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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


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    [private]  I'm just warming up
    #11
    Sickle has been no stranger to fire - first the lava rivers of her home, the blue flames of her companion, and now the occasional flare up from where she knows Fyr practices his skills. This seemed different, though, and the roaring and loud noises didn’t help. She hasn’t felt afraid often in the Pampas, just homesick, but she feels it now as she wakes with a start from her nap beneath the wildflowers. She shifts into a dragonfly to scope things out, flying up enough to see a griffin facing off with Aela, and then ducking (forgetting what shape she is in) when a second griffin flies in to fight the now-dragon while the wildflowers and grasses around them burn.

    Her eyes are wide when she returns to the shape of a fox, trembling next to her companion. She was supposed to stay out of sight when strangers came around, just in case any of them were her dad. And the angry noises definitely sound like something that might happen while her dad is around.

    She hears her name being bellowed in a female voice that she recognizes but can’t place. She doesn’t think it’s Wishbone, but she’s never heard her mom yell like that. And just as she’s wondering this, Aela calls out for her.

    Hope so easily wins over caution.

    Sickle’s fox-head pops out among the sea of wildflowers and flickers between that shape and a half dozen others with her nerves. She takes flight as a dark blue phoenix while her companion sticks close, and together the pair approach.

    It doesn’t take long to figure out something is wrong. “That’s not my mom.” Sickle’s disappointment is obvious and she flinches away from how the white dragon hisses at these words. She recognizes the colouring as the mare who had fought with her dad in Hyaline, but that only confuses her more. This was a friend of her mom but nothing about the aggravation makes her think this shifter is an ally anymore.

    Though she is also a little afraid of Aela, her blue-and-orange gaze gravitates to the palomino, desperate for answers, and she sticks close to her while hovering in the air - orange fire and deep black bleeding into the dark blue flames of her feathers as it reflects the inferno and charred land around them.
    SICKLE


    @Skandar
    #12
    It is all a tangle of claws and feathers, pulling at skin almost blindly in attempts to rip the other open. Skandar is not an experienced warrior when it came to his skin-walking, clumsy and brutish in his attacks and defenses. The gryffen is a difficult shape to keep during such a scene and there are moments when his skin flickers cautiously as if his flesh could not hold the shape without his intense concentration. It’s almost a blessing that the white beast changes shape, giving him the opportunity to give in to the trembling of his skin. He cannot keep the previous shape as well and when a dragon bores down upon him (though he has never seen one, so there is a genuine surprise in the stallion’s fierce orange gaze), he gives in to instincts.

    His wings attempt to drop the feathers, becoming leathery and sharp while scales shiver across his muscled body - scales were easy for Skandar, a practice that he has done quite a few times - and they click over him in a myriad of indigo, violet, and orange. He roars upon collision with the other, jaws snapping and clawed fingers gripping at her forelegs and chest, attempting to keep her a distance away from him as well as in hopes to find purchase with the fangs that have now replaced his once sharp beak.

    Despite his inexperience with such fantastical shapes, Skandar holds his ground. The other makes a little movement towards Aela, using the power he mimics from Mazikeen to keep her at bay. He is weakening, however, already his scales fading in and out - which is where her claws slice brutally, unprotected by the armored scales that continue to waver across his skin, disappearing and reappearing. Skandar doesn’t know to reach for the soft underbelly but instead uses the weight of his heavy wings to flap clumsily at her face in their battle, despite the way her teeth will easily shred through the supple skin in between the bones.

    He is losing, his mind unable to reshape the pieces of the dragon he attempts to copy. He begins to fall back into stallion subtly - his dragon’s scales only plate his sharp reptilian face and shoulders - and his ombre mane begins to fall across the slender slope of his snake-like neck, replacing the horns that had once sprouted dangerously from it. The other is nearly on top of him as she sets her gaze back to Aela - he is not her main focus, merely a distraction - her claws digging deep into the unscaled parts of his skin. He roars in pain and frustration, snapping at her neck that is just above him.

    Everything is burning - the grasses around them, each part of Skandar’s body that had been spliced by the shapeshifter he fights - and so he focuses on something he doesn’t have to mimic; he reaches for his own power, fed through his own flame, arising in the irises of the dragon that is slowly changing back into a stallion. It hums and buzzes, a sinister and foreign sound amongst the sound of raging fire and screams, nearly inaudible as her demand vibrates through the smoke-filled air.

    The girl, Sickle, comes when Aela calls her. Skandar does not turn his gaze from the dragon that holds him down, even when her attention is fixated on both Aela and her supposed daughter.

    Glowing a vibrant red, his gaze sweeps over her dragon’s wings, hoping to cut them straight from where they sprout from her shoulders as her clawed talons grip tighter and tighter into his throat. If his lasers were to hit anything else (her chest, throat, forelegs) - it would only sear the tough dragon scales - he would need to repeat the cut over and over in order to deepen the wound. But perhaps at the first sign of his quite literal burning gaze, the dragon would leap from his chest. If he misses,  he would only be adding to the fire that burns with rage around them. Maybe then he will set his sights on the phoenix instead.

    skandar

    i want to be the bullet
    that brings you to your knees



    @Aela
    @Mazikeen
    #13
    mazikeen
    For a few short moments, Mazikeen loses herself in the tangled fight with the other shifter. She welcomes the pain of his fangs sinking into her scaled skin and the way it sharpens her focus. The noise she makes when her claws dig into his skin is somewhere between a purr and a growl - the act of fighting now hopelessly tangled up with other desires for this beast that does not deserve or want anything different.

    But it is not just the two of them here and Mazikeen’s attention snaps away when Aela calls out for Sickle. And the stupid girl comes over, just like that. She is a phoenix of flickering colours, trailed by another of vibrant blue. Mazikeen’s talons grip tighter on the throat in her grasp but it is more reflex than an attack when she hears Sickle say that she is not her mother.

    Before she can say anything on the matter beyond a growl, a sharp searing pain brings her back to the creature beneath her and the lasers bite into the joint of her wing. She twists away, abandoning her hold on him and a line of his gaze sears across the dragon scales of her throat and chest as she protects that more delicate limb. Those wings were needed to get out of here, she couldn’t allow them to be removed.

    Exhaustion continues to bleed through her mind but she is so close to achieving her goal she pushes herself through these last few moments. Every beat of her wing is agony and it keeps her rooted in the present as she rises - growing more now until she is as large as she can manage. Lost in that mess of her own mind, she loses the ability to speak again. Her red-orange eyes are only on Sickle and with a final, terrific roar she launches herself over the unknown opponent, over Aela, and snatches the terrified phoenix-girl in her claws.

    The second, the girl’s companion, attempts to bite at Mazikeen’s tight grip but cannot touch another so he is forced to trail behind as the dragon takes its leave. It has what it has come for, and it is already forgetting the now insignificant figures left behind in the seared patch of earth below.





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