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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]  round two: and with strange aeons, even death may die.
    #1
    They wander through the fog, just as expected, and he can almost taste them even from this distance. Innumerous black tongues emerge from just as many mouths to lick their chops. The sound of so much greedy slurping is enough to turn the strongest stomach. Luckily, he remains within the deepest chambers, where he cannot be heard, but his writhing tentacles reach all the way to the entrance. Coil after coil of his strange body lifts and then slams the ground once enough have arrived to sate his hunger. The ground beneath them collapses and the world goes black.

    His slick tentacles retract back into the main chamber and curl around him. Slowly, little patches of fungi begin to glow a dim blue-white to mark the tunnel they have fallen into. The walls of the cave seem to throb and undulate like awful intestines despite being made of cold, wet stone. In the corners of their eyes, figures seem to pass and then vanish once the eye tries to focus on them. Whispers speak over one another both nearby and farther down the tunnel, but their words are impossible to decipher. Again, he opens his thousand jaws and he cries out, their loved one’s voice leaving his throat.

    When they blink, their loved one stands before them – their child, lover, friend, or whatever else stirs their heart. The phantom’s brow is furrowed in brief confusion and then in hesitant relief. The Old One opens his jaws and speaks, and his voice is carried through the doppelgänger’s mouth.

    “Fol̮̩͋͋ḷ͌ow ̢̂m̺̿̃͟e̤̔,̭͗ ͍͂w͇̟̽̒e̱̱̓͑ ͔͓̔͛d̩͎̊͗o̓͟n̲̏'̯͖́͝t ͍̿h̝̎ā̮v͕̓e͎̓ ̲͊mū̘̟̅ć͖̦̎h͇̓̚͟ ̲̎t̛̘im͎̐e̳͐!̮̀”

    He gets their voices mostly right. Perhaps that strangeness to their words could be excused by the whatever magic warps these caves. But before there is a moment to consider this further, they hurry down the tunnel, as though there is no time to explain. The monster bites his tongues to keep from cackling.

    For this round, you have each fallen into your own personal tunnel of terrors. Describe your loved one and any strange new qualities they may possess. You may pass the same areas more than once and nothing seems to make sense here. Describe anything else you notice in the caves like the flexing walls or muffled whispers. Most importantly, follow your loved one until you reach some kind of impasse - a cave collapse, a tight squeeze, or a long jump. Whatever scares you the most! This round will end on Sunday, February 9th at 11:59pm CST.
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    #2



    Sabra

    I scream, when the earth gives way beneath my feet. Scream as if the Dark God himself is after me, and I think it is not impossible that he is. Why else would I find myself freed of my prison for mere breaths before the dark engulfs me once again.

    How long I fall is anyone's guess. Long enough that I can't make out the sky when I drag myself upward, cannot even try to escape because there is no sense of direction in this depthless hole. To try would be to dash myself against the stone, to fail before I'd even begun. Violent tremors wrack my limbs as the darkness bleeds into the crevices of my mind. I have been here before. I have lived in this darkness and watched as it destroyed me from the inside out and I have only just returned to the way I once was.

    There is an eerie keening cry that echoes from the impartial cavern, and it is only when the light catches my eye and the sound fades, that I realize it is from my own throat it echoed. A broken, haunted sound. How easily it finds me again.

    I can't think about it too long. If I dwell on it, it will consume me and it will not matter how I came to be here or any chance I have of leaving. If there is time to panic, it will come, but I haven't come into it yet. If I can bear it, it will not come at all.

    But I digress. The light, it is so faint at first, only existing in phantom blurs at the corner of my eyes. Perhaps it is my eyes adjusting to the dim, perhaps the glow grows stronger the longer I stand still. Sickly blue-white, damp and milky. It clings to the stone walls, gives me an outline I can work with. A larger space than I had realized, the dim glow dots and splashes on the rocks in random ways, a constellation I don't know how to read.

