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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


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    [open quest]  Will you join us on our lonely peaks? ROUND III
    #11
    The rumbling of the Sphinx’s purr sounds like a landslide, and Pteron has time only to half flare his pale wings before she swallows him whole. His hooves scramble for purchase on impossibly tilted sand; even his wings (now fully spread) seek something to catch on, to stop his reckless slide. He slides forever - or just for a moment - and then he is suddenly tumbling over himself into a  world that is no longer pitch black.

    It seems to be every other color though (if mostly green), and it takes the olive-eyed stallion some time to adjust from the darkness. By the time he does, he coat is uncomfortably damp from his own sweat. The air he breathes feels like it is half a swallow away from being a drink. Jungle. The word comes to him in his father’s voice: a forest where it rains and rains. 

    Pteron has never been in a jungle before, and while he might have explored any other day, this is certainly not any day. It is all too clear where he is meant to go, anyway. A path stretches ahead of him (but not behind, he sees, nor to either side) and so he heads down it. 

    The dun stallion lets his wings drag alongside him, reluctant to tuck them tightly and insulate his piebald sides beyond comfort. He stops beside the same purple and yellow frog that had caught another’s eye, but Pteron lacks the youngster’s caution. He lips at it curiously before it leaps away, and other than a faint tingling along his blue lips, the pegasus is unaffected. With it gone, he continues down the path, and sees the colt ahead of him long before spotting the castle. 

    Pteron considers going invisible, but the boy has already spotted him, and if he had not hidden from the Sphinx he cannot bring himself to hide from a boy. He’s not much older than Celina, Pteron thinks, and that brings a bittersweet smile to his face. It’s not so difficult a task to sorar across the magma on spread wings, though he does manage to still his face entirely and avoid looking down.

    The expression vanishes entirely at the sight of the magma beyond Aedan when he lands. Pteron snorts sharply and takes a step back, eyeing the roiling surface with a wary eye. Magma. With a deep breath, he inches forward and manages to put himself between the curious boy and the magma, though the heat that rises from the boiling stone is far hotter than that of the humid air around them.

    Pteron can’t take any chances. 

    He’s distracted from his thoughts by the pale face in the tower, one that is lovely and alarmed. At them? Pteron wonders, and the boy voices much the same concerns. 

    “There’s only one way to find out,” Pteron replies, though he himself is far from certain. He is no stranger to dragons, but he has been hiding on the Mountain from one for six months, and his desire to face this one is...less than minimal. “Maybe it’s a good thing there’s two of us,” Pteron says. ”One to go to the castle, and one to go to the dragon.”

    Pteron doesn’t want to face down a dragon, but he wants the boy to do it even less, and answers that he will take the overgrown lizard. If he gets eaten, the dun stallion means to shout loud enough that Aedan has a chance to get away.

    It seems fitting that a boy covered in the night sky can make other sleep, but Pteron does not think on that long. Instead, he distracts himself with hoping it has worked, hoping that this creature - centuries older and larger than the biggest dragon Pteron had ever seen in Loess - is as capable of conversation as the dragons of Beqanna. 

    “Hello?” He calls as he rounds a large boulder. Ahead of him lies the dragon. Easily ten times his size, the beast turns a large head toward him slowly. He turns another head more quickly, and Pteron’s own eyes widen at the four snake-like eyes that blink down at him.

    “That was rather polite of you.” Says the larger head as it stifles a yawn. ”Usually snacks don’t introduce themselves.” adds the smaller one. The bigger head scowls (at least, Pteron thinks it is a scowl, it is hard to tell with all those scales). ”You literally just ate,” it says, ”how can you possibly be thinking of snacks?” Pteron wonders exactly what had been eaten. Were he and Aedan the first to reach this castle? Or had there been others?

    ”Besides Leonard, I thought you’d decided to become a vegan. I’m, like, forty-six percent sure that horses aren’t vegan.”

    ”They eat grass. Doesn’t that make them grass?”

    ”I don’t know, Leonard. You ate the prince, does that make you a prince?”

    Pteron had been watching this exchange with wide eyes, and had begun to wonder if perhaps he might just become invisible and get away. But the mention of eating a prince catches his ears, and it seems to have struck the larger head in a similar way.

    ”You shouldn’t have said that, Dorothy. Ohhh, you shouldn’t have said that. What if...what if he tells the princess? She’d be so mad. Soooo mad. She wouldn’t believe me it was an accident. I know she wouldn’t. I just...I couldn’t help it. He looked like all the others, all shiny with his little stick…” Leonard babbles on, and Dororthy leaned toward him, resting her chin on his scaled head in a way that reminds Pteron of the way he comforts his younger siblings when they are frightened.

    ”Shh, Lenny. Shh.” She says soothingly. ”He won’t tell anyone. I promise.” Ptero has begun to nod his head, agreeing with Dorothy - he won’t tell, not if it means he won’t be eaten. Unlike the larger head, Pteron is 100% sure he is not a vegetable product. 

    “I’ll just eat him, and then we can take a nap,” she continues, rubbing her jaw soothingly against Leonard’s head. Before Pteron can really process what she’s said, the large head is snaking toward him, large mouth opening more than wide enough to swallow him whole.

    Please, please, please let this be like the Sphinx, Pteron thinks. At the last moment, he remembers to shout a warning to Aedan, hoping that the boy can hear him.

    -- pteron --



    collab with @[Aedan]
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