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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


    Waste my time pushing daisies
    #1

    And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love

    Eyas did what she knew best: leaving Ehko and the others behind on Icicle Isle, flying away. Traveling through the winter tempests, back south but not back home. She didn’t think she’d ever go there again in her lifetime. When the day passed over into night she guided herself by the stars, soaring along the lion’s mane and floating past the bull’s thundering hooves. It was peaceful, cold. She thought about her final duty to a beloved daughter, hoping the girl would be alright on her own. Ehko knew what she had to do. She knew how to fly, a little. That was the best Eyas could provide for her now.

    They both had unfinished business that needed attending.

    Before long Islandres loomed ahead in the distance and for the first time in a very long time, Eyas reached for that dangerous thread of dark connection between herself and her once adored triplet, Gale.

    It was true that he scared her. She - who’d faced down a dragon and made love to it, who’d let a magician toy with her spirit and body on more than one occasion - was terrified of what Gale would do when he sensed that old, familiar tug. All her life it’d felt like they’d been swinging opposite one another, held together by something indescribable and deep, twirling them both around and around. Now that felt severed. For all the effort of the universe at bringing him back, Eyas still believed her brother had died all those years ago.

    She found him roaming, and landed downshore on the same old, unsteady legs that were overgrown by a winter coat. As always, Eyas looked unkempt and moody. She folded her wings, losing a feather or two in the process, and swallowed down the feeling of regret as she approached him.

    “You were never quite comfortable in your own skin, Blue.” Eyas slowed to a stop. “But I still love to see you.” She admitted.

    Grey clouds roll over the hills, bringing darkness from above



    @Gale
    ► Powerplay Me : Powers (any)
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    #2
    @Eyas


    i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do
    ---------- i hope you dream of me




    Somewhere far beyond his body, where he has no voice or throat or body, Gale screams a warning to his sister.

    On the beach of Islandres though, the stallion’s blue mouth turns up at once edge in a half-smile, and his blue eyes settle on Eyas. He’d not have chosen to find her now, not feeling so drained of Power, but with each step his hooves take toward her, the more he can feel her Regret.

    His mind is still too fragmented to remember where she has been since their last conversation, and the sharp scent of ice and snow could be from anywhere at this time of year. Not Islandres, that is for sure.

    Blue, she calls him, and the cursed creature hesitates before replying. Does she know?

    Divest hadn’t, but he knows that Gale had warned his sister directly. She must know. Yet he does not drop the facade, does not act any different from the boy who had named himself Blue when he says: “I was wondering when you’d come back.”

    Even if she has given up hope, perhaps he can rekindle it for the joy of blowing it out himself.


    GALE
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    #3

    And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love

    The same stallion who’d warned her was the exact same stallion (save a few physical alterations,) who was trying his best to put her concerns to rest right now. Nothing between the two of them: his past self, his current self - seemed different. He still spoke with the same charming, warm voice she always remembered. He still smiled the exact same way. Her heart, which had ironically always belonged to him, still tripped over itself at the sight of his chest rising and falling with the breath of life in it.

    She’s not Divest, but that doesn’t matter. What he knows and what Eyas assumes are his to keep and hers to lose. It was almost as if she could see the path laid out so clearly ahead of her.

    “I’m here now.” Was the cryptic answer. If she was regretful or afraid before, the feeling lessened now.

    “Ehko lived.” The filly had unexpectedly made it. She hadn’t considered how that outcome was nearly similar to his. Despite being the reason Eyas had left Islandres years ago, the twins had thrived and made it through those rough, early years. Ehko in her frozen chamber, Brash among the living. “Did you go to the mountain?” She asked him.

    Shuttered, the window between their souls could not give Eyas the answer she wanted. It would have to come from Gale now. Small talk; how unexciting. But if the truth was a lie then small talk was exactly what Eyas wanted. She’d spent so long folding her sorrows and storing them away, pointlessly.

    She always knew that in the end, it was her nature to open them back up and cover herself in their cold, familiar comforts.

    Grey clouds roll over the hills, bringing darkness from above



    @Gale
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    #4
    @Eyas


    i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do
    ---------- i hope you dream of me



    I’m here now, she says, and Gale wets his lips, a brief flicker of uncertainty even though he continues to smile. His teeth are just a little too sharp, fed by the way his caution writhes black in his chest.

    It’s been some time since he’d had to use his own strength, and it feels unfamiliar, the stretching of rested muscles. Too long rested, perhaps. Tephra has given him a nearly unlimited source of Power. Disposing of his positive emotions hadn’t been a simple task, but he’d been successful. He’d been more powerful than he could have ever dreamed.

