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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


    Is this how it was meant to be? Amet; any
    #1
     photo alayayabytasha_zpsndcabs1j.jpg

    Alayaya was alone as she wandered through Beqanna’s various dominions. In her freedom, she was a bead of sunlight, lithe and unattainable as she waltzed over landscapes which, somehow, were simultaneously old and new. Untouched wild country barely scarred by newly trodden paths which was yet full of history and whispered memories, just below the surface. Like Alayaya herself, there were layers of new beginnings, almost-forgotten disasters and forgotten secrets wrapped over the divided country of Beqanna.
     
    Whether intentionally, or by coincidence of wandering she came along a pass between the stony peaks that guarded the boundaries of the Lake just after the sun had climbed high enough to pour its pale morning light down their slopes and into the country. From the east and out of this light, or through it, came the palomino filly that morning. With the impetuous license of a child she never considered that her presence might not be welcome. Although she was silent, mere visual spectacle among the stones, there was a sing-song cadence to her steps and the innocence of her bold but hapless actions. Wreathed in sunlight she was almost ephemeral. She is sunlight and air, light trapped against the earth, and she shines with an unabashed vanity that contradicts her timid grace. Wisps of golden mane clung to pale skin, the sheen of sweat glittered lightly over her shoulders, but her eyes were bright and cold, sweet and open as they reached across the bare trees, craggy mountains and frosted green toward the center and the lake itself. As they fell upon the lake there was a curious transformation of her features and her little frame. Stillness settled over her, and the blank surprise of disbelief replaced a careless smile. The surface of the water drew no attention to itself but her eyes clung to it as though parched. The metallic sheen of her skin, the long thin legs and the delicate, carefully sculpted features of her face betrayed a desert breeding and long, unbroken generations of heat, sand, and survival.
     
    Wordless, she drifted forward, her eyes arrested on the water. She was entranced by the site of the Lake, as though such a thing were not possible. Her feet carried her lightly on, losing the playfulness of the previous moments, without the embellished dancing or the fits of speedy energy that branded her youth. She appeared older than she was, at that moment, her movements were without pretention but possessed of too much quiet confidence for a filly of her age.
     
    She halted at the water’s edge, her eyes lost below its surface but unseeing of the lake bed, awe and something else, something like fear, writ in them. She was still, framed against the mountains behind her, glittering in the shifting light of the sun’s angle above, her feet not quite touching the edge of the water.

    a l a y a y a



    OOC: This is not amazing. But I have been meaning to write this post for a while and I was tired of putting it off.
    #2


    i know i'm not the center of the universe
    -but you keep spinning 'round me just the same

    Though he knows that Kylin’s family is long gone from the shore, Ivar still watches the lake. It is always from a distance, always from high in the mountains where he does not have to cross the border. The piebald colt does nothing more than watch; his pale legs remain perfectly still. There is longing in his eyes though, a desire to break away from the safety of neutral land and head to the water.

    He’s turned away a half-dozen times already, but today he is not able to stop himself.

    Rather than return to the familiar forest, Ivar heads down the slope in the pre-dawn light. The water is more inviting with every stride he takes forward, and by the time he touches the lake he is at a full gallop. The nearly-yearling doesn’t stop when he reaches the water’s edge, but rather leaps forward, diving into the deeper water immediately.

    Ivar does not surface as a horse should, but rather swims deeper. The water that is so crystal clear during the day is black in the time before dawn. Still, he can feel the fish fleeing from his presence with perfectly clarity and knows that this place is a god one. He decides to stay below. The stones beneath his hooves are no different than those above water, and he moves along the bottom of the lake as easily as the average horse through a meadow. The last time he was down here was months ago. That had been a shorter venture; he was just learning to swim back then. Today he is perfectly at ease, swallowing the water and tasting the various mountain streams that feed water to the lake.

    The tobiano colt loses track of time. He probably dozes off in the rippling current, but the passing of time doesn’t concern him. Ivar is young, free of responsibilities, and at the very top of this aquatic food chain. He doesn’t have a care in the word.

    It’s not until he notices the light in the water is changing that he considers surfacing. The darkness is becoming light, a soft golden glow in the water around him. The sun is rising, he realizes, and the water is no longer safely dark. He’s crossed the lake in his time below, so when he clambers up on the shore it is on the opposite side of the valley than he’d entered. His breathing isn’t labored, but he does shiver uncomfortably as the water drips off him and steam rises from his coat and into the cool winter morning.

