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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


    [private]  break these bones until they're better; for laura
    #1

    She can feel the creeping cold of the coming winter, the way it makes her body weary and her limbs feel heavy. It is still hard sometimes to accept that this body is hers now, these legs that look like slender branches, this skin that will never be soft or warm again. At night, in the dwindling moments where she can still find sleep, she still dreams of being a girl. Of the old body a shade of soft ash and crimson dapples, of an inner warmth and a thrumming pulse and the sound of her own heartbeat.

    Sometimes the heartbeat is all she dreams about.

    This body is quiet except for the rustle of leaf and flower - though now her flowers have turned to rosy apples in her hair, and soon they will rot and fall and stain the bark of her skin with their putrid sweet juices. She has not decided yet if this shames her, if it is as repulsive as she initially thought it was, or if perhaps she is just growing used to these new truths. But she knows this quiet body scares her, that it is so hard to lay still in the silence of deep night and wonder what it is to live and die. To be lost in these mortal worries and have no bump-bump in her chest to call her back, no gentle hush of breath in her lungs.

    There is only ever the quiet, so how does she know she lives?
    Sometimes it feels like there is nothing inside her.

    She is just like the quiet trees, tall and solitary, a universe within itself. Just like every flower yearning for the sun and summer showers, like every blade of grass swaying gold and brown in the autumn noon. Alive, and so quiet. Unnoticed.

    Except, she can hear them. She has never told anyone, never shared this secret or spoken it aloud for worry of what others might think. For fear of others finding her even more strange. She can feel the sorrow of a world during fall, the silent dread of winter months and waiting death. She can feel the heartbreak of the oak when her boughs fill with too much snow and her branches break and die beneath its weight. But she can feel the delight of the white silk seeds when they float free of a dandelion stem, too.

    The world is quiet to everyone but her, and she wonders, if she is like these things, is anyone listening to her quiet joys and sorrows?

    She rises from the grass in her patch of autumn sunshine, and she can feel the weight of the apples bobbing heavily in their tangle at the crest of her neck, hear the hum of bees buzzing amongst the ripe fruit. But her gentle focus is elsewhere, following the sad song of a cluster of wild violets as they brace against the cold. She can feel that hopeless yearning for more summer and more sunshine, more life where there is none left. She pauses to nose a branch aside with such gentle care, letting more sunshine slip through to her patch of violets as the bees continue to bumble gently through a mane of leaf and twig.

    linnea

    these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

    Reply
    #2

    how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

    He had been lost and then found.

    Found and then lost again.

    Although perhaps lost is not the right word for it. Can you be lost if you are the one to cast your boat out to sea? Can you be lost if you had purposefully slipped back into the fog and silence?

    Because he had—he had.

    He had gladly loosened his hold on this world and let himself fall beneath the waves. And he is glad, in some ways, that he had. Glad that he had missed the way his parents had torn apart. Glad that he missed the way his sister turned so savage—taking a kingdom and then turning her teeth on her supposed lover.

    Glad to have missed the cruelty that seemed to define his family.

    It did not leave him without the scars, but it did leave him molded by something else entirely. Molded by the howling winds and the yawning canyons. Molded by a loneliness that etched into his very bones. He became made in the image of his shadow, cast in the iron of his empty world.

    Still, he thought of her. Of the girl who had watched him fall through the portal. Of the girl made of vine and branch who had greeted him when he came back. He thought of the sweet sadness in her eyes. Of the way she made his chest ache as a young boy and the way he carried it with him now like a bruise.

    Even as he found his way back into the world of Beqanna, he feels the weight of it. Thinks of her even as he thinks of her magician of a mother, of his own tigress mother, the dragon who sired him. All of them swirling around in the back of his mind. The animosity between their families. The hurt—always the hurt.

    It feels like a dream that he sees her and he inhales sharply at the sight of her.

    He lifts a leg as if to step forward and then steps backward instead, letting the shadows reach dark fingers forward to curl around his legs, his chest, his neck. It obscures the iridescence of him but does not hide it completely. Does not shield the silver gleam of his hooded eyes as he watches her rise.