    For a long while all I can do is stand, and take stock. I am alive. I can smell the mineral wetness, I can taste blood. Had I bitten my tongue on the way down? Rough walls, hard floor. The faint fungal light illuminates me in the barest ways, washing my colors out into an alien greyscale. I can hear... What is that? My ears pricked at the far wall, fighting to see the source of the shambling, scratching sound. It was quiet. Nearly imperceptible. If I could write it off as imagination, I would. Unfortunately, I am not so naive. This is not that kind of story.

    There is already wall at my back, broken stone at my feet. There is nowhere to run or hide. Nothing to do but watch and wait, and hope that the slow-approaching rasp does not see me. A vain hope, of course. It always is. Any blind beast could find me then, the way my heart thundered in my breast. There was no initial surprise when the figure emerged, only grim acceptance.

    "Mommy?"

    The heartbeats stop.

    "Miela,"

    My voice breaks on the name. The daughter I left in the Afterlife. It's impossible. I know it is impossible, yet here she is, as washed out as myself, but I know it's her. It has to be. She is as I remember her, frail and lean, wings dragging on the unforgiving floor. That was the sound I had heard, the pale feathered limbs being pulled along. Yet something is wrong.

    (She is so small, and it has been years since she died)

    "Follow me, we don't have much time!"

    Her voice, it is her voice, only it echoes strangely on the cavern walls. She sounds so far away, though she stands so close. I can't dwell any longer on it, because she is not waiting for me. Urgent, jerking steps pull her away, back into the darkness.

    "No- no, wait! Miela, wait!"

    My legs have begun to follow her without my conscious choice, a longer stride that still leaves me in her wake. As much as I hurry, stumbling over rubble and cracked stone, she is still out of reach. Weak as she looks, she is fast, the whisper of her lifeless wings sometimes my only clue for where we're going.

    The fungi splotched walls are getting closer.

    She has taken us down some side tunnel, heedless of my pleading for explanation. Not another word from her pale lips. Soon enough, I stop asking. My head is pounding with a dull staccato beat, too much has happened in too short of time. The little girl is leading me on, never looking back to see if I am still there. The dull phantasms that paint the walls throb and pulse in the corners of my vision.

    The longer we walk, they more certain I am that the foxfire lights are not random at all. That whorl repeats, I know it does, that pattern of lines was on the other wall. The drum beats on, my heartbeat, my breathing, and something else. Something that crawls up from my hooves and through my legs, insinuates itself inside my spine. Knowledge I have been ignoring for some minutes now creeps into the forefront of my mind. We are going down. All this time our tunnel has been bringing us deeper and deeper, the weak lights growing more frequent, the tunnel walls closer together. 

    Too close! Too deep! I want to scream, but for once I find that I can't. The noise is caught in the back of my throat, choking me on its stillborn shape. 

    "Stop. Please-" I croak, husky whisper fighting for the air to breath. Any further and my wings will be pinned against my sides, feathers scraped away on ragged walls. I can't do it. I can't. I cannot be buried again, stone on every side and only steadily stagnating air to breath. 

    She hasn't stopped. 

    The eerie blueish glimmer of her is still moving away, step by jarring step. She knows something I don't, some way out that defies every instinct that is screaming inside me. She has to. My eyes are wide and bloodshot, every breath a desperate gulp, and I force my legs to move. To push me forward into this tighter grip. A few more steps, that's all I need to take. That's what I'm begging myself to believe.

    And then I'm not moving at all.

    I can't.

    I'm trapped, wings stuck between shoulders and wall, and I can't press forward or back.

    "Help," the sound comes mangled from my constricted throat, a cry too pitiful to be useful. Maybe it is good that there is no one to hear it.

    Miela is gone. I can see now in the phosphorus light, the end of our tunnel. It lays mere feet beyond my dripping nose, a narrowing too small for anything larger than a rat to pass through. Not enough space for even an undersized filly to stand in. Not enough air to keep me breathing for any meaningful time.

    I hear it then.

    The rustling of feathers on stone.

    The walls have me pinched, but there is a small space above my back. Enough that if I crane my neck, so very carefully, I could see behind me.

    She is there.

