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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


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    [open]  i trust my life to ghosts, any
    #1
    she looks like sleep to the freezing
    This, the natural progression of things.
    She could not have survived in the heat of Tephra. No, she is made for and of winter; she belongs here in this land of snow and ice.
     
    She does not (cannot) say goodbye to the sisters she leaves behind. As much as it pains her to abandon them, she cannot risk returning to Tephra to do so. So, she only hopes that they know that she loves them and begins her journey from the dark, cold heart of the forest. Even in autumn, she leaves a trail of snow in her wake as she travels. 
     
    For days she travels, through Taiga and Nerine. Up to the coast, where she calls upon the cold to freeze the stretch of water separating the Isle from the mainland so that she can cross. But there must be some mistake because the stretch of beach here is barren, black and bare. There is no ice here, no snow. She glances over her shoulder at the rapidly melting ice behind her, watching as it dissolves into the sea. 
     
    Had she somehow gone astray? Where could she have strayed off course? Is this not the northernmost land? Snow collects around her, as it is wont to do, even without her having to call upon it but this is snow that belongs to her alone and has nothing to do with the landscape itself. 
     
    She resolves to rest here awhile before she returns to the mainland and tries to figure out where she made the wrong turn that led her to this strange land that she had thought would be the Isle but cannot possibly be. 
     
    camellia
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    #2

    (and it's harder than you think)
    telling dreams from one another

    The cold no longer bites against him as it once did.

    Winter here is still the harshest that he has known (though the only other ones he has known had been in rocky and hazy Taiga). But after years on the Isle, Nashua knows where the best spots to seek shelter are, where to weather out the blizzards. He knows what corner of this frigid land is the first to welcome spring and where winter will continue to cling.

    He moves to the Southern fringes of his kingdom, a point that makes the travel to Nerine or Taiga easier, and it is where he stays in favor of more tolerable weather.

    She is not the first visitor to his Isle, but each arrival always seems to surprise him. Some could be attributed to Ciri, who seemed to bring another back for each trip she took the mainland. Some came seeking the former Freyr, Leilan (a dragon and a Magician), and some seemed to be seeking the isolation of their small island. This newcomer glints in the sun, an iridescence that reminds Nash of the fresh ice that forms each winter.

    His green eyes glance to the path of new-fallen snow behind her and where it settles around her, like a frozen pedestal.

    "I've never seen Winter come this way," the pegasus says, stopping a respectable distance from her. His mother's kin had been full of stories - about stormmakers and windwalkers, about stars made mortal and Gods who walked amongst dreamers - and so while he half-smiles, it isn't hard for him to believe that she might be a blizzard given flesh. "Nashua," he introduces himself (and leaves enough of a space for her own name) before asking: "What brings you to these shores?"


    NASHUA


    @camellia i know this is from a million years ago but i wanted to get something up <3
    [Image: jCdBK6.png]
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    #3
    camellia
    She is never truly alone.
    There is the wind and the ice and the snow.
    The storm that she calls to rest on her shoulders, the storm that bends around her, kisses her softly while it ravages the landscape around her.
     
    There is no storm now, though. Only the snow that collects at her feet, slow and lazy like a dream. It melts faster than it can accumulate, which makes her feel as if it is endless and all the more beautiful for it.
     
    But she loses track of how much time passes with only the snow as her companion. Hours? Days? It’s hard to tell. Not that it matters much, she reasons, because she will be gone soon enough. Or so she thinks.
     
    She spots the pegasus from some great distance because he is the only thing that moves. And she waits, the snow still falling slow around her, collecting in the tangles of her mane, the ice-kissed ropes of her tail. 
     
    He does not greet her as a threat so she does not react like one. Instead, she calls off the snow, so it is simply the two of them there on the beach. And the smile is cold, if only because she is a thing carved from ice, when she nods. But she does not speak until he offers his name and she responds in kind, “Camellia.” 
     
    At his question, she turns her gaze down the beach and lets loose a soft breath that twists out of her mouth like vapor. “I had hoped to make Icicle Isle my home,” she explains, “but I fear I must have made a wrong turn someplace.” 
     
    She shifts her focus back to the pegasus, shackling the glacial blue stare to his face when she says, “I hope you don’t mind my resting here until I have the energy to make the journey back.” 
     
     



    @Nashua
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    #4

    (and it's harder than you think)
    telling dreams from one another

    Nashua is used to the cold, so it is familiar when he sees it in the aloof smile of this stranger.