    Part of him wants to go to her. To ask if she remembers him. If she has thought of him the same way that he has thought of her, but the rust of years spent alone holds him captive, roots him to the ground. Instead, he reaches down and brushes his nose against a pile of leaves by his hooves. They come alive before him, bumping against one another, crackling and moving. He nods his head at them and the begin to tumble forward, half on their own accord and half carried by the wind as they move to dance around her feet.

    And he simply watches.

    nikolaus

    if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
    ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

    Reply
    #3

    She knows the way eyes feel when they settle on the bark of her dark uneven body, can remember the way it felt when once upon a yesterday, the hairs along her slender spine stood on end. So she waits a beat before she looks up, giving those eyes the chance to move on because she can of course understand the urge to stare. She is strange by any standard, odd by any definition. But the feeling doesn't pass, and finally she lifts those shy petal pink eyes to find him. But the sight of him is like a lightning strike to her chest, and she is so sure that if she is brave enough to look down, she’ll find a hollowed mess of splinters gaping back up at her. 

    He is the boy from her childhood, the one she died to protect - would die for again one hundred times over even knowing what it is she becomes. He is the silver of every star in every sky, he is the raw ore buried in glimpses behind dark coal stone. He is the smoky black of half-night and the absence of light, he is the blue of sapphires she has never seen and never has to because she knows without a doubt that he is brighter. 

    He is Nikolaus.
    He is the boy that will forever hold the heart that no longer exists inside her chest.
    He is home.

    So it is a wonder that she does not immediately know him when she looks up from her sad violets and the song they break her heart with. That this flash of silver jolts something locked inside her memory - a kind of guarded recognition, but it isn’t this face half concealed by shadow and fully grown. Her mind remembers a boy with gentler features and an easier smile, with laughter on his lips and in the ore of his eyes. She knows him, but not this version of him. Not the man he became without her, and somehow it is too jarring to reconcile.

    Yet.

    Something inside her is a tide to the pull of his moon, and she cannot take her eyes off of him for fear of falling away into an oblivion without this new gravity. She takes a single step towards him, and then pauses again when the leaves rise and find a new life she cannot detect, a new depth she cannot feel. She watches, blinking those pale eyes like pink tourmaline, fighting tears that will never fall for memories she is so afraid to take hold of.

    But she knows, she knows.

    There is such pain as she reaches down to touch the dancing autumn leaves, letting them brush across the bark of her nose, his sudden appearance restoring an old ache inside her chest. To be touched, held. To feel a warmth long since stolen, a warmth gifted away for a far better cause. Her face lifts again to find him, and there is pain and relief in every knot and whorl as she closes her eyes to hold the perfect memories of him inside where they will always be kept safe. “You look very much like a ghost I once knew.”

    linnea

    these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

    Reply
    #4

    how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

    He had not expected the pain—so fresh and visceral as it sears across his chest. He hadn’t expected to feel this fresh ache in his bones as she looks at him and he is trapped in the memories of them. Growing up and hiding a friendship away in secret. Never understanding why they came from two sides of the same war. Laughing and running around and being free in a way that feels impossible now—forever lost.

    He finds himself trapped in the memory of being locked on the other side of portals.

    Of seeing death claim her.

    Of having the ice claim him.

    He remembers his mother bringing him home and doing her best to stitch his body back together. Of the way Linnea had been born anew into this beautiful body of bark and leaves. How she had looked so different from the young girl he had known and yet still so mesmerizing—still herself.

    How she had comforted him as the pain came over him in waves.

    The memories are painful and comforting in the same breath. It makes the distance between them hurt all the more until he is gritting his teeth, the muscle jumping in his jaw, the skin stretched tight over the grooves of it. He watches as the leaves continue their dance, swirling up around the slender bark of her legs and then falling to the ground, the magic he had gifted them with drained from them completely.

    Her words catch him on the edges of the hooks and he glances back up, silvery gaze mercurial. “Maybe I am,” his voice is huskier than the last time she heard it, rusted with disuse. There is still something of the boy that she had known though and it shows in a quick glimpse across his face, a shadow of humor.