    Smiling vacantly. Staring at me with sunken eyes that I think have not blinked once since she has found me.
    This is not my daughter

    I can see now, straining my eyes and my neck, but I can see. She is no child of mine. The image, maybe, had been plucked from my mind, from the grave. A facsimile that had passed only because I was desperate. Given form to this grinning thing that had led me into this airless, lightless tomb. 

    I wanna be Immortal, like a God in the sky

    I wanna be a silk flower, like I'm never gonna die

    Photo by Kareva Margarita
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    #3

    your heart, it's like a drum
    the chase has just begun

    The rumble and crack of the earth beneath her feet sends an electric rush along her spine, and as the earth opens, a furious shriek escapes her elongated jaw. The offense of the situation is overwhelming, but there is little she can do about it from the bowels of this cave. Ears flattened against her damp neck, head lowered and eyes narrowed to slits, she creeps forward even as illuminating fungi begin to sprout along the dank walls.

    Teeth chittering in agitation, she snaps irritably at the living stone. Her dislike of the way these tunnels writhe and grow things is immediate, raising every fiber and hair of her body into alert. This entire thing feels wrong and terrible, and she wishes now she had never heeded that deceptively brilliant star as it fell from the sky.

    She has hunted enough prey to know when she is no longer the hunter.

    Then, as though through flickering illusion, there is another before her. Recoiling, Waverly hisses, jagged teeth bared as she eyes the other with open distrust. After a moment however, she recognizes the lovely figure standing before her. The only creature it might ever be said she holds any fondness for. Her mother.

    Except, she is all wrong. Surrounding her writhes an oily, dark mass. Nothing like the jade green that so often followed her mother in memories from her youth. Ears pressed flat, she eyes her mother warily, uncertain in her course and affronted by that uncertainty. Her mother is as lovely as she has ever been, but her eyes glow eerily in her delicate features and her sea-green locks tangle and writhe about her unnaturally. And when she opens her mouth to speak, her voice carries the weight of a broken echo.

    Curling her lips, Waverly snaps at the figure, though her teeth land on nothing but air. She had not truly intended to find flesh though. Whether this mother feels strange and alien is irrelevant. She is still her mother, and that stays her teeth.

    But when the lovely figure turns and slips down the alien, confusing passage, Waverly hesitates. She does not like this. Not one little bit. And that intense disquiet holds her limbs for several crucial moments. Even when she does finally follow, her steps are slow and hesitant, the clarity of her distrust evident in every stilted movement.

    A distrust proven correct by the inconsistent ways in which the musty tunnels behave. The tunnels she passes more than once, the way movements catch the corner of her eye. Except, when she turns her gaze, it is nothing. A fever dream that is no dream. There would be no waking here, and that stirs a roiling anger deep in her belly.

    When she meets this culprit who led her on such a horrendous chase, she would rip them limb from limb.

    Her dangerously lustful thoughts are interrupted however when the smell of acrid smoke reaches her nostrils. A heartbeat later, the first lick of orange flame erupts beside her. With a snort, she flinches sideways, gaze cutting warily to the sudden burst of fire. Spinning, she turns to flee, but flame had already found it's way behind her, effectively blockading her path to freedom.

    The sound that escapes her throat then is foreign and piercing, a high-pitched keening of raw and visceral terror. Water is her salvation and fire is her death. The flames would crack and dry her skin, sucking every ounce of the things that gave her life. Her reaction is of the basest kind, instinctual rather than thinking, as sheer panic overcomes her. Her body scrapes against rough stone as sharp nails scrabble at the damp walls, as though she might claw her way through by sheer force of will alone.

    Waverly

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    #4
    The first sensation he knew was cold. It wasn’t the cold that woke him from his slumber, something else made his eyes fly open, wide and shocked, something else made him bleat and cough and choke on his first breath, but it was not the first sensation he knew. The headfirst tumble he took to earth, legs limp underneath him, his body crumpled and wet and thudding against the cool ground, this he didn’t notice, too new, too asleep, but the cold crept in. Tendrils of it writhed up his body, clinging to the wet of his fur. His mother did not lick him clean, though she was not far away, standing still and muttering quietly to herself. He could not understand her words.