    It takes him a moment to realize that he isn’t alone.

    There’s a filly at the water’s edge, one that’s not too far in age from Ivar. That puts him at immediate ease, and he smiles warmly.

    “Hey.” Says the young colt with a boldness that challenges the seeming oddness of his sudden arrival on the shore and his sodden appearance. He’s grinning easily, as though that is something that happens frequently (and really, it does). “I’m Ivar. Who’re you?”

    -------------------i v a r
    ------------------------------------djinni and stillwater---------------------------------

    #3
    if there's a light at the end, it's just the sun in your eyes

    His third birthday has come and gone. Amet feels no different - he is learning to be a confident (and competent) leader, but he still feels like a lost boy if he lets himself think about it too much. It's comforting that his siblings are here with him, free of the tragedy that were the Dunes, but it also offers the young Amet a chronic state of anxiety.

    He's roving by the lakeside today, brow furrowed with worry at whatever thought had plagued him. He bites at the inside of his lip occasionally, but mostly the stallion concentrates on the circle eight that he has configured with two cherry trees. The morning sun splashes across his gold and bronze scales, the metallic plates glinting brightly. Amet, the formerly light bay Akhal-Teke, has slowly grown to love his gift from the Fairy. They separate him from the individual he'd been when he left the Dunes. He is changed - despite the way he feels about it.

    Movement in the corner of his eye catches the dragon king's attention and he lifts his head suddenly, narrowed pupils swiftly focusing on the source. She's young - younger than Sakir and Iset - but she looks just the same as the Akhal-Teke trio that had escaped from the Dunes and made themselves a home in Beqanna.

    His blood runs cold. Had another foal run away from the Dunes, and Him? He needs to know.

    The lithe Akhal-Teke moves through the trees and around the lake with purpose, his approach announced with a friendly and nervous whinny. The way-more-unique entrance of another equine catches Amet's attention, however, and even he forgets his own questions as the kelpie-like horse surfaces. How long had he been down there? he questions himself silently.

    Incredulous.

    "Hello there!" he offers semi-cheerfully, though there may be a bit of fatigue that shines through. Much had happened in the last few months. "Welcome to the Lake! My name is Amet. You both look like you have some interesting stories," he adds, amber eyes flicking to the kelpie with a grin.

    Amet


    @[Alayaya] @[Ivar]
    #4
     photo alayayabytasha_zpsndcabs1j.jpg

    Alayaya had an excellent vantage point to watch the strange colt wander up from the distant depth of the lake, growing larger and larger through the distorted prism of the water’s surface until he appeared gigantically large. It wasn’t clear that she recognized what the shape was, as it approached. Her head tipped to one side as she watched, newly fascinated beyond whatever she had been drawn to in the first place. Her demeanor had changed almost instantly as the shadow had moved over the lake bed below. Perhaps subconsciously aware of an impending audience she regained some of the energy she had lost in her quick walk to the edge of the water. There was a trembling, almost fidgeting eagerness again that consumed her slight frame. She took a practical step back from the edge of the water once the figure started to disturb it enough to generate small waves. Fascinated blue eyes held the kelpie until he rose from the water; small and familiar-shaped. As he stepped toward the bank through the shallows she laughed, enjoying the reveal, musical notes escaping with the thrum of energy under her skin, glittering like the sunlight in the cool morning air between them. This may have been what called his attention, for he seemed to notice her then.

    She studied his face. She recognized he was a little younger than herself, but already they were nearly the same size and eventually, he would be much larger. Everything Alayaya practised was a show, from the extravagant grace of her footsteps to the dancer’s perfectly beguiling expressions writ in her little face. And while none of it was truly false, and certainly not unbecoming, they hid more than one would suppose, in a creature so small and frail. As she met the colt it was no different; she stood casually, openness and unperturbed childhood confidence on obvious display, the previous moment’s stillness and disquiet banished into no one’s memory.

    The silence after his question dragged on a little bit as she watched him. Finally, just after the moment got awkward she spoke too; “Hello,” she said, in a voice of shy adolescence, her gaze carrying coyly from the dripping colt to the young stallion now drawing closer from along the bank. She smiled; a fleeting, powerful expression, and moved toward Ivar in the swift, fluid way of unfiltered sunlight, her skin flashing gold under the rising sun overhead. She pressed her cheek gently to his in a more intimate hello than either of them were entitled, having never met before, and then spun away again, bubbling with unlikely energy, and threw the weight of her gaze on Amet’s larger, stronger figure where, for the first time, they gave away something of the understanding that lay beneath them; the reason that restrained euphoria. The cool wetness of the lake, passed from Ivar’s face to her own, ran along her cheek.

