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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


    [private]  just deliver me truth; gale
    #11

    for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
    but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

    It would be easy, she thinks, to let the feeling of this island transform her, change her, keep her. How easy it would be to surrender to a different life than the one that her mother had imagined for her—than she had accepted for herself, if she was being truthful. What if she ran away from it all? What if she shed the weight of her mother’s dream in lieu of finding one for herself? What if she became just Breach instead?

    Would she be the same girl who tore her own leg off in sacrifice to Carnage?

    The same girl who nearly ripped the throat of Mesec out to just send a message?

    Could she find the girl she had once been underneath all of that?

    She swallows, doing her best to skirt around the idea and immerse herself in the moment again, trying to focus entirely on Gale—suddenly desperate for the relief she felt in his presence. She throws herself into the conversation again, enthusiastic and childlike, as they approach the massive sign. Her dual-colored eyes widen just slightly and she doesn’t bother to hide her awe at the structure, entirely alien in nature.

    “Colby,” she echoes, deciding that she likes the strange name for the strange creature. “How fitting.”

    Then she shifts into a large pelican, taking flight so that she can get a better view of the weathered sign. She hovers for a moment before she flaps her wings to take her around to the back and then to the front again. When she has had her fill of the sign, she flies back to Gale, shifting back into herself easily.

    “How wonderful,” she says, as soon as she has her mouth back to say it.

    “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

    though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
    though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth



    @[Gale]
    Reply
    #12
    Gale
    run away with me--
    lost souls and reverie

    running wild and running free


    Gale continues forward, his path meandering and without haste as he makes his way toward the wooden shape. The soft pink cattails and the end of the orange dunegrass brush against his belly as he weaves through the rarely travelled bit of grassland. Islandres is not a populous place, but most visitors have seen this. The follow the trails nearer the beach, with a better view of the entire whale, but Gale prefers the vista from a little nearer.

    It seems Breach feels the same way, for as Gale turns his head back to see her reaction, he finds her gliding overhead on newly sprouted wings. He laughs, as impressed by the sudden change as she is of the whale, and continues to weave his way higher up the dunes, until he arrives at the highest of the black sand hills. As the rose-colored grasses sway, Gale settles his bright gaze on the woman who’d been a bird, and finds himself overcome with wonder. He had been impressed by Mazikeen’s ability, a woman powerful enough to scar a creature with regenerative healing. To see delighted Breach and alpha of the pack Breach and pretty Breach coalesce with such effortless magic into Breach that is pleased by something of Gale’s leaves the brindle pegasus with a curiously breathless feeling.

    Has she done that as well, Gale wonders, flexed telekinesis or blood magic or metal bending to make his heart skip along? The thought is colored only with pleasant curiosity as it flits across his mind. Gale does not think he would mind if she’d tried, yet nevertheless he is determined to not allow the way that the world seems somehow a litter brighter to sway him.

    “Better than what you’ve got in Hyaline?” he asks with a lift of his dark brows and a quick smile, which fixes on her for the briefest moment before he turns to gesture at the rest of the view that surrounds them.

    First he points toward the distant volcano of Tephra, a dark shape against the southeast horizon, and then the peak of Islandres’ single mountain across the distant river and heart island. It’s prettiest later in the afternoon, when the sun seems to settle into the cradle of the long dormant volcano before sinking into the sea, but Gale still thinks the view one of the best in Islandres. Then his gaze returns to Breach, and he wonders for a moment if she’ll change again to look at this as well. He’d worried only briefly that she might think him prying, but curiosity almost always wins out with manners when it comes to Gale. He doesn’t remember learning the latter, after all, though he does manage to chew the soft yellow flowers he grabs from the shorter lavender grass at their feet with his mouth closed.

    When he has swallowed it, he asks: “Do you always keep the same color?” All of Mazikeen’s forms had been icy white; will the same be true for Breach? The picture of an osprey (Gale’s favorite animal) with an iridescent blue shimmer to its pale gold feathers is an image that visual Gale can appreciate, and he smiles softly as he waits for an answer, his blue eyes carefully taking in the unique way Breach’s patterns and markings swirl into each other. He is careful not to miss a detail, and only when the inspection is over does he look back to meet her without a word.