    “Fol̮̩͋͋ḷ͌ow ̢̂m̺̿̃͟e̤̔,̭͗ ͍͂w͇̟̽̒e̱̱̓͑ ͔͓̔͛d̩͎̊͗o̓͟n̲̏'̯͖́͝t ͍̿h̝̎ā̮v͕̓e͎̓ ̲͊mū̘̟̅ć͖̦̎h͇̓̚͟ ̲̎t̛̘im͎̐e̳͐!̮̀”

    There is a long, slow moment in which Dreamscar looks at the black mare standing over him, blinks away the flashback of his birth, the tattered memory of what came after, her attack, his surge of power, the feeling of her body as she landed atop him, curling protectively around his strange body. He knows that gentle warmth of which she is capable as he know wild, uncontrollable, raving, fear that she meets every day, breath quaking, reddened eyes rolling, furious, unfocused. She has always been unfocused, until she had a son. He gave her that focus. He did, with his magic and his strings and his control, and now, as she stands over the crumpled grey form of her taloned, beaked, son as once she stood over that wet, black, colt, he knows, and he is furious.

    She frets as he stands, but he takes his time, feeling anger coil in his belly, burning brightly, fed by the fear that came before. She frets until he is on his feet, softly thrumming the strings that connect his mother to him, listening to them sing tight and high in his head. They are stretched so thin he can hear the tension in their whine, so taut he can feel the fragility of them. They are ready to snap, she is so far away, and yet, she is in front of him. He blinks once, almost sleepily, and a soft growl crawls from his throat so slow it is barely more than clicking. His beaked mouth cannot curl into the snarl he wishes to express so, instead, he screams.

    NOT hrrrrrr!

    In the blue glow around him, the broken tunnel pulses like entrails, but such things do not bother him. There is never even a second that he entertains this creature as Truth, this fake Hippogryph - he will shred her, eat her. As the last of his outraged breath leaves his lungs, he charges and she cannot turn and run from him as fast as she did above on flat, hard ground. In the Underworld, there are twists and turns and chambers that double back. There are pits that swallow and trip. He tears at the walls – they become mere rock and soil when he looks at them directly, but his black talons leave great grooves in them just as easily as if they were the thin, pink, flesh of intestine.

    "Falsssss"

    His scream tears through the tunnels as he follows after her, fading to a hiss. He follows, with the scent of her sweat and fear hot in his nostrils. At the corners of his eyes strange figures flicker, but Dreamscar has no time for whispers and shadows around him, the False Mother consumes him. He pays no heed to the depth to which they are traveling, nor to the increasing treacherousness of the cave floor, nor even how she is ever just beyond his reach, though the streaming strands of her blacks tail occasionally flutter against the horn of his beak. One scaled foreclaw snatches the hairs away with a screech and his hind legs gather beneath him. He leaps.

    The False Mother stops so hard that she is nearly sitting down, desperate to avoid the gaping black chasm that opens up in front of her.

    Her son collides with her in that self-same second, talons outstretched, finding their mark, digging deep into the flesh of her back, her shoulder. The momentum throws both mother and son into the abyss which swallows them like ink. The scream that wrenches from Hippogryph's mouth as they fall, entangled, is real enough, but the mimic is silent now as his claws pull her tight against him, below him. His mother's body is heavy, so full of solid bone, bone that snaps and crunches when they land at last, her still beneath him. He falls atop her and she breaks his fall, she breaks beneath him against the rock floor and he rolls away, battered, bruised, but whole. He coughs, the False Mother groans. She rolls up onto her belly with heaving sides and legs that bend in all directions except the correct one, unable to stand. Her sides twitch and sweat, she cannot outrun him now. When he leaps, his bloodied talons find purchase immediately in her soft flesh, they curl and dig and the welling blood is almost as dark as her damp black coat, gleaming dully in the pulsing blue light.

