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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]  never let me go
    #1
    The first thing her mother said was this: the world is waiting.
    So the first promise the tree-daughter ever made was this: she would not keep it waiting long.

    It had taken only days for her to understand what it meant to want to swallow the world whole. (Was she wrong to think that the world could belong to her, though? Children are fools, certainly, but was it so outlandish to think that she could not take a piece from every part of it and make it her own? Perhaps the nymphs are the greatest fools of us all.)

    And it had taken only weeks for her to strike out on her own. (Almost certainly bolstered by her mother’s magic because a journey to the Playground from Tephra is too great a journey for a child of only a few weeks.) But she goes and she does not stop to consider consequences. She goes and she does not tire. She goes and she thinks this is what it means to swallow the world whole. 

    She arrives at the Playground and she thinks herself a faerie, light-hearted and gleaming in the sunlight. Such rapturous laughter as she dips her nose to kiss each flower, faces upturned. (Too young to know that it is her they turn their faces up to, not the sun. She is their sun, this stark white child in the middle of all this green. She does not yet know that she is magic.)

    i cannot frown underneath
    fractured moonlight on the sea
    crania
    Reply
    #2
    drakon—

    Drakon’s mother taught him similar things, if not so gentle. She taught him the storms that he had swallowed and kept hidden in his belly. She taught him the fire that raced along his veins—the heat that was just barely trapped. She taught him the beginning and the end. The fury and the feast. She taught him how to sink his teeth into the meat of life and not let go until it had stopped thrashing.

    She taught him hunger.

    It’s that barely restrained hunger that urges him on today—away from his mother and his sister and his father. Away and to the Playground where children gather, gentle and kind and curious. He, too, is a child beneath it all, but his brand of childhood is not the same. There’s a maturity to the summer heat within him and he only barely restrains it, his body crackling and crumbling beneath the pressure of it.

    And, immediately, he sees her. An oasis amongst the rest—a summer breeze to race along his summer storm—and he is both repelled and fascinated. Pupiless eyes watch her for a moment too long, the flames flaring along his childish back. He doesn’t understand the emotions that beat in his breast. The possessive need that blooms under his attention and so he doesn’t know fully how to control it. Just yield.

    So he walks toward her, the air warming in his presence, the small flames flickering as they follow. When he is near enough, he thinks to open his mouth and say something, but the words leave him.

    And he’s left standing there, glowering, exposed, and without a word to say in greeting.

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    #3
    It is the heat.
    (She mistakes it for her mother, because it had always been so warm in Tephra. When they had emerged -- for they had emerged, she had not been born the way the rest of them had been born -- it had been to a place so humid she had struggled to breathe at first. But this is not her mother.)

    The flowers reach for her, but the flowers were not made for this heat. The kind of heat that warps the air and they wilt, despite how fiercely they want to reach for her. (She does not know that she is magic, she cannot call them back to her.)

    It is such a strange ache that pulses through her for this is her first taste of loss. She lifts her head, her brow dark with confusion, and turns her focus to the source of the heat. And she is so surprised to find a child standing there that she forgets her grief. (Gone, just like that. But she will not always forget it this easily. No, she will not always be a child.)

    Oh,” she says and she smiles, her mouth golden. Gleaming. (It does not occur to her that there is something about him unnatural. It does not occur to her that perhaps she should be frightened by the way the skin cracks and chars.) “Hello,” she says and tilts her head, so impossibly white compared to his.

    Unperturbed by the way he looks at her, she takes a step toward him. “Does it hurt terribly?” she asks, quietly.

    i cannot frown underneath
    Fractured moonlight on the sea
    crania
    Reply
    #4
    drakon—

    Drakon notices the way that the flowers wilt but does not feel loss or sadness. He tilts his charred head to the side, inquisitive and curious, but feels it settle like truth. This was the way it was always meant to be. The flowers would curl under his presence. They would flatten beneath his hoof. He could move the earth beneath them, but he was not designed to bring spring to them. He could not make them bloom.

    He was not made for the soft, sweet things.

    He was not made for things like her.

    But he remains because his heart is a starving thing and he must feed it. He presses new experiences into his flesh like a promise and soaks them up, even when they are ill-fitting. Even when he brings death to the things around it. His pupiless eyes remain open and unblinking, staring at her across the short expanse and barely looking away toward the plants that succumb to his heat, to the humidity he brings with him.

    “Hello,” he repeats back in his boyish voice, a gentle rainfall to the thunder it would later become.

    When she steps toward him, the stars in his mane rise up in response, floating in the air around him as though a summer evening had descended upon them. “Everyone asks that,” he muses, glancing down to his legs and that of himself that he can see—the skin crackling and peeling apart. “I wasn’t always this way,” he admits, but his memory of the time before is thin and cloudy. “But I don’t remember it.”

    A pause and then a shrug, the motion childish on him.

    “It doesn’t hurt though.”

    A frown.

    “At least I don’t think it does. What does hurt feel like?”



    @[crania]
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    #5
    The voice is not what she had expected it might be.
    She had anticipated smoke, charcoal. Ash, maybe. The charred remains of something that had once been but no longer was.

    She smiles at the sound of it. She cannot help herself. (Will she always react this way to surprise? Like a reflex. Will it always delight her?) She smiles and she moves closer still. Not because he is a thing to be examined, a specimen meant to be studied, but because perhaps she might find in him a friend. Though he is looking at her in such an unsettling way. Though the heat of him is gathering sweat along her flank and the flowers that had reached for her have wilted in his presence. 

    At first she thinks the stars are sparks, but they wink as they ascend and she sees that they are not flames at all and she wonders how she might have convinced the night to lean down and kiss him in such a way. She feels foolish for asking the same thing that everyone else has asked, she feels simple for being the same as everyone else and her nose wrinkles with distaste. She wants to assure him that she is not the same, that there is so much about her that is different, that she was born from the root of a tree, that she crawled her way out. But she doesn’t because that would make her a fool, wouldn’t it? 

    What happened?” she asks and tilts her head, wondering if it would burn should she reach out and touch him. “Do you remember what happened to make you like this?

    But she is only a child, just as he is a child.
    How does she explain what it is to hurt?
    Something that she only knows inherently.

    Hurt feels like… your body is crying.” She, too, shrugs. “Sometimes it feels like you couldn’t possibly survive.


    i cannot frown underneath
    Fractured moonlight on the sea
    crania



    @[drakon]
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