    It doesn't bother the Freyr, and settling his speckled wings, his green eyes glance momentarily to the smoke that comes dancing in silver wisps from her nostrils. The sight wouldn't be an uncommon one during the colder parts of the year (or further North, beyond the heart-shaped lake); but while the warmth of summer still lingers on the Isle, the pegasus finds himself surprised to see the chill of winter here.

    "You've found it," says the striped stallion, glancing back at the rugged terrain behind him. Mountains shield this part of the kingdom from the worst weather, and it keeps the snow that remains almost year-round to one side. It also kept the ice wraiths - particularly nasty creatures that could shift into whatever fear could shape it as - on their own side of the realm. On the other side of the range, though, was frigid tundra and a barren wilderness that very few (of the already few that chose to live on the Isle) braved. "Though the other side of the Isle is much different from this one."

    "There is no further point North after this, I'm afraid." He tells her, in case she meant to keep wandering past the arctic outpost. She would only find the edge of the world if she kept going (though some part of him still thrills at that thought; before he became a King, he had wanted to find it). "Please, take all the time you need to rest." Nash says, spreading one wing out away from the shore and towards the shadows of a few clustered pines, if she desired shade.

    "We very rarely have visitors," Nashua admits, half-joking. They had some, but most that came had ties to his family or the North itself. His green eyes glance at the glowing cracks of her coat again, and wonders if she might be in the mood for company. There is nothing for him these days but worry, and he would rather keep it waiting.

    @camellia

    NASHUA
    [Image: jCdBK6.png]
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    #5
    camellia
    She makes no effort to hide the surprise that flickers across her face. 
    This is the Isle?
     
    She turns her face from him then and studies the beach as it stretches toward the horizon. Barren. The only snow that exists here is the snow she has brought with her, the snow that collects along her spine and melts at her feet. The only ice that exists is her skin. 
     
    There is hope yet.
     
    And she shifts her cool focus back to him, Nashua, when he speaks again. The other side of the Isle, is that where she will find her beloved winter? Is that where the ice beckons? She nods her understanding but does not ask the questions that immediately come to mind.
     
    Instead, she glances at all the bare, open space that yawns outward away from them and asks, “what happened to it?
     
    The landscape, the ice, everything she had come to find.
     
    He invites her to stay but she does not react. (Had she expected those in the North to be so welcoming? How could she have known to expect anything at all? She had not grown up with stories. No, she had grown up chasing the cold. She had left Tephra as early as she could to escape the oppressive heat there. She had returned only briefly to visit with her sisters, only to steal away again just as quickly as she had come.)
     
    It’s almost as if she has not heard him at all.
    (And maybe she hasn’t, distracted as she is by the way she mourns for the winter that must have existed here on this beach sometime ago. It could not have always looked like this. And the thought of snow melting, of ice shrinking, it bruises her heart far worse than anything else ever could.)
     
    Finally, she draws her attention back to him and exhales another wintry sigh. “No, I suspect not,” she says and tilts her head, the cracks in the ice growing the same glacial blue as her eyes when she studies him. “Not everyone is built for the cold.
     
     
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    #6

    (and it's harder than you think)
    telling dreams from one another

    The storm that graces the Northen island looks around, and appears mildly surprised at what she sees. His pale mouth twitches, tempting to quirk into a lopsided smile. Nashua wonders what she makes of this place, but then refrains from asking, thinking it might be an impolite and perhaps prying question when they have only just met.

    "Spring, and then summer." The Freyr explains. The warmer months that thawed Beqanna reached even here, though the heat here was much milder than the mainland. And the sea surrounding them helped keep the land cool, with breezes whipping up from the churning waves. Turning his head again, the pegasus glances at the few mountains in the distance, where Camellia's attention seems to be resting.

    "It's colder over the range," he tells her, having recently flown over that way, "in fact, most of it is still frozen over." When he glances at the pale woman again - with her softly falling snow and ice-like sheen of her cracked skin - Nashua thinks she might be most at home there.

    She sighs, and Nashua can feel winter chilling across his copper skin as it goes past him.

    "No," Nash agrees and settles his speckled wings against his sides, as if already drawing warmth for the coming season. "If I may be so bold," he goes on to say, "you seem rather well suited for it."

    @camellia

    NASHUA
    [Image: jCdBK6.png]
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    #7
    camellia
    Spring (and she thinks of Silene) and then summer (and she thinks of Aestas and he makes no mention of fall, but she thinks of Lyali still). 

    Of course she understands the passing of seasons, she and her sisters had each been crafted to represent each one, but she’d been led to believe that the Isle knew only perpetual winter. She does not speak, only considers the mountains and then what he says lies beyond them. There she will find her perpetual winter and she takes some small comfort in knowing that it is there, that she is close.