    He has never hunted prey as large as a horse before, and though he might have felt some sadness rending a horse or stag to pieces normally - for they are so large he cannot quickly darken their little lights as he would do with the rabbits and groundhogs and sleepy fawns - for this mockery of his mother, he feels only disgust. Talon and bill pluck chucks of flesh from neck and haunch and shoulder, flesh he cannot eat, that he rips messily away and, shaking his head, open-beaked, sprays against the walls tight around them. The mare does not die - it does not make sense - perhaps because she is not real, and he knows it; perhaps because he wills her to wakefulness as he scrapes meat from bone, as he at last rips through the soft skin of her belly. He will not have to eat for weeks, after this.

    That's when he sees them.

    The Others.

    How could they have gotten here? The horses of Beqanna, those who were not him, not her, that would surely kill him if he could not control them? How could such a crowd fit in this tunnel?

    The shadows ring the fallen pair, encroaching, growing denser and more threatening. Fear quells his anger with ice. He reaches out as he did before with his magic, Love me, but there is nothing to grip, nothing to control. Heartless. The shadows grow black and he can hear the snarling whispers of their voices.

    "What are you?"

    "Stomach Eater."

    "Abomination."

    Whispered voices become screams in his ears, he sees flashes of teeth and hooves and angry eyes flickering in the darkness and in response he roars back at them, but his own anger is fading fast. He is the same frightened child he has always been, crying for his mother to save him from the Others, the monsters she sang of every night, breeding terror into her child. But she's not here, only the blank-eyed husk of the Hippogryph Who Was Not. As the darkness envelopes them, Dreamscar crouches low behind his kill until he can hide his grisly face in her mane and breathe the scent of morning glories drowned in blood.


    Dreamscar
    Carnage x Hippogryph
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    #5
    If he was going to choose to walk away, he is not given the chance.

    He hears a voice, and the familiarity of it stalls his heart. “Mom?”

    Swiftly, the ground swallows him whole, yanking him down with such an abruptness that if he could scream he hadn’t the breath in his lungs to do so. He is plunged into an impossible darkness, before he hits this new ground with a hard crash. The impact forces a grunt from his chest, as he tries to reorient himself. He blinks, his eyes adjusting to the dim light that glowed along the edges of what appeared to be a tunnel system. Gathering his legs beneath him he stands, shaking debris from the roan of his coat.

    Slowly, he begins to walk forward, trying to ignore the way the walls seemed to contract and breathe. Had it not been for the stone – and he touches it, feels the roughness of the walls – he would have been convinced that he was trapped in the insides of some grotesque monster.

    And then, the voice again, and he turns to see Briseis standing in the shadows. “Mom,” he says with a frown, and he moves towards her. “Mom, I don’t understand, why are you down here? Where’s dad?”

    But Briseis just shakes her head, and repeats again, “Follow me, Torryn, I know the way out.”

    He is confused – more confused than he has ever been. In all his life he has never seen his mother away from Ether, had never known her to enter shadows that were not constructed by his father. If she was here, then the rest of their family must be here, too.

    He follows his mother along the twists and turns, swallowing away his doubt as they seem to go in circles. He flattens his ears against the whisper of voices he keeps hearing – mangled and overlapping each other, but then he hears one that sounds distinctly like his younger sister and he stops, looking at his mother with concern flooding his face. “Did you hear that? It sounded like Wrenley!” and before his mother can answer he spins, rushing through the dark despite the protests that call from behind him (“Follow me, we don’t have much time, follow me, we don’t have much time!”).

    He loses track of how many times the tunnel curves, or the way the path seems to sometimes constrict so much that his shoulders scrape along the sides of it, the way it shudders and groans like a living entity. All he can hear is Wrenley’s whispered plea, tangled amid the chorus of other voices.

    Until the path widens, and what he sees before him causes him to stumble to a stop.

    In the space before him hundreds of stalactites hang from the ceiling, with more stalagmites erupting from the ground. The sharpened tips nearly touch in so many places that an easy passageway would be impossible, and as he stands there and tries to figure out the best way to navigate through this to the tunnel that he can see continuing at the other end, everything around him seems to shake. There is an earth-shattering crack that vibrates clear to his bones as stalactite plummet and collide with the floor below, and then, just like that, everything stops.