    “A ghost that’s still allergic, I’m afraid.”

    A flash of white teeth and then nothing as the curtain flutters closed over his expression once more.

    nikolaus

    if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
    ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

    Reply
    #5

    He is the only one that made her feel any kind of beautiful in this strange body of hers, the only one she ever believed. Mother had tried to help her understand, to help her see this as a gift, as a second chance. That she was no more strange than any of the flowers in her secret garden home. But it is a mother's job to say those things whether they are true or not, to build up her daughter so that she never falls low enough to doubt her worth, her purpose. It didn’t mean Leliana ever lied to her, or that every word she ever spoke was anything but the honest truth. It just made it harder to believe when it came from a place of such beautiful, unmatchable bias.

    Perhaps it was a love she had taken for granted.

    But Nikolaus had never tried to build her up, never soothed her with the things he knew she needed to hear. He had come through the portal through Leliana’s power, and he had looked at her with such vulnerable, honest relief. It seemed the only thing he ever saw was her, like he could see right through any skin she ever wore to the heart that lived inside it, to the soul itself. He has always seen her for more than she ever fully understood, seen the depths that even she had not fully unearthed in her fear of finding something unrecognizable.

    She watches him now like there is nothing else in the world worth knowing, like the only thing that could ever matter is right here with her where it always belonged. She watches him tense, watches the striations of muscle along his jaw as he clenches his teeth in a way that reminds her of his deepest agonies after coming through Leliana’s portal. She knows it is a signal of pain, but as those pink tourmaline eyes fill with worry and search every inch of this grown version of her Nikolaus, she can find nothing physically amiss. He is perfect, as he always was, and for once she is glad that there is no blood to heat her cheeks.

    His eyes lift and she is quite suddenly, and so willingly, pinned in place by a swirl of silver that every star in every sky would be jealous of. Does he know how beautiful he is? Can he tell that she still loves him? She smiles when he speaks, and it is like her body is held hostage by him because she cannot remember giving her wooden lips permission to find that old, familiar shape again. But his words take her back in time to a memory that is, in equal parts, perfect and painful. To a boy returned to her from the edge of the world, but returned so broken that even her magician mother had struggled to put him back together.

    It hurts to remember how close the healing had come to breaking him.

    She takes a step closer, and then a few more, flowing with more grace than should be possible for a beast so made of wood and bark and crooked branch. But she stops before she is close enough to reach out and touch him, because she knows she cannot trust herself not to. “Well,” she says, and those petal pink eyes settle against his face like shedding spring blossoms, “that’s because my bark has always been so much worse than my bite.” And then, because she cannot stop the feelings that flow from her, “Please don't go, Nikolaus. I don't want you to be a ghost anymore.”

    linnea

    these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

    Reply
    #6

    how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

    He can hear his own pulse in his ears. Feels it like the ocean tides that wash up against the insides of him until he is certain he will bleed out on the shore. Still, he doesn’t run away, even though he considers it. Wonders just how quickly he could fade back into the shadows and the fog until there is nothing of him in this moment, and nothing for her to miss. But she holds his gaze and he finds himself trapped.

    Finds that he cannot move underneath the weight of her gravity.

    He remains still as she moves forward, fluid in movement that belies the wood of her, and he aches with the need to fill the space. But he doesn’t. He stands apart, as straight as the soldier he had been bred to be, his mercurial eyes watching her so closely. His laugh is sudden, a bark of a thing that she surprises out of him, and for a fleeting moment, he feels like a boy again. The boy who had run alongside her in the woods when their parents had been at each other’s throats. The boy who had believed in happiness.

    “And yet neither hold a candle to the stench of you.” He wrinkles his nose in a mockery, as though she does not smell sweet like ripe apples or blooming flowers. There is laughter in the creases of his mouth though, although it fades so quickly—washing clean as those his face cannot hold onto the shape of it.

    He wants to though.

    He does.

    He reaches out for it and takes a stumbling step forward, the limp so apparent in the movement. He had healed, but even her mother had not been able to take that from him. He was forever marred by the brokenness of it. Nikolaus looked the soldier, but he never would be. He would never be able to run with clean, fluid lines. Would never be able to fight. He was a shattered thing still. A ruined thing.