    And yet he’d still lost them everything when he’d died thrice at high altitude. He’d had to quash his resurrected host, the stallion’s conscious mind resurrected when his body is. It is some quirk of Magic, a weakness that he does not intend to repeat. It keeps him cautious, keeps him from asking who Ehko was.

    The resurrected host had not known Ehko - being sure that he was eight months old and living in Loess. And the first Gale had taken his knowledge of her to his metaphorical grave rather than feed his infestation’s insatiable hunger with the details of yet another innocent relation.

    Did you go to the Mountain?

    Had his host intended to ask the Fairies to get rid of the Curse? Lepis had tried that before, but the Curse had not known the details. Gale hadn’t either - or if he did, he’s managed to destroy them.

    His blue eyes narrow, and he truly takes in the buckskin mare for the first time. She is thickly furred and in wild disarray, her feathered wings disheveled and her hair long and wind tangled. She looks moody, which might mean almost anything, and he probes within her chest the moment he’s near enough to do so. A long tendril of shadow (the same that lingers always beneath and beside him) reaches out toward the dark eyed mare.

    “He did not.” Says the thing that wears her brother’s body, and reaches into her chest. There’s something there. Something that he hasn’t felt before. Something he doesn’t recognize. He wants it.

    He doesn’t have enough magic to rip her open with magic, as has become his preferred method. The smile on Gale’s blazed face falls away, and he licks his lips once more. This time the ivory teeth are pointed and more numerous.

    Of all his family, Gale had protected Eyas the longest. There is little that the thing inside him knows of the woman in front of him now. Will she break at the realization that her sibling is dead? Or does she already know?

    Gale takes a step closer, near enough for his own shadow to cross hers, his eyes narrowed and his lips drawing thin as he looks down at the much smaller mare.

    “He tried to save you the longest,” He continues, still in Gale’s concerned voice rather than his own. He sounds like the Gale from Loess, he who had been the Chief of Islandres. That iteration of his host had died a dozen lives ago, but the cursed thing is careful to keep him the very same, to use all he knows of his sister against her.

    She is likely to be a threat, he thinks. His host had been a formidable warrior long before the shadowy thing had taken his heart, and he’d been aware that Eyas was talented. But exactly how, the Curse is not certain. Best to put her off-balance, he decides, to keep her busy with emotions.

    “That sort of fury is usually reserved for other types of relations,” he continues, and his once-thin mouth has pulled up into a smirk. He’s taunting her, and the cruelty it inspires sends little flickers of lightning down his sides. “Not the brotherly kind.”

    There is a dark look in his eyes, followed by a ferocious hunger as he closes the space between them to more quickly reach the source of what he is sure will feed his black magic. His teeth reach for the dark shadow where her dappled foreleg joins her chest, closing around the tender flesh and ripping it away. The shadows reach for her as well, but unlike the one that still winds tight around her heart, feel less substantial than the electric current across the skin that comes as his lightning reaches out toward Eyas.

    Gale pulls the pain from it directly, feeling it slither into his veins. Parched, he keeps his mouth against her bleeding skin for a long moment, drinking in the blood and agony. He’ll rip the leg away in a moment, he thinks, but first he swallows every drop of the pain that Eyas might feel like a dying man.

    Then he pulls back, and his bright eyes are - just for a moment  - dim and glutted.


    GALE
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    #5

    And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love

    Of course he never made it to the mountain. Eyas had guessed back then what was true now: Gale wouldn’t be the link that broke under the chain’s weight. He wouldn’t end the suffering. Wolfbane hadn’t, Longclaw hadn’t, and so on and so forth before that. It was the principle of the thing, or rather the lasting curse that made things like principle disappear. Promises, true loves, family and identity; all was lost.

    Once upon a time she’d been afraid it would be her in her brother’s skin. It could’ve been any of them. It could’ve been the ones that came after, those half-siblings with their magics from another world beyond Beqanna. But it ended up being Gale.

    Eyas knew months ago that she’d lost her darkness. That foul power she had, the one capable of letting her slip into other souls, disappeared. She felt a sharp pain; the sorcerer’s shadow plunged into her chest and fed itself through her veins, searching for something. Eyas writhed against the torture, knowing her situation was hopeless.

    She could’ve avoided all of this by staying away and out of sight. The Curse had infected Gale, not her; she had Ehko and Brash to raise, Narcisus to deal with in the downtime. If she’d stayed hidden away in Icicle Isle, she thought Gale would’ve probably been right: She might’ve been saved the longest.