    “Follow me,” Briseis suddenly murmurs from alongside him, and Torryn jolts at her abrupt appearance. But he sighs in relief at the sight of his mother, even though she was acting so incredibly strange. He gestures to the minefield that was spread before them, and says grimly, “I’m not sure how we’re supposed to get past this, mom.”
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    #6
    Mama used to tell Thorn that he will always have so much more love to give than everyone else—because she could sense the magic in his heart but also because Thorn is special. Because even when feeling bitter, when feeling left behind, when feeling too tall and gangly to make friends, he loved and loved and loved. He smelled the flowers as he passed, he stared in wonder at the trees and birds and bugs. He felt his chest nearly burst with the weight of his heart and still asked to be given more.

    Because Mama loved Papa and Thorn so obviously loved Papa even when Papa could not show his love back. And Mama loved that.

    Thorn used to fall asleep to Mama’s singing while she wove flowers into his nighttime skeleton, and that is what he hears when the ground beneath him falls. A flash of fear, first, but then that strong heart of his reminds him that if this is it (death), then so be it—Mama’s singing will call to him even in the Afterlife. The monster’s magic finds it hard to wrap wiry and sharp fingers around Thorn’s lungs—again and again he leans into that steady beat in his chest.

    The black comes, all encompassing, suffocating, quieting even Thorn’s healthy heartbeat.

    But when he blinks, he is standing upright and not even dizziness blurs his vision. Tamlin stands before him, clear and unblinking eyes empty and then suddenly imploring. His brother’s gaze feels off, like there is nothing behind them; but then he is begging him to follow, and then he is disappearing into the shadows the fungi cannot light up, and Thorn cannot bear to not follow him into the dark.

    The walls pulse but not so much that it disorientates Thorn (being as resistant to evil magic as he is), and that seems to infuriate the caves. The sabino sees his brother, sees him turn around with eyes desperate to know why Thorn is not catching up. The click of their hooves speeds up when Thorn breaks into a confused gallop, but Tamlin merely matches his pace and remains the same distance away.

    It isn’t long before Tamlin is far enough away that Thorn can hardly see him. On his next blink, the cave changes into ice so clear he can see his reflection clearly. He comes to a sliding halt as even the stone beneath his hooves grows slippery. A wall of mirror-like ice slams down before Thorn, leaving him to slam his forehead into the hard surface. When he opens his eyes, he sees his own two purple ones staring back, illuminated by the fungi left upon the ceiling. Thorn takes a heavy breath, the air around him fogging and the ice crackling angrily.

    The cold has always frightened Thorn. Not freezing to death, but the way it is the exact opposite of his warm Tephran home. The way it opposes the warmth in his heart.

    Slowly, Thorn turns to study the cave around him, finding with a sinking heart that a wall of ice has enclosed the other side of the cave, as well. His breath quickens, his heart squeezes, and Thorn ends up spinning until he is dizzy. When he settles, too disorientated to keep moving, the mirror ice whirls—Thorn can’t breath, his heart rate picks up, the ice—the ice, it moves and then stops—

    Thorn stares at Thorn, fear plastered across his face. Tamlin stands just behind him with a wicked, bloodied grin splitting his face. A gasp, small but enough to turn the still air, leaves Thorn’s lips when he whirls to confirm Tamlin is behind him, but he’s not; instead, Thorn’s closest sibling is once again in the reflection, but this time he is closer—and this time, rows of fangs replace his flat teeth. A roar, one that echoes and tears up the sabino’s eardrums, leaves Tamlin’s mouth just before he rips into the reflection of Thorn’s hindquarters. “No!” the real Thorn screams, even as his knees hit the ground from the pain in his ears. He can’t tear his eyes from the reflection, can’t stop staring as his most beloved brother rips him limb from limb.

    Tamlin tortures him, both in body and in spirit, and when there is nothing left of Thorn but a body and head, he lifts his gaze to stare haughtily into real-Thorn’s face.

    “Why?” Thorn whispers.

    “Because I wanted to,” Tamlin replies, then rips reflection-Thorn’s throat open.