    To a casual, distant observer it might seem that she had waited to answer Ivar until Amet was within easy earshot. As Amet spoke she levelled her wide, over-bright blue eyes into his with a little too much recognition, too much familiarity, to fit with the carefree impish figure she was enacting this morning. The sun gathered over her skin and reflected from it in warm waves, as though from hot sand, and slipped along the metallic sheen of her coat in a mirage of bright youth unchallenged by tragedy or oppression.

    “Amet!” She said, the word rolling with an exotic flavour, her lips wrapping around the dry, brittle desert sound of his name. She did not dwell there, but threw the full of her exuberant gaze again to the dripping dark colt again. “This is Ivar! He’s a fish.” The unflinching confidence in her voice did not expect or encourage correction, nor did it appear to allow that the idea that this boy might be simultaneously a fish and a horse was in any way unusual. It certainly was unusual, but Alayaya was too young to have pre-conceived notions about breathing water or air. “I am not a fish,” She clarified, “I’m a girl.”

    a l a y a y a


    #5


    i know i'm not the center of the universe
    -but you keep spinning 'round me just the same

    The palomino filly seems to have noticed him before he noticed her, but she doesn’t speak. Ivar hesitates after his introduction, his dark eyes roving her face uncertainly, but before he can break what is almost an awkward silence, she finally replies.

    When she steps closer, pressing her cheek to his, the colt stills. She spins away with a laugh and Ivar smiles, but remains where he stands on the bank rather than follow. A few months ago he’d have cavorted merrily after her, childlike.

    He is learning, it seems, he is growing.

    The tobiano colt does trace the path of her attention, finding a third horse. When he meets the gaze of the bright bay stallion, Ivar smiles. The older male looks friendly enough, even if the shimmer of his metallic hide is almost enough to make Ivar squint his dark eyes.

    Amet introduces himself to the younger pair, and Ivar wonders briefly if this is the leader that had replaced Kylin’s father as guardian of the lake. It doesn’t really matter, he supposes, though Ivar hadn’t known that the place had been reoccupied since the amethyst family’s departure.

    “I’m not really a fish,” he tells Amet, but he is not bothered about having to clarify. “I just like the water.”

    -------------------i v a r
    ------------------------------------djinni and stillwater---------------------------------

    #6
    if there's a light at the end, it's just the sun in your eyes

    Amet is near enough to see the way the filly presses her muzzle to the colt's moist cheek, causing him to wonder if they had agreed to meet here, in the Lake, away from whatever tethers may keep them apart. His lips twitch into a small smile at their interaction, but his amber eyes are pulled once again to the metallic sheen of the girl's coat. For a brief moment, he thinks of Iset and Sakir, playing in the rolling hills of sand that made up the Dunes.

    Iset's laughter echoes in the scorching sunlight, her stance low and playfully aggressive as she circles her twin. She is egging Sakir on again, Amet can see, but the young boy isn't rising to the bait. He rarely does. He knows that Iset's loud laughter will draw Him nearer, and her twin brother is already anxious for the interaction.

    Sakir is not wrong -- He has already heard the disturbance in the Dunes' quiet, and He has already begun his trek towards the children. Amet can smell Him before either of his younger siblings can, and the colt is swift to near them, his lips drawn into a grim line. 'We need to go,' demands Amet, but Iset will have none of it, as usual.

    'I'm not afraid of Him, Amet,' she hisses, but now it is too late for them to hide, anyway.


    Amet shakes his head, the memory disappearing into past, where it belongs. His mouth is dry now, but his attention is back on the young pair before him. The metallic filly has yelled his name, almost as if she is familiar with him, and his smile (while forced) grows a bit larger. The young boy, who the girl has made a point of introducing, also smiles but is less enthusiastic. "I suppose that breathing underwater isn't something that I could ask you to teach me, is it, Ivar?" The dragon-king winks at the still-dripping colt before flicking his amber gaze back to the filly. "And you, girl-who-is-not-a-fish? What is your name?" he inquires cheerfully.

    "Are you, by chance, from the Dunes?" he tries to ask casually, but ends up sounding quite worried.

    Amet




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