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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


    break these bones until they’re better; any
    #1
    She is afraid, but she hides it so carefully behind a learned hardness she wears in her eyes, a mask that she’s spent days practicing in watery reflections. There is little she knows of this world, but she does know that emotion is weakness, that feelings create holes and vulnerabilities, gaps in an armor she has worked so hard to reinforce. She knows that it is lonely to be an orphan, and that maybe it is even worse to have been deliberately left behind. So she pretends that her parents are definitely dead, and she pretends so well that sometimes their imagined selves meet death in different ways in the realm of her nightmarish sleep.

    But they have to be dead, whoever they are or were, because if they aren’t, then she must be wrong in some unforgivable way. Wrong enough that when she was born and first opened those luminous rust eyes, they felt only the absence of love. Felt nothing, perhaps.

    She shies away from those thoughts though, feeling those ancient fissures yawning like mouths on the surface of her heart. She is enough, and maybe her parents are out there right now looking for her and missing her so desperately. Dreaming about their gemstone child with sunsets trapped in the shades of her shining coat. They wonder how she is and where she is, what she’s doing and when they’ll be able to hold her again like these other parents hold their children. 

    She blinks, looking around the field with a wary kind of uncertainty that comes from the way seeing families together makes her chest ache and her stomach hurt - because she knows in her heart that she is not missed, that she is not lost. There is not a single memory in her mind of any dad. He has no face and no voice and no smell. He is only a word, barbed and buried to the hilt in her chest. But maybe it’s worse that she does remember mother. That sometimes she finds a particular shade of purple in the flowers and wild fruit, and a sense of loss and longing washes over her. It becomes suddenly easier, and harder, to remember the way her mulberry fur had smelled like damp earthy morning, or the way her whiskers had tickled Hypatia’s little face when she cleaned the milk from around her muzzle. 

    Sometimes her armor slips and she forgets to be hard, and then she is lost in these spells of remembering, curling up around her legs like it’ll help trap the memories in close where they’ll stop escaping, stop fading. But instead the memories shift and change, growing and becoming adjacent versions of their original selves. She thinks she can remember that same mulberry mare whispering I love you and chasing birds with her through fields of pale yellow flowers. She can remember coming home to a father whose face is different every time she closes her eyes to find him. But his eyes are always kind and his smile is always warm. And perhaps it makes this loss worse, that beyond mourning her lost family, she mourns the loss of what never was. Of a dream.

    Her eyes are more guarded now as she looks around a busy meadow soaked in the pinks and oranges of sunset. She realizes how very much she doesn’t want to be here, how it hurts to stand alone and try to look unbroken, because to everyone else she will undoubtedly be that poor little orphan in varying tones of pity and senseless empathy. She winces, and the expression shifts into a seamless scowl as she lifts her chin to turn those flame eyes elsewhere. To the sun itself, or the tallest branches of the nearest trees, to the leaves and the birds and the blessed things that pay her no notice. It is a tricky balance to want to be both simultaneously invisible, and found by someone who might learn to love you.

    HYPATIA

    i want to break these bones until they're better

    Reply
    #2



    Sabra


    I am alone again, after encounters with the past. Faces and names that kept me in a tail spin long after the men they belonged to had left. My progress is slow on foot, the spear in my chest hindering every motion. It's dark by now, soaked through with blood that just won't stop trickling down its length. 

    Drips and drops follow me everywhere I go, and they follow me when I go to the field that evening. Crystalline blue tinged with blood red, fiery gold. And I find the mirror of myself bathed in the dying light. Small, gossamer winged and with a stubborn set to get mouth that looks hard on a face so young. My lips tilt downward as I sight her, the trajectory of my steps curving with elegant purpose as I cut through the summer grass. 

    My head tips sideways as I stop before her, expression flat and calculating. "Who are you, girl?"
    I ask in my eternally silver voice. She's pretty, and like enough in colour that I could call her my own, if I wanted to. But first, her name. 

    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


    @[hypatia]
    Reply
    #3
    She is most startled by the colors that dance and shimmer across the woman's skin as she approaches. It is a sunrise of color - the kind of shades you might find gleaming in the belly of a shell washed ashore. Not unlike Hypatia’s own colors. There is a treacherous flare of wonder in her chest, and it is etched in a hope that leaves wounds behind as logic reminds her this woman is not her mother.

    Belatedly, she notices the spear in the woman’s chest, and her delicate face wrinkles with poorly concealed revulsion. “What is that?” She asks before her mind has a chance to catch up with her mouth and make her feel first bashful and then guarded, very much a bold child expecting to be scolded and already resentful for it. “It’s just that you’re bleeding all over the flowers.” She points out with that quiet shade of defensiveness in the sound of her small voice.

    Then, remembering that this woman had asked a question when she stopped, her ears flick back warily, almost indecisive as she hesitates. She could offer a name, and probably that is what this woman intended, but she didn’t specifically say name. Just who are you, and what a question that is. So when she does finally answer, and it comes after a long, weighted silence, it is to tighten her jaw and flash those lantern eyes as she says, “I don’t know yet.”

    HYPATIA

    i want to break these bones until they're better

    Reply
    #4



    Sabra


    A flicker of short-tempered irritation flares across my features at the girl's question. I rein the feeling in on a deep breath, fighting to remember that she's only a child. I can't reasonably expect the curiosity to stay inside her head or her mouth. My displeasure is instead expressed with a flipping of my tail and the thinning of my lips and nothing more. 

    "The flowers will recover, I'm sure." I drawled, sparing a glance for the herbs in question. They were, in fact, speckled with crimson droplets, glossy on their matte petals and leaves. A faint thing between grimace and smile played my mouth. Almost beautiful, really. Bland as milk I returned my gaze to the girl in her concern. 

    Her quick words seemed to have been swallowed up into a stubborn shell. "That, is a spear. The tip of it sits in my heart which, as I'm sure you can imagine, does very little in the way of improving my demeanor. Especially when being questioned by nosy little girls." The smile on my mouth stretched into something that would have looked more at home on a shark, if sharks were born with dull teeth. "Good job though," I added as an afterthought. "If you're going to be nosy, you may as well get used to defending your words."

    I continue my examination of the slight young thing as I wait for her to respond to my initial question. Her answer causes my nostrils to flare. "Don't be cute. You know perfectly well I meant your name." My own ice blue eyes cut at her warningly. "'You don't know yet', child, there are horses far older and wiser than yourself who don't know who they really are. Now. Do you have a name, or did your mother neglect to give you one before seeing you off." The sharp words soften towards the end of my bitter tirade. I myself had a child who'd been named only after I'd died. It was far from impossible that this iridescent fey girl had met a similar fate in life.

    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


    @[hypatia]
    Reply




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