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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]  should have known better than that; torryn
    #1



    Even if the sun never comes back, Lilliana thinks she might be alright. That those who dwell in Taiga would be alright. (There were the shadow horses who existed on the fringes of their little group. They never bother Lilliana or the other Taigans and so the chestnut made sure they were never bothered in return.) Yanhua and Amarine came back from the Mountain with some of the stars perhaps struck from their eyes but she doesn't doubt they will return.

    Lilliana doesn't doubt that the Dreamers of Taiga will continue to do so, regardless of the perils or the dangers that they faced. The dark could linger as long as it wished. But Lilliana doesn't doubt that those who reside in Taiga can keep their souls light with dreaming (regardless of everything, she is still the same ever-hopeful girl that she has always been).

    It doesn't mean that she wishes her home to unprepared or unprotected. The monsters that roamed Beqanna could just as easily come to Taiga (as she had learned from Nashua). So the chestnut patrols often and the routes of her Redwood home are worn down with the small hoofprints left behind from the flame-marked mare. When Leilan is not in the vicinity or Yanhua has been called away to other responsibilities, Lilliana relentlessly treks from one edge of her Northern home to the other. She travels from the imposing cliffs of Nerine towards the eastern border that runs along the River towards the South where Loess and Tephra and the Pampas exist.

    Another day (night?) comes and she finds nothing. Taiga is quiet and Lilliana reminds herself to be grateful for the lull.

    The chestnut mare sighs softly, ready to head towards her grove by the sea and the comforting cadence of the waves. It's only the feeling that something isn't... right that gives her pause. She hears nothing. Her blue eyes glance around the few trees and down the trail that she has just followed. She sees nothing. Lilliana lifts her slender head, uncertain but there is only one way to know if something (or someone) is here: "Hello?"

    Lilliana


    @[Torryn]
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #2
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    He doesn’t return to Taiga often.

    The land of his birth no longer holds the comfort that it once had. He looks back on his childhood and thinks how foolish he had been to wish to be somewhere else, or someone else. A plain boy born to a family of shadows, he had stood out more than he liked. Different eyes, different skin, no abilities — he convinced himself he was a disappointment. It did not matter that he had been born to parents completely and wholly in love with each other; it did not matter that any child born between the two of them would be considered perfect. He watched as his siblings were born, and while he loved them—still loves them—he never could quite shake the sorrow every time one of them displayed a skill for bending shadows and he had nothing.

    What a cruel twist of fate that he would be turned into not just a shadow, but something else entirely.
    He may be made of shadows, but he was not made of the same darkness as his father. There was something malicious to the magic that took root inside of him, something sinister at the core of him that he constantly warred against. Try as he might to seclude himself, there was only so long he could go before the cravings could no longer be ignored.

    He needed them; he needed all of them.
    He needed their sorrow and their anger, their fear and despair.
    That beast inside of him was a greedy, gluttonous thing, and he knew that no matter what he did, it would never be sated. The moment he had realized that had been when the hopelessness truly set in. That realization that this endless starving and insanity was it for the rest of his life.

    From the cloak of darkness and behind the thick of trees he watches her. She is familiar, though he doesn't know her name, or who she is. She is just someone that he has seen growing up in Taiga, and then again on his visits back (he liked to linger on the outskirts, pressing against the shadow curtain Ether often kept wrapped around his family; just close enough to touch their darkness but not actually interrupt it).

    And usually, he is more careful to keep his distance and remain undetected, but today, he slips. He is not sure if it was truly on accident—he did not often make mistakes like that—or if a part of him was hoping she would notice the mass of dark that followed her. She says hello, and her voice is soft, like sunlight, and he almost disappears again. Instead, he steps from around the thick redwood that had been hiding the glow of his red eyes from her, though in this eternal black it is nearly impossible to discern the shape of his shadows from everything else. “Sorry if I disturbed you,” is all he says, his voice a hushed sound in the dark.
    torryn


    @[lilliana]
    Reply
    #3


    They aren't so different, the shadow man and the fire-gold mare.

    Lilliana had been born like him, untraited and ungifted, to a passel of siblings who seemed to range with their abilities as the winds blew in different directions. Her only talent had been a smile that drew out their warmth like sunshine, that eased their conflicts and allowed them to momentarily forget their struggles.

    It had only been in Beqanna that it had all changed (and she remembers joking about it once in Beyond, remembers laughing and saying 'I'm more likely to be struck by lightning to be given a gift.') The Mountain had given her the ability to heal and then the ability to catch the glimpses of the past, to see what memories that others might wish to keep hidden. Lilliana, who preferred to keep her past neatly tucked away, found her own making its way to the minds of others.

    She has spent years with her Echoes now. It's been years since Craft and Anatomy have returned to the Realm of the Living. Lilliana no longer projects her memories like lightning strikes (though certain emotions certainly make her more prone to do so). She holds on to her memories - keeps them close and wrapped around her beating heart - so that they don't overwhelm another. Her father's curse had been his haunted eyes, a sadness that permeated from him because of those he couldn't save when Windskeep finally succumbed to the war.

