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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]  i am torn apart by you
    #1

    come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you

    She dives into the ocean like it will wash away this pain inside her chest, and it roils in greeting as though the water had missed the shape of her. As though it had been expecting her. At first she does not realize where it is her thoughts have led her, that the volcanic shore she had stood on led only to one place and that this place is a jagged piece of stone inside her chest that has never let her stop bleeding. But as soon as the dark ocean tide carries her far enough to make out the distant shores of Ischia, she knows. She knows from the way her heart leaps and breaks like waves thrown against a wall of dark stone. She knows because the salt on her face is tears instead of ocean water, and she can taste this sorrow on her tongue.

    This place might have become home if not for whoever had stolen that night from her and Dovev - because it hadn’t been just memories taken. It had been a version of a life she would never know, a love she had never deserved but found anyway.

    This is more than love, isn’t it.

    The memory is like a knife thrown at her chest, his voice as clear in her mind now as it had ever been. She can even remember the way it had felt when he bent to kiss her neck and the words had whispered across her skin like a promise.

    I love you, Luster.

    The urge to sink quietly beneath the waves is almost more than she can bear to ignore. Maybe there is bliss in the dark silence below. Maybe this pain won’t find her in the next life.

    I’m going to make damn sure you never fucking forget it.

    She falters, and in an instant she is beneath the waves and in a place so dark that not even the sun can reach. It might be startling if this weren’t already a familiar kind of hell.

    It would be so easy to sink, she thinks, so easy to stop fighting these hands wrapped so tight around her neck. But there is more than just her now, there is life inside her belly and it grows stubbornly every day as though it does not realize that she is a wasteland. There is nothing good that could possibly come from this, and yet she cannot smother that tiny flicker of hope that kernels like a seed inside her chest. This feeling of love rekindled inside a chest made of stone and built like a fortress. Did she even know how to be a mother still? Could she do this again?

    She is swimming again, and she doesn’t remember when it was she made the effort not to drown, but she knows she must have because there are stars overhead and shore beneath her feet and she is looking out at a world aglow with the bioluminesce she had once found so beautiful. It just reminds her of him now, of the celestial blue marking he’d had at the corner of his mouth. The same markings she now has beneath each eye like carved blue trails of shining sorrow.

    She swallows and blinks, feels dead inside and yet somehow wild. Like she is coming apart and coming undone and there is no one to help hold her together. Fenris would have, she thinks, which is why she cannot be with him, why she is drowning herself in a night-dark ocean just to put this distance between them. To keep him safe from the storm inside her chest. From the way she has ruined everything that has ever had the chance to mean something to her. She will protect him in this way that no one ever protected her.

    The way is a familiar path beneath her feet, though it is overgrown and well-forgotten in a way that makes her glad. This place should belong to no one. She finds the small river that feeds inland from the ocean, finds the place where he had rinsed the wounds his bone armor left behind. The same place she had been brave enough to finally leave a kiss on that marking at the corner of his mouth. Her eyes stay riveted there for a moment, forced flat and empty because she already knows what it is that lingers in the dark a few feet away. Can already feel the way its presence wounds her.

    But she lifts her gaze anyway, tracing the greenery that hangs in flowering vines over the mouth of a cave that had witnessed every moment of their togetherness. Home, or at least it might have been. She steps inside and closes her eyes against the way the vines whisper over her back and swollen sides. Would he be furious to know she came here in foal to someone else? Yes, likely. It’s good then, that he’s gone.

    But the memory of him is like a ghost at her side, and if she were to close her eyes she knows that whatever this new magic is living inside her would take her back to that place, that time again. It’s why she’s here at all, why these memories are being dredged up from the muck of her past. And it’s so tempting to let go, so tempting to give in, so tempting to be anyone other than this broken husk.

    Her pain is a fury that explodes from her, it is lightning in the sky outside, lightning crackling along the stone walls of the cave she stands inside. She screams, and though the sound is at first fury it fades to something that is so much more like agony. Like falling apart and coming undone. “I don’t want this.” She says, or maybe she’s yelling, but the thunder outside matches the racing of the heart booming inside her chest. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.” It isn't until she notices the way her stars have filled every dark nook and crevice in this shallow chamber that the storm eases at all. The lightning lessens, though the thunder still matches the beat inside her chest, and rain falls in earnest like the tears on her face. 

    Luster
         i can't help but love you
    even though i try not to



    @[Beyza]
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    #2

    The storm that draws Beyza out of sleep feels different than the few that she and her family have weathered so far on the island. For the most part, the weather has been pleasant - warmer than their used to but that is something easily mitigated by magic or a swim and it has not yet bothered them enough.

    Now, though, there is an electricity in the air that goes beyond what she’s come to expect from nature. The way there is lightning streaking across the sky where there had been stars just moments ago. She makes sure her daughters are sheltered before she moves to investigate. Although part of her wonders whether this place is finally revealing a threat, something that contradicts the paradise they’ve been enjoying, she is mostly just curious. It is not shadows or death on the air, not the signs that Jamie has come to take what is rightfully his.

    So Beyza is not worried as the lightning draws her in, closer to the cave where it seems to be radiating from. Electricity sparks across her coat when she is angry but it does not belong to her. It is a harmless manifestation of storming thoughts.

    Nothing like this.

    She is not worried until she hears a scream, something so utterly primal in its agony - that single sound holding more emotion than Beyza has ever felt in her life. More than she has ever allowed herself to feel since she first suspected she was only an echo of a girl, of life. Although she does not mind the rain, Beyza bends it around her body and it splatters against an invisible shield around her as she approaches the cave. Her white eyes widen to see the lightning within it but she is still drawn in. Still pulled by curiosity to find out who is inside.

    The storm has eased by the time she enters, and she feels the echo of the words in the air like they are visible. She’s not sure if she so much heard them or just had them imprinted on her mind. There is a surprised noise that comes out of her when she recognizes the mare - remembers a conversation with her and a dragon.

    “You don’t have to feel like this.” Beyza tells her in a soft voice, a contradiction to the storm as she projects the shield around her to cover this mare. If only to give her a small respite, she doubts this near-stranger really needs to be protected from the storm Beyza suspects she’s created.

    And then, unsure if she’ll be remembered, she continues with a kind voice - attempting to prompt a memory of a pale filly who had said something similar “You’re as pretty as I remember."

    B E Y Z A

    artwork by musonart


    @[luster]
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