkness can show you the light.

    pic by Qinni
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