    @[breach]

    Reply
    #13

    for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
    but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

    She relaxes further, the rest of the world going pleasantly hazy as she sinks further into the fantasy that this world is the only one. That she’s just this carefree girl who gets to roam around the islands with him, who gets to discover wooden signs and shift without having to think about the dynamics of that shift. Is this the best shape for a predator? It is the fastest method of travel? Instead, it’s just discovering what shift will help her get a better vantage point for looking at the curious sights, and she prefers that, she finds.

    Her dual-colored eyes study him and her smile brightens, pulling at the corner.

    “Oh, I don’t know if I can say that,” she says with a light laugh, her voice a little breathy. The kind of laugh she gave a lot as a child and a lot less as an adult—as she grew more serious, more severe. Her edges growing sharper and sharper until she so rarely kept anyone close. “To be honest, Hyaline has always been a means to an end. I have never loved it the way that so many people love their lands.” It felt treacherous to admit, and she isn’t certain why she opens up to him about it, but the words don’t stop.

    “Everything in my life has felt like I’ve been working for something that isn’t mine.”

    She frowns before shaking her head, trying to rid herself of the seriousness of the admission and trying to grasp once more for the ease of the moment. “I don’t,” she says, her expression softening with the clear nod to Mazikeen. “I’m not like Maze in that matter. I haven’t tried before though.” She frowns and then shifts again, this time into her own favored form, the hawk. To her delight, she manages to hold onto her original coloring—the bird pale with the marbling coming underneath its wings and the blue sheen covering it. Even her avian eyes remain the same, one silver and the other blue.

    She shifts back, shaking her mane into tangled knots down both sides of her strong neck.

    Her eyes catch his as he looks back at her, and she isn’t sure why she can't say anything further.

    though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
    though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth



    @[Gale]
    Reply
    #14
    Gale
    this is going to break me clean in two --
    this is going to bring me close to you



    That had not been an outright ‘No’, Gale thinks, and he glances curiously between her bicolored eyes. Hyaline is simply where the Pack lives, she had told him. Now she tells him more, unexpected admissions that add to the many layers of the blue gold mare, and leave him frowning in thought as she shakes her head. Gale interprets that as a clear ending to that part of their conversation, though he does not take his gaze from her as she answers his query about coloration.

    He watches her instead, like he watches phenomena he finds curious, and so he notices the way Breach softens when she mentioned Mazikeen. Gale suspects that the two of them are close, dearer than their formal titles might imply. He does not think of this long, because she’s shifting to a bird almost exactly like the one he had imagined moments ago. Can she read his mind, he wonders? When she shifts back to her equine shape, Gale decides he will question her about that, thinking it a rather useful trait for a leader to possess. He’d not felt the tickle of foreign magic though, and the possibility that she had chosen a hawk by happenstance remains. 

    He'd been going to ask her a question, but he forgets what it had been as he watches her shift back, shaking out her snowy mane as she does. He watches where it settles against her iridescent neck, and how that blends into her gleaming shoulder and then he follows the arch of her neck back to her face. There, he realizes that they have both gone a rather long time without talking.

    Gale smiles, though not quite with chagrin, because he remains convinced there is no harm in looking (why else would he have been gifted with these eyes, if not to take in all the detail of the world around him?)

    The brindle stallion knows that he had meant to ask her something, but that train of thought has been entirely derailed. Rather than speak immediately, he looks past her, toward where the distant peak of Tephra rises over the waves. “Perhaps you need a vacation,” he finally suggests. “Time to decide what you want.” He’d enjoyed his own vacation, even if he’s never really left since arriving nearly a decade past.

    @[Breach]

    Reply
    #15

    for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
    but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

    Gale does not ask further questions, and she is not certain whether she is relieved or frustrated by it. Whether she had hoped he would ask so that she could finally take off this weight and place it at someone else’s feet. That she could tell him about her childhood roaming. How she had met Yadigar and then his abusive father. How Ghaul had killed her to send a message to him—and how that had been merely the first of situations to plunge her straight into a drama that was not her own. How she’d never fought it.