    For Lilli, it was that same sadness that sometimes a stranger might glimpse. A kind of sorrow that happened when her blue-eyed gaze would linger on the scorched remains of a Sequoia. When she thought of Aela. When she lifted her slender head and stared to the east, towards mountainous Hyaline, and remembered her girlhood. Remembered all those nights laughing and trading secrets with Elena like they had been back in Murmuring Rivers.

    Sometimes, she thinks she would give anything for another night like that.

    She thinks she could endure the Dark with more grace and bearing if there was something bright like their laughter to break it.

    But Elena is nothing more than a memory.

    And Lilliana has a territory to worry for.

    The sensation that someone is nearby - a prickling feeling - becomes her foremost concern. The chestnut mare searches through the obscure shapes of wilting ferns and looming redwoods, waiting to see if whatever is out there will reply. It's the fierce red glow of his ember eyes that attract her attention first as she tries to make some shape of the stranger. He is harder to discern than Wishbone had been but there is something about him that she recognizes. He isn't a monster, that she much she does know (or at least she thinks she knows).

    "No," she says, in an equally hushed voice. The slender mare even gives her refined head a small shake. "I just wasn't expecting anyone," Lilliana explains quietly. This part of the forest normally seems so empty but now she wonders if this was because of the shadow-dwellers, to Leilan's brother and his family. The supposed safest place to be in Beqanna. Her head tilts curiously, momentarily forgoing introductions, "is this your part of the wood?"




    Lilliana



    @[Torryn]
    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply
    #4
    choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
    She is a mess of emotions, so many of them twisting and tangling around each other that it is difficult to discern what they are, or where they came from. He wants to pull on a single thread and follow it, unravel it until he gets to the core — because that is where she keeps it, her sorrow. She keeps it armored away, beneath a shield of softness and light, but he can still smell it. It wouldn’t be hard to coax out of her, he thinks, but he is not here to feed, and so he does not. Not yet, at least.

    She asks if this is his part of the forest, and he shakes his head, noticeable only in the way his gleaming red eyes bob in the dark. “Not anymore,” he says, and somewhere in the smoke of his voice there is a smile. “I was born here. Ether and Briseis are my parents,” he cannot hide the note of longing in his voice, as he looks past her and to the shadowed paths that he is sure would lead him to where his parents still called home, and likely all the new siblings he has never met. Ever since he was returned from hell-like underground tunnels he mostly steered clear of his family; to see them happy and thriving was like a knife twisted between the ribs, to remember the way they had all turned on him in that hellscape. He could not bear the way Briseis looked at him now, with the kind of grief only a mother could know.

    Mostly, he could not bear the way her grief made something inside of him rumble with hunger, and while there were so few that he considered off limits, his family always would be.

    “I haven’t lived here for a very long time, though,” he continues as his eyes are drawn back to hers, noting the bright blue of them. Even cast in shadow they are vibrant, and he finds himself wondering what she looks like in the sun—something that he so rarely thought of or considered. “I’m Torryn.”
    torryn


    @[lilliana]
    Reply
    #5

    She is a tangle of emotion.

    There is a heart that beats in her chest that is wrapped with grief and sorrow and even rage. (Can he sense that? That is the emotion she is most afraid of. The anger that overwhelmed Warden - the Watcher - in Tephra. That cut against Leilan's temper and the pair could have frozen half of Taiga with all the fury that bled out between them.) Those emotions have knotted in her chest and Lilliana has lived so long with them that part of her can't fathom living without them.

    They have been the things that have stayed with her when so many others have left.

    But Taiga stays; the Taiga has always been there for Lilliana.

    Her chestnut head tilts in the darkness, watching the pair of glowing eyes as they tell her that he had been born in these woods. She listens, wondering if he might reveal what Taiga that might have been. Aten or Pteron? When the Comtesse and her Commandant took charge? It doesn't matter, she finally tells herself. Not when he didn't even dwell beneath the Sequoias anymore. But the shadowy creature reveals his parents (Ether, whom she knows as a relation to the Freyr) and whatever distracted expression might have been on her face softens. The longing in his voice resonates within her. How often has she wished that she could see her own family?

    To see her father again? To be reunited with Elena?

    Lilliana can't imagine that he would come to Taiga - to the place that he was born - and not seek his family. "Do you visit often?" she asks the shadow. Her head lifts and turns towards the cloaked stallion, the barest hint of a smile hidden from the light. She's done enough patrols of these woods to know most of its inhabitants (with @[Torryn]'s family being the exception, there is only the awareness that they are there; rumors that have passed from horse-to-horse since she has been here). He's rather fantastical and she is certain that if she had come across him before, there would be no forgetting him.

    "Well, welcome back to Taiga," it's Guardian says. Her blue eyes meet his with only a glimmer of curiosity sparkling there. "I'm Lilliana."

    but it's all in the past, love
    it's all gone with the wind
    Reply




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