    The motion draws him up short, the embarrassment and shame flooding him.

    “I don’t think I know how to stay anymore,” he confesses, but this time he can’t meet her gaze.

    nikolaus

    if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
    ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

    Reply
    #7

    There will always be enough of him to miss.

    This ache in her chest has a ferocity she cannot name, an intensity she has never known before in her life. It is a desperation that shames her, because it tells her if he leaves now, she will not survive the loss of him again, and she believes it. She tries to keep it from her face, and it is easy enough to hide it from her expression as the wood of her is already so stiff and stoic. But those pink tourmaline eyes betray her on every level, and she needn’t see her reflection to know her own eyes are shining with the kind of pain that would’ve once broken his heart.

    They don’t fit together anymore.

    She can feel it as they stand together like this, feel it in the rift of negligible distance between them. He is close enough to touch now, but neither one of them is brave enough to do so. She blinks, but then the blink becomes remembering and it is several dozen heartbeats before her eyes open again. But when they do they find him like his gravity is the only thing that keeps her here.

    It had been easier as children, even while their families feuded and their homes had come to war. Even with all that, the only thing that had ever mattered was the way they felt about one another. Best friends, best everything.

    She is surprised when he speaks again, blinking in a way that is almost a wince at his words until she searches his face again and her eyes tell her it was a joke. She can see it in his mouth, faint wrinkles that look far too unused. Her wide eyes soften and alight, a smile in mirror on her wooden lips. “You’ve lost your edge.” She tells him, eyes nearly shining now as she grins a secret smile at him. “I am literally made of flowers.”

    But he limps forward and dims again, and it is like all the light and warmth has been snatched away from her. Had he seen her eyes drift to that injured, gnarled leg? Her lips part to say something, and for a split second she is glad when he beats her to it because she cannot think of a single thing that wouldn’t make him feel worse.

    This is much easier.

    She reaches out to kiss his brow, close enough because of the distance he carved again by half. “Okay, don’t stay.” She says, waiting for him to look up at her, most likely shocked by this rare, unbelievable compliance from someone he almost certainly recalls being nightmarishly stubborn. “But I’m going with you.”

    linnea

    these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

    Reply
    #8

    how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

    There is an echoed memory here between them.

    Something that had once been so easy in childhood reflected back now, although it was twisted and made different, made more difficult. He wants to swallow away the tension, but he doesn’t know how to remove something that he has caused. He is the one who left, who slipped into the shadows when he could not bear to watch his family tear themselves apart. When it became clear his new life was one that would be built around this injury—that he would never have the things for himself that he had so longed for.

    He was the one who had left, and she was the one who stayed behind.

    How could he just wash that all way?

    He can’t, and he knows it in the way that she looks up at him, her pink eyes pained. His stomach clenches and there is something painful in his throat that only eases as the light teasing that feels like it used to. “I’ve lost more than that,” he replies, not realizing until after that it sounded more dark than joke.

    His handsome face falls a little, a storm cloud moving over it, but he doesn’t give up. Doesn’t stop trying to reach for that light of her, that light they had once been. If he just gets past this one hurdle, he thinks. If he just can climb this last mountain. Perhaps then it would be as it had once been.

    Perhaps then she could forgive him—understand why he must go again.

    But each moment it only gets harder as she finally splits the space between them, touching him with those wooden lips. “Okay,” he breathes, throat tight, nearly relieved at her willingness to send him away, and then feeling the simultaneous frustration and joy at what she says next. “Linnea,” her name comes so effortlessly to him as he takes another limping step toward her, finally pulling her close to his chest.
    
“You can’t come with me,” he breathes into the flowers and leaves.

    His voice cracks, the sorrow rushing in to fill it.

    “I can’t protect you where I’m going.”

    nikolaus

    if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
    ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

    Reply
    #9

    There will always be enough of him to miss.