    And yet, as his serrated teeth closed around her forelimb and tore away the flesh, Eyas felt nothing like regret. Pain? Yes. An immeasurable sum of it, radiating out in piercing waves to melt the eyes and liquify the bones. The worst part was that she knew Gale had only just started the feast. Outside of the pain there was the sound of her squealing; she thought she might’ve thrashed and kicked, but it was mostly the strain of muscles in her neck that told the buckskin pony she was still alive.

    Her wings fluttered uselessly beside her, slapping the wet sand on the beach like a bird caught in a web too large to fly through.

    “...power.” She sobbed, sucking in a breath of air before the next round of agony hit.

    What she was trying to say was: I can increase your power. Not possess, not anymore, but amplify it beyond the normal limits. Turn the volume of its flow from a mid-to-high level range, just by being near the user. Ehko had benefited from the warp of her magic, growing and healing twice as fast - Brash could force his energy into even the most strong-willed of creatures when Eyas tutored him. So if it could do that for her children, what would that mean for Gale?

    She slumped, burdened by the weight of her body going into shock. Dark stains of heavy sweating spread across her hips and under the curves of her wings, pooling like white foam under her belly. Eyas let go of her restraint and pressed Gale with her powers, wanting him to see a vision. “Look…” She begged him, finding it hard to stay focused.

    Grey clouds roll over the hills, bringing darkness from above



    @Gale
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    #6
    @Eyas


    i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do
    ---------- i hope you dream of me



    She does not go down easily. Gale can feel a sharp ache in his hip where she kicks him, and his side where she slams her shoulder. His healing has not yet recovered; he considers it unnecessary in the moment. There are more important magics to strengthen.

    Foremost is the one it takes to shove a shadow of Power down her throat so he might more easily set fire to her lungs. He has never seen a body burn from the inside out before, and the ghost of the recently killed Gale lingers close enough to make him curious.

    Just before he sets her ablaze though, the shadow within Eyas’ chest begins to writhe. She falls to the sand, her weight sliding against his side, the hard edge of her wing pressing on the bruises left by her earlier struggling.

    ‘Power’, she breathes against his ear, and fills his eyes with Images while his shadows caress a heart with the ability he had found in the angel.

    “Oh.” The word is soft, barely more than an exhalation of breath. It is not Gale who says it, but the thing that wears him, the voice crisp and cool as he draws a crescent of blood along her shoulder rather than peel the flesh from it.

    “That is something quite impressive. Something new?”

    She has sent images of two children, golden and blue. They’d look like the pet that Malik had mentioned - Myrna - and as he looks down at his dying sister, Gale wonders if that palomino filly might be a more distant relation as well.

    He does not have enough strength to pull it from her mind. Should he let it go, he wonders, abandon the opportunity to find more victims in favor of this one?

    Yes, Gale decides, brushing Eyas’ forelock away from where it covers her face.

    He cannot risk losing the ability again, not when it had slipped through his grasp once before. The moment he’d torn it from the dead angel’s chest, the power had died as well. There are some magics he cannot understand, but one thing he knows for sure is that he needs Eyas alive to use this one.

    But she is dying, he thinks, looking down at her body. Perhaps she is even already dead. Are her lungs rising and falling or has he set her ablaze while distracted, and the flames are already burning within her chest?

    Gale isn’t quite sure, but he does know that she is in excruciating pain. It feels incredible, and the smile on his navy face as he straightens out more of her dark hair is so wide he can feel his own pain at the edges.

    He is not focused on anything but the sensation, and without focus the magic that he accrues flows in a way that the Curse had not quite anticipated, but that he does not alter. This is a new host, for all that it feels the same. This Gale has just died, and bits of him still linger at the edges of his mind, still exist in the twists and crannies of the body wearing a brindle stallion’s shape. Better to not fight all the instincts, to save his strength for the more important battles of exorising his host.

    Perhaps that is what tips his decision, that and the fact that he might lose augmented Power for the second time. 

    He chooses to heal her rather than let her die. He does so from the inside, invisible, leaving the plethora of superficial wounds that litter her buckskin body, the sharp cuts and aches and burn of wings broken in such a way that only power might set them right again.

    “Give it to me.” He says gently, soft against her ear. “And I will keep you alive.” His magics are weaker than her own right now, and he is not certain if he can force her to comply. Perhaps fear might, he thinks, and he presses one of the sharp points of his glowing horns to her throat.


    GALE
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