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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


    a full force;
    #1
    kor
    Early morning, a chill in the air.
    It’s drizzling, but Kor doesn’t mind. He’s used to being cold and damp, remnants from his life Before in the mountains — memories he can’t quite shake. He and his sister playing in the rain, seeing who can make the biggest splash; his mother and the children huddling close for warmth, fuzzy coats soaked: a chill to the bone. Watching his father pace as a mountain lion, ready to protect his family as they slept, as Kor was supposed to be sleeping.
    With a blink, the memories are gone, pushed back into the depths of his brain where he carefully stores his hurt. He swallows the catch in his throat and presses on.
    He can see almost everything from his place on a small mountain. The plants are blooming — greens and reds and even purples — and he can faintly make out a lake, his view blocked by another cliffside. Kor had been in Beqanna for months now, laying low and watching (one of the many lessons of Before, taught to him by his father), and had heard of the kingdom of shifters, Hyaline. It wasn’t his family, but it could at least be a home.
    He takes his first step onto the grass, soft under his feet. He sees others in the distance, and though he doesn’t know the protocol — does he wait to be invited? would they even notice if he’d joined them? as if they wouldn’t see the bright red boy immediately — he’s too nervous to approach them and ask. He isn’t even sure if his voice would work at this point; he hasn’t spoken to a soul since stumbling upon Beqanna.
    So, instead, he walks (seemingly) coolly to the nearest river, an offshoot of the large lake in the center. He takes a sip, stalling, and then pauses, looking up to the sky. The rain has stopped.
    those eyes, caught by surprise
    if i look again, oh, what’s gonna happen then?
    #2

    s a b a l . 



    She’d been watching the rain too, but from and entirely different perspective.  It’s one of those little quirks of living part of one’s life underwater, when it rains it makes the most extraordinary patterns on the surface of the water when the light hits it just right.  Its one of the few things that gives Sabal any sense of peace in recent days. 

    She watches him carefully from quite a distance, taking a quick look before slipping back below the water. At first the brindling had sent a shiver up her spine, immediately filling with images of another brindled stallion – but after only a few moments she felt fairly confident in her assessment that this stallion was not a threat, at least not a grave threat in the way that the stallion she was thinking of was. She should have been put at ease just by his coloring, but Sabal’s trust in just about anything had been all but shattered in the past few weeks.  She didn’t like this feeling of paranoia that had settled in her gut – but that paranoia was what was going to keep her family safe.

    She doesn’t break the surface until she is reasonably close to the shore, but allows him some distance so he isn’t too alarmed by, well, her presence.  She draws into the shallows near enough to converse.

    “You’re new,” she said, plainly aware that she was stating the obvious. She moves closer to the edge of the river, but makes no effort to leave the water just yet.  No, she’s in the element in the water. “Have you come to join us or come to make trouble?” she asked, pleasantly, with a flick of her long tail.  However, depending on his answer, he would either get a tour of the kingdom or a tour of the bottom of the lake.  Sabal wasn’t picky and would be happy with either option.


    can’t stop staring at those ocean eyes.
    manip by squirt


    @[kor]
    #3
    kor
    He has to admit, in all of his preparation to interact with others for the first time in months, he wasn’t prepared to be welcomed by a fish-horse. Bears, lions, dragons even, but somehow he’s caught off guard by a fish. He’s still staring up at the sky when he hears the movement of the water — that alone isn’t enough to startle him — but when she speaks and he brings his eyes to hers, he jumps in place, surprised, and coughs in a weak attempt to cover it up. She’s tried her best to be respectful, to give him space and still, Kor looks as though he had never seen any kind of animal in a body of water before.

    “Sorry,” he says, laughing nervously, “I am new, how’d you guess?”
    He takes a few steps off the shore into the water, wading closer to the teal and white mare. She’s beautiful, which only makes him want to shrivel up and disappear even more than he wanted to already, but instead he looks into her eyes, doing his best to feign confidence.
    “I try my best to stay out of trouble,” he pauses, and then, traveling deeper into the water, “but I’m not always successful.”
    He’s immediately distracted, searching his mind for a water animal that he could shift into (to show off, naturally, in a very subtle way). His family had all been shifters, though they largely stuck to big cats and other predators. Kor had been different from them, though, not quite able to replicate the natural animals of his family — instead, he would end up as a monstrous lion with impenetrable fur or a giant, three-headed dog.
    Lacking the words to will himself into a hippocampus, he pictures himself as the mare is — a sea horse — and becomes it: his head and neck normal, though now gilled, his back legs now a finned tail, his front hooves now webbed paws.
    He dips his head underwater for a moment before surfacing with a grin, awfully proud of himself, and explains: “I’ve never met a fish before; it looked nice.”
    those eyes, caught by surprise
    if i look again, oh, what’s gonna happen then?




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