    She wonders at the darkness etched into those words, wonders how deep those chasms run inside him. Is he full of it now? Full of dark and disquiet, full of regret made more jagged, more broken. She thinks maybe she can see hints of it in those beautiful eyes that make her feel so shy now, like she cannot watch them for any more seconds than there are petals on a daisy before she has to glance away again. Maybe it is the unfamiliarity of this newfound dark that pushes her away from him like a broken tide, like gravity come undone.

    Or maybe it is just fear and cowardice. Maybe she isn’t brave enough to love him again, and certainly not foolish enough to think she could ever know him again without also knowing that love.

    The memory of them is a wound in her heart, and she has thought of him so many times that in all these years it has never completely healed.

    She might have been able to let him go again, if he truly insisted. It would’ve been pain and misery, but not anything she didn’t already know, hadn’t already survived. But then he says her name and it is like her heart is a flower that blooms wide for him, every petal a piece of memory she had locked down safely inside. In that one word, in her name on his lips, she can hear every laughing, scowling, annoyed time he had ever said that same word before.

    But if her heart is a flower, then his next words are the hand that plucks it from her chest, and she cannot help but wonder what he intends to do with it, if he even knows the weight of what he holds.

    She is a sliver of every emotion, trying to decide which one she feels the loudest. Pain is there, but pain is an easy color to wear, even cradled like this against his chest. Same for sorrow and the blue of sadness. Love is both easy and hard, both tight in her fist and dancing just at the ends of reaching fingertips. It is not quiet, it is more than a whisper, but she wrestles it back to deeper oceans inside her. The loudest, she thinks, is so close to anger that even she shies from it.

    “You stopped protecting me a long time ago, Nikolaus.” She is slow to speak, stiff now against his chest because she cannot decide whether to pull away and look at him, or to stay here where the sound of his heart is the closest she’s been to home in a long while. “And anyway, I don’t need protecting.” Except from him, she thinks, but that is not true at all. She presses her cheek against him harder, gritting her teeth at the frustration building inside her chest, and then leans back abruptly, but not away from him. She could no sooner leave his gravity than the earth could leave the sun. “Where are you going, and who is going to protect you?” There is an emphasis on that last word, a subtle narrowing of petal-pink eyes. “And when did I become so easy to throw away.”


    linnea

    these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

    Reply
    #10

    how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?

    She is an enigma, his Linnea. As delicate as the blossoms tucked behind her ear and as steadfast as the roots suggested by her woody limbs. She is the fire and the flood, and he wonders if she knows just how wondrous she is. But these thoughts do not stem the pain that comes from her words—the anger that rushes into him to match her own. It’s a dagger that she buries between his ribs and he nearly breaks away from her to find relief, but instead he remains and lets the closeness bury it to the hilt in him.

    “I know,” he says between gritted teeth. How could he not know that he had stopped protecting her? How could he not be acutely aware of how little he had protected her? He had watched her through that portal. Watched the way her life had bled from her. Watched as death claimed the young girl she had been and how she had been buried in the earth, blossoming later into something new entirely.

    Something beautiful, he knows.

    Something perfect and still entirely her.

    But it had taken death to get there—and it was her blood on his hands.

    He doesn’t break the contact though. Partially because it feels like a punishment to hold her close and to know that he is undeserving of it. Partially because he is famished for the feel of her cheek against his chest. Partially because he could no longer staring into the sun than he could stop the beat of his heart.

    It simply is. They simply are.

    He swallows hard and shakes his head. “Does it matter where I am going if I cannot protect you? If I have never been able to protect you?” He ignores her question about who would protect him. It doesn’t matter. Perhaps it never mattered. He didn’t deserve to be protected, least of all at the expense of her safety.

    His face breaks though at the last question, his silvery gaze finding her pink one.

    “Linnea,” softer this time, the anger in him washing away as it always did. Helpless. “I can’t throw away something that I’ve never deserved to hold onto. Something that was never mind to hold.” He reaches forward to push the blossoms and branch back, struck again by the sweetness of her scent.

    “Please don’t make my last memory of you so sad.”

    He smiles, the curve of his lip nearly cracking.

    “I want to remember you smiling.”

    nikolaus

    if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
    ( for all you know, for all you’ve known )

    Reply




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