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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


    [private]  i will sing to you as if my chest is glass
    #1
    It is quiet beneath the waves, quiet but for the way the water breathes around her. She can feel it in the sway of tides and changing currents, like a chest that rises and falls in quiet perpetuity, a body too large to fathom and entirely too vast to know. But she’s always known that the ocean is a living thing, because it is something that lives inside her, too. Something that makes her ache and want and hurt. Something she belongs too, and yet something that she remains at odds with.

    Dissonance.
    She is dissonance.

    She feels like she is the compromise of two halves of different wholes come together. There is the mare, and there is the selkie. One an identity, the other a part of her and yet not, a skin she wears beneath the surface of the water to feel like she belongs. It is easy to forget that the selkie is a second skin when she is lost beneath the waves, exploring the deep and the dark and the places so few eyes ever see. It is easy to forget that it is a borrowed body, that it is something she sheds. Something that could be taken from her.

    Alleria does not know for certain, but she guesses that it is different for those who shift their own bodies into other shapes, that there is less disconnect when the form is not a physical thing that can be taken from you. She remembers what it had felt like when the sun fell out of the sky and apex predators had filled her oceans. She had been cut off from her selkie, cut off from half of her own heart. Cut off from freedom. It made this part of her something vulnerable, something easily broken when she would rather be impervious and made of stone, pale and cold and unyielding as quartz.

    The evolution of this distrust means that less and less often she returns to the ocean, unwilling and unable to draw attention to her skin or to the place she hides it in - and though she can still wander the deeper valleys and ridges of these underwater places in this equine body, it does not allow her all the same freedoms of the selkie.

    There are moments, very much like this one, where she wonders what it would be like if she never left these shallows. If the blue water became her blue skies, the reef formations like mountains hidden away in the deep below with valleys between them like paths for her to explore. There are predators in deeper waters, places where it is gray or nearly black instead of blue, places where the sun cannot reach her to warm these silver dapples in beams of refractive light. But it is relatively safe in these shallows, the place as much an in-between as she is.

    But habit takes her from below the waves and to the shore, leaves her standing in white sand that must be eons worth of silent erosion. Bone, shell, stone, all of it reduced to something infinitesimally small. She thinks there might be sand inside her too, inside the hollow of her chest or the bottoms of those mountain sky blue eyes. She is certain this is what erosion feels like.

    The wind is cold, tangling in the nearly white curls of sea-soaked mane against her pale grey neck. It dries the ends first and they lift from her like silk, like colorless flame. There is a sound, something indistinct, and though a single ear flicks back out of reflex, those glass blue eyes remain moored to the view of the waves she just climbed out of. Moored to the place that is and isn’t home, a place that ever holds her at an arm's reach.

    When she does finally turn to that sound, it is with a mask of beautiful indifference, eyes that remember the shade of perfect, bored amusement. But there is nothing inside her chest, nothing but open space and blowing wind, nothing but erosion. And as those luminous eyes find those of the stranger, there is a flicker of that sorrow, just a moment where the mask slips and beneath it is a glimpse of the weight she is drowning beneath. Whatever illusion she had been about to weave with the residue of her selkie voice is gone, tethered to a mouth that does nothing but freeze in an instant of beautiful emptiness.

    alleria

    pull me back to shore, i'll never reach my place



    @Squirt
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    #2


    Tiasa often finds herself pulled to the coast and it feels like a genetic flaw. Like she is just the same as all her other relatives, just another kelpie and nereid in a long list. Part of her resents it, part of her is tempted to make a home in a desert or in the wastelands of the north. But these parts of her never are able to gain much traction. They are small voices in the back of her mind and they are drowned out by the calming crash of the waves.

    She wonders, when she spots the mare, if this is just another relative. Another kelpie, either fresh from the hunt or just beginning one.

    It is not that no one else can stand on the shore of Beqanna but Tiasa’s isolation has made her cynical. Better to assume so that she can be on-guard.

    She approaches anyway, curious - and still intent on forcing these new experiencing on herself. What she’ll say as a greeting is fumbling through her mind when the mare turns to her - first a perfect, beautiful look of indifference and then a crack. A flash of something Tiasa pretends she has no experience with - sorrow. It is enough to continue to draw her forward, uncertain and yet all the more curious. She comes to stand beside the other but is careful to stop far enough away that there could be no accidental touches. That either of them would need to move in order for contact to be made - and that meant she would have time enough to get away. Either into the waves or further up the beach.

    She doesn’t remember the last time she was touched. It must have been her mother, back when she was small. And it has been so  long now she does not want to waste such a precious moment on an accident. Or on just anyone. And it remained to be seen whether this stranger was just anyone or not.

    Only then does she speak, watching the grey stranger from the corner of her eye but feigning attention on the horizon, allowing the other mare the illusion of privacy to gather herself back together if she wished. She doesn’t remark on that crack in the mask, thinking she’d hate it very much if someone had done that to her. Her voice is still not as smooth as she wishes, it is still raspy with disuse, but words are beginning to flow a little easier. “Rendering a pretty face speechless is my second favourite way of being greeted.” The teal mare considered all attention worthwhile, no matter whether it came from a mare or a stallion.

    tiasa

    art by dozymare


    @alleria
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