    It is that fear of the unknown that the monster draws on, because Thorn has always needed to know why. His kind upbringing left a lack of understanding of suffering or of the senseless evil that scars their world. The most terrifying thing Thorn can envision is harm befalling those simply because the evil wishes it so; and for such evil to poison his family . . .

    Thorn blacks out.

    When he awakes, Tamlin is peering over him. Thorn jerks back in fear before realizing that this is his normal brother. No fangs tear up the flesh of his mouth, no blood frenzies his eyes. A sigh of relief escapes his clenched jaw when he sees the concern in Tamlin’s eyes (though a sliver of doubt, just a little, makes him question why his brother’s concern looks so baseless).

    “Where are we?” Thorn whispers through a parched throat. Tamlin looks up at a wall of tightly woven vines lit up by the blue glow of fungi.

    “I don’t know,” Tamlin’s voice echoes strangely. “I was running ahead and you appeared before me.”

    “Oh,” the sabino replies. He climbs to his hooves and stares in exhaustion at the foliage. “Maybe we should find out.”
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    #7

     
    It kicks the air out of his chest.
    Opens up a gaping chasm in the pit of his gut.
    He has never fallen from quite this high.

    And when the dust settles, he is aware only of the sound of his own pulse thundering in his ears. He does not hear her now, his daughter, doesn’t hear much of anything at all as he tests the limbs and rises. As far as he can tell, there is nothing broken. He turns to seek out the place where the earth had given way but sees nothing but impenetrable darkness. 

    The once-king does not panic. But then, he never has. Because there is nothing productive in it. He trembles with the adrenaline that pollutes his bloodstream and drags in a thin breath as both the eyes and the ears adjust to the darkness and the acoustics here.

    And when he turns again, she is standing there. “Kennice,” he blurts in surprise, relief surging through him. Because she is here and she’s all right and, together, they’ll be able to find a way out. But her expression remains smooth, unchanged, as she opens her mouth and speaks. There is a tone to her voice that he does not recognize and his brow darkens in confusion as she turns from him and hurries into the darkness.

    There is nothing for them behind him, the earth seeming to have swallowed them both whole before it closed itself up again, so he follows. And he blames the gnawing uncertainty at the very center of him on the unusual circumstances, the way his daughter flits in and out of focus, always just out of reach. He chooses not to acknowledge the heartbeat in the earth underfoot or the way the walls heave like lungs. Every so often he loses his footing, shying away from something in the dark that he senses but does not see, catching himself off-guard each time. Because when he peers into the shadows, he sees nothing. But the pulse quickens and there is a very real fear that tightens a fist around his windpipe as the two of them hurry deeper into the earth.

    There is a period of time where he loses sight of her entirely. He is old now and, though he is immortal, he is not immune to the way exhaustion eats away at muscle. His sides heave wild with his gasping breath. And then she looms back into view again, always several steps ahead, cast in an eerie glow by the fungi on the walls. It is a strange place, certainly, but he has never traveled underground before and has no way of knowing that this is not simply the way the earth behaves beneath its surface. Beqanna is a land of magic, after all. And the voices he hears that do not belong to his daughter must belong to the spirits that make it so, he thinks. Or, at least, tries to convince himself.

    He has no way of knowing how much time has passed until, finally, he reaches her. So focused on her is he that he does not immediately notice the reason for her stopping. Another great hole in the earth. This one filled with water. But not just any water. It has a current. A wild, raging thing. Rapids cut through the center of the cave coming from someplace unknown and disappearing into the darkness. The rush of the water is so loud that he cannot hear himself think. There is ice in the water, too. Great chunks of it. He thinks of the Tundra. His beloved Tundra. Wonders if this is where it’s ended up. Underground.

    The pulse quickens even still. And, though he’s standing, he’s finding it even more difficult to breathe. He knows that it is not productive to panic but this seems an impossible thing to cross. “I don’t know that we can make it, Kennice,” he says. And it is not the water that scares him so much as the idea that he and his daughter might die down here, alone. He should have waken Plumeria, told him where he’d gone. It seems so silly now, as he turns his gaze on his daughter and woefully shakes his head.

    jarris
    now I’ve been crazy, couldn’t you tell? I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell
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