    She shifts her weight and shifts her focus back to his face, the corners of her mouth tilting upward in a cool smile at his appraisal. “I was not always so well-suited,” she tells him, remembering the earliest days of her childhood when she could still rest comfortably in Tephra. The days when she had chased the cold simply for the thrill of it, when her travels to the common lands had nothing to do with survival.

    But my soul has only ever been winter,” she continues, “and the body has ways of adapting.” As she’s certain he must know by now, a thing like him living in perpetual cold. He must have his own ways of dealing with it. 

    What drew you to the cold?” she asks, never shifting her glacial stare from his face.  
     
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    #8

    (and it's harder than you think)
    telling dreams from one another

    He finds his own smile lifting in response to her cool one.

    Nashua doesn't know her heritage. The language of her name is foreign to him, and he wonders briefly it means something to do with the chill of winter. His pale brow arches when Camellia mentions that she was not always suited to the cold. That her soul has always been winter, and eventually, her body had come to reflect that.

    (His would be a storm. Nash has the Wind his soul, and the striped pegasus takes a moment to wonder how he would appear if it reflected that. Would the troubling gales of his life blow away the warm summer green of his eyes, take the shining gold from coat?)

    "Loyalty," Nash tells her simply, with a Northerner's bluntness. "The man who raised me once ruled this place and I could think of no better way to repay that favor than to look after his kingdom as he had looked after me." He partially opens his wings, feeling a gust come rushing from the coast. It was lovely weather for flying and he glanced up into the vivid blue sky, already imagining himself in the clouds.

    But - thanks to Leilan and the portals he sometimes left behind - Nashua knew another way to travel further North.

    "Would you like to see more of it?" the pegasus asks the pale mare, angling his body towards the mountains that she had been studying before.


    @camellia

    NASHUA
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    #9
    camellia
    He smiles at her and says loyalty and she understands on some level.

    (Is it not loyalty that has driven her north? Loyalty to the storm, the snow, the cold. The ice. She had pledged her allegiance to winter even before she’d taken her first breath. Their mother had carefully crafted each daughter to represent the seasons and she, the fourth daughter, had taken winter into her soul in the womb. And she would remain loyal.)

    She shifts her weight and nods. She wonders if he’s died, this father figure, but she does not ask. It’s none of her business and she’s uncertain if it matters at all.

    The pegasus standing before her is the commander of the north, she understands, and this is all that matters. 

    (How strange it is that someone not built for the cold would come to call it his.)

    She draws in a long breath and glances back at him at his question, pulling the glacial stare from the mountains and shackling it to his face again.

    Yes,” she says, plainly. She is not demure, Camellia, she does not grin and ask him if he wouldn’t mind showing her more of his home. It is blunt. She belongs to the cold, the winter, and she wants to see the part of the Isle that might nurture her cold, cold heart.

    Had she more energy, she could have brought the snow to herself. She could have blanketed this stretch of beach in ice, but she is tired. The snow continues to fall on her back, but only to protect the ice from the sun beating on them from overhead. 

    Lead the way,” she says and then, perhaps remembering her manners, smiles again. 
     


    @Nashua
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    #10

    (and it's harder than you think)
    telling dreams from one another

    Nashua has no loyalty to the cold. (And if the legends were true, Winter itself had once been the enemy of his bloodline. His ancestors had been born golden and blue-eyed like his mother, like his brother Yanhua. Descendants of the Summer line. He had been born strange, green-eyed and striped. Even his pale grandmother had remarked how different he had been from them.)

    But he owes a great deal to Leilan. And the former Freyr had given much of himself to the Isle. Nash has spent his life trying to repay that debt, to keep the kingdom the Dragon Mage entrusted him with safe and protected.

    It doesn't take him long to find it; one of the portals swirls in a frozen mist before them. The obsidian pebbles beneath his hooves roll away from him and the striped pegasus glanced behind him to see if the pale mare was still following. What did she make of the strange magic before them? Would she balk at it, or would something of Leilan's abilities appeal to her own wintery ones?

    His speckled wings itch for flight, but a smile quirks on his pale mouth instead as Nash glances back to his companion.

    "Through here," he says, and hopes that the Dragon Magic doesn't take him to Silver Cove again. Nash steps into it, and the silver haze gives way to a world of white. Snow coats everything and while the rest of Beqanna basks in summer, the pegasus shivers against the brisk breeze that blows past him. Stepping out into the pale sunlight, Nash stretches his broad wings out in greeting while waiting for Camellia.



    @camellia

    NASHUA
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