    How she loved the pack and what it represented, but that she resented her mother for dying.

    How she wished it was Sochi leading it and not herself.

    How she wished she was still a girl, adventuring and living with ease.

    But he doesn’t ask and she chooses to feel relieved, shutting the door on her trauma once more. Instead she smiles, enjoying the way that he looked and the way she felt feminine and pretty for a moment. How she didn’t feel like the Alpha or the Queen or anything but Breach in that breath of time.

    “A vacation?” she echoes, musing over the idea. She frowns as she looks out to the horizon, to the places where Tephra rises up against the sky. “I’m not sure I would even know where to start.” It feels like such a silly thing to admit—that she doesn’t even know how to relax anymore—and it leaves her feeling freshly vulnerable again, childish before him. She straightens again, as if she could brush away the illusion of her relative inexperience and instead focuses on the strange but handsome brindling of his coat.

    “Tell me something of you, Gale,” she asks, desperate to turn the conversation back toward him.

    though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
    though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth



    @[Gale]
    Reply
    #16
    Gale
    this is going to break me clean in two --
    this is going to bring me close to you



    The idea of a vacation doesn’t seem to please her, and Gale watches as her face hardens into a frown. That had been the very opposite of what he’d wanted, so he frowns too, and tries to determine exactly what he had said that had been so wrong. She doesn’t know where to start, Breach continues, and Gale’s frown deepens. He pushes it away before she turns back to him, because she resettles herself in a way that suggests she might be perturbed by such an expression.

    Distracted by the way she now looks at his brindle coat (different from the way she’d contemplated Tephra moments earlier) Gale doesn’t reply at all, not until she speaks again.

    Something of himself? Gale frowns, but the expression is introspective and thoughtful, not directed at the pale mare. “I was born in Loess,” he  offers, but he tilts his head in a way that asks if that is the sort of something she had meant. “Ospreys are my favorite birds?” His brows raise as if to inquire if this is more in line with what she’d meant.

    Before there is time for her to ask more, Gale interjects “My turn.” And then, without waiting to see if she assents to this decision asks: “Tell me your happiest memory.” That this is a somewhat intrusive question of a near stranger doesn’t occur to Gale, who gestures Breach to follow along as he turns toward the woods, the heart of the island that they have avoided thus far on their beach side sojourn.

    @[breach]

    Reply
    #17

    for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
    but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

    He frowns, but he doesn’t seem agitated by the moment and so she relaxes it again. She tries to focus on letting her muscles loosen—on letting them relax one by one, but it takes more effort than she would have thought. So she focuses instead on his face and, eventually, on the answer he gives. “I was almost born in Loess,” she ponders for a moment, the name of the land surprisingly bitter on her tongue. She thinks of how Oceane had stolen her. How she had torn the throat of one of the Loessian kingdom members before she had left. She thinks of how Loess had nearly broken her mother. And then she pushes it to the side.

    “It’s a good bird to like,” this pulls a smile from her, genuine and free.

    Her eyes widen a little at the turning of tables, but she doesn’t deny him. Doesn’t outright tell him no. Instead she walks next to him, falling in line with his pace. She thinks of it—tries really hard to remember all of the happy moments in her life, as few as they may be. When she finally lands on one, her entire face grows a little softer. “I was a young girl,” a fairly normal start, “and my mother woke me up one day. Told me to follow her.” The story is easier to tell than she thought it would be, the words coming easily.

    “It was cold out and I remember being so tired, but my mom wasn’t particularly good at taking no for an answer so I got up and followed. She shifted and I mimicked her—and did my best to keep up.” A soft laugh. “For hours, it felt like.” Another thoughtful pause. “Eventually, we got to the forest and she spent the entire day teaching me how to hunt. How to track an animal. How to make yourself practically invisible.” Tears prick the corner of her eyes but she doesn’t try to chase them away—not yet.

    “It may not be my happiest memories, but it certainly one of them. Getting to spend uninterrupted time with her. Getting to learn from her. Feeling special because she was there. Safe.”

    She shivers before admitting.

    “I miss her more than I admit sometimes.”

    though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
    though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth



    @[Gale]
    Reply




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