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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


    shovel all the ashes out; jenger pony
    #1


    Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.


    Elli remembers when the night was scary, and the only comfort had been the warmth of her mother’s belly, Elena’s legs curled around her, and the soft coo of her melodic voice, as sweet as can be, soothing against the harsh way the leaves rustled with the midnight wind. Whispers, Elliana would say, people talking, plotting, planning. The world had been dangerous at night, fearsome, but Elena would just smile, nodding because she knew it to be true, but comforting Elli because she knew she would survive. Elliana, in her naïve ignorance, did not believe so, she hid her face away from the night, from the crisp and chilly wind, burying into the comfort of her mothers stomach.

    And now?

    Now there are monsters that lurk behind faces that look so much like her own.

    Elliana carefully picks her way through the overgrown path, her coat made of shadows soaking up the milky golden light of the spring sun. The sunlight trickles through the open patches in the canopy, catching the dust particles in the air and causing the world around her to sparkle as the specks float around her. She is quiet and silent as she moves, her dark hooves barely making any sound as she presses them into the soft earth.

    With a soft snort the young mare (the filly? she doesn't know anymore) halts, lifting her dark head with blonde locks and viewing the forest with a curious blue gaze. From somewhere in the depths of the thick forest, a small white moth appears. It is fuzzy and soft against the gentle and warm sunlight of the afternoon and Elli merely breathes in and exhales her breath towards the small, flying creature. It comes to rest momentarily on her nose, its emerald blinking eyes watching her for a few seconds before taking flight again and gently resting on her withers. The sensation causes her soft skin to shiver and twitch slightly. She allows herself a small smile in the moment. Elliana takes a deep breath, the scent of the damp woods giving her some comfort.

    She continues moving, taking her time as she wanders through the forest with no particular thought on her mind. Her tail made of moonlight idly flicks every now and then while her ears turn at every hint of a sound. A breeze had picked up, sending the large leaves of the forests trees swaying to and fro, rustling heavily around her. The trees start dispersing after awhile, and while they became more and more sporadic, Elliana could feel the warmth of the sunlight growing more intense with every step.

    Elliana reaches the end of the forest now. It is quiet here, and Elli finds herself enjoying the silence. There was no sound save for the gentle rustling of the grasses beneath her and the wind rushing through the air. The moth that had now taken refuge on Elliana’s withers had departed from its rest place, shakily lifting from her soft skin. Blue eyes follow the moth as she walks, lifting her head slightly as if trying to reach out and touch the soft insect with her dark nose. The moth disappears into the bright blue sky, where wisps of white cloud linger, like white paint upon a blue canvas.

    « r » | @jenger
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    #2
    The forest is as much a home to him as any other place in this vastly small world, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that he finds some level of solace among the quiet trees and reaching plants when so much of it seems to be tied intrinsically to his dna. It comes first from a grandmother that he has yet to meet, though the stories of her are incredible things and he has no doubt that she is someone he will love. His favorite tale is of the way Leliana had saved her daughter, his own mother, and used her magic to create a new body for Linnea when she was consumed by the fires of unchecked war. She had made it possible for her daughter to grow as if from a seed, and perhaps that love had been a seed, building a secret garden around Linnea in which she could grow and relearn this new version of herself.

    There is an immense sense of pride that lives like a flame inside his chest simply knowing that the capacity of love and loyalty in his lineage is something worth being proud of. That his mother had died to protect his father while they were just barely older than children. That his grandmother had remade her the only way she knew how so that Linnea could live and love and discover all those cut-short potentials. That when the dark had come and Linnea had been near death, his father had found her again and taken her away to a place where there was still sun, a place not bent on killing her. A place they began both a life together and a family.

    His is a lineage worth knowing, but with that comes the weight of expectation (his, only his) to be something as great as what came before him.

    Physically, he is the perfect blending of both of his parents. Grey as his mother had been before that borrowed body, and blue in the same iridescent shade of his father. Even his abilities blended both parts of them into one, filling him as though filling a mold. From his fathers family came the dragon whose wings and horns and spinal crest he bore, but it was his mothers family who carved those things out of dense green leaf and worn smooth ridges of wood and root.

    He knows he looks more like some strange woodland fae princeling than he does any kind of dragon, so he supposes Elliana will not be too startled when he pulls himself free of the shadows beneath the nearest trees to join her. He looks like someone that belongs here, someone made for this place with his half-crown of worn and dried root, with the ivy that climbs through his mane and his tail, wandering over the wooden ridges along his spine and around the towers of the horns that rise around his ears.

    “Do you ever wonder what they’re thinking?” He asks, and his voice is something that belongs in this place, something deep and dark in the way of solitude. “So small and so very mortal, and yet they land on beasts the size of mountains as though they have no fear.” His gaze had been on the moth as it flew harmlessly out of reach, but it swings to her now, a shade of green so pale it might be glass. “I think I would not want to sunbathe on the skin of a creature infinitely larger than me, but perhaps I lack a sense of adventure.” His smile is something half-way and crooked, not insincere but certainly only surface deep yet. “My name is Quake, care if I join you on this walk to..” He cleaves a space in the silence for her, leaves an opening for her to name her destination.

    QUAKE

    i leaned in and let it hurt



    @Elliana
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    #3


    Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.


    Elli has spent so long trying to be a seed carried by the wind that she has forgotten she was supposed to be looking for a place to grow roots. Now she does not know how to stop — does not know how to slow herself down, or stop looking for the in-between things that most people dismiss. She does not know how to be anything but a contradiction.

    A branch hangs down too low, in front of glacier cut blue eyes and she is almost startled by the beauty of it. Po once told her a story about gifting autumn leaves. That it is a sign of letting go, of being willing to go to places the wind would like to show you. To give someone an autumn leaf is to say you have found peace in whatever it is that plagues you. It had not been autumn when she had left Terrastella. If it had been, she would have filled the whole of Dusk Court with oranges and yellows and reds.

    If she were still a gangly newborn, she would have thought him born from a tree when he appears before her from the shadows. He looks the part and at that age she had owned the imagination to think of such. She is startled and it is only seen the slight widening of blue eyes and a quiver of her nose. ‘Would you like to be a dead thing?’ She was asked by a unicorn in the forest. But he is no unicorn and this is not a forest made of redwoods. But there is a prayer that settles in her eyes when she looks at him.

    She is twilight and stardust where he is a sunny forest and daydreams. He is stunning and unique in all the ways she could never be. Never has she wanted to reach out and touch someone so badly, but a the same time restrain herself because there is some sort of trembling fear rising like canyon walls in her chest that he could very well not be real. And instead just be some sort of forest spirit that only appears to lost little girls.

    “Maybe it is the same thing that convinces a child that a puddle is an ocean and a patch of dirt a desert,” she speaks like she is not still a child herself, that she is something far older, far wiser. Elliana thinks she has seen the color of his eyes in the blades of grass beside the river.


    The mountains rise like spires behind them and the forest and the grasses each whisper in the wind stories that only she remembers. Her steps are light-as-air as she begins to walk, blue eyes fastening themselves to him, an invite as any for him to stay with her. “Somewhere,” she finishes his sentence with an inhale synchronous with his own exhale. She leans towards him, shoulders not quite touching, but close enough to welcome him into her circle, even if she is the only one residing within it. “What do you think it will look like? Somewhere?” She asks him, her voice as silvery and as breathy as her mother’s had been at this age.

    “I’m Elliana—Elli. I come from far away.”

    « r » | @Quake
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