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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


    like a prayer for which no words exist; ramiel
    #1
    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us;

    It’s not forever, but she sheds death like a skin.
    She feels the weight of it roll off, feels a sudden lightness in her bones, in her very self, and she is near-giddy with it, this sudden freedom. Death is a shackle, a pair of manacles about her ankles, and suddenly a key has been turned.
    She follows the shaman and as they cross the strange, impenetrable border she holds her breath, expecting to be spat back out, as she had so many times before. But she is not. Instead, there is a sensation of stretching, and a heavy, leaden feeling between her ribs as she crosses from the afterlife into Beqanna.

    Go find your someone, says the mare, and Gail embraces her for a moment, marveling at their warmth.
    “Thank you,” she breathes.

    ***

    She is flesh again, a dark woman, an easy beauty. The beauty is refreshed upon her, no longer so burdened by such things as death and time, and she looks almost as she did long ago – like a queen with a life before her.
    The land is wilder than she remembers, the meadow strewn with brightly colored horses. Some of them crackle with electricity, and she sees one transform into a bird before her very eyes. She is no stranger to magic, of course (child of one, lover of one, mother of one), but to see it so rampant here is strange.

    But there are familiar moments (she sees her dark god’s features painted across more than one creature here). The air is scented with memories and she recalls living here, dying here, coming back – and leaving, for the last time.

    But it doesn’t matter. She is here for one thing. Her heart beats crazily in her chest and she reaches out her mind, tries to sense him, unsure if her dubious powers would even work here.
    They do. She can feel his pulse, and invisible string pulling them together. She smiles despite herself. She follows the string.

    It takes her to the dale, where he reigns as king.
    She’s never been to the dale before, and she takes it in. She especially savors the fecundity of the earth, the rich green of the plants (she’s missed it so much, she realizes – how all things are so alive). She feels so wonderfully normal, here, looking at the other denizens. She is not particularly attention-grabbing – beautiful, yes, but beauty comes in handfuls here. She has no color about her, no wings or horns.
    All she is to them is simply a woman. A woman who’s alive. Gloriously, giddily alive.

    She finds him. It doesn’t take long. His heartbeat was like a beacon.
    He is stunning, in the flesh. The afterlife has a way of muting things, dulling them. Here he is in his element, he is vibrant. She feels suddenly nervous, like she will not be enough – that in life, she is somehow inadequate.
    But those are a fool’s worries. She is alive.
    “I’m here,” she says, as much to herself as to him, “I’m here.”
    It’s not forever, but that’s okay. She’s had quite enough of forevers.


    Gail
    Reply
    #2
    Miles and miles away from where the stallion stands against a backdrop of mountains, his muse resurrects.

    He shudders, but it is only the autumn wind that chills him. He does not feel the moment the air makes itself vital in her lungs again. He does not know when her eyes open to her second life, the rods and cones quenching their thirst on all the light they’ve missed in the murky afterlife. There is no pulling on his heart the second she becomes solid, though he has become unconditionally anchored to her. If he knew that Gail walked the Earth once more, perhaps nothing could stop him from flying to her side.

    His ignorance, however, keeps him home.

    All the while, he waits. Ramiel has grown used to waiting over the years. He has anticipated his father’s return since the beginning (the verdant grass of spring browning into fall as he counted the days of his youth). He has ticked off the time of his rule, recounts the long stretch of his people’s safety with grateful care. He has waited for Ea to soften, has tried to be the relenting rivulet of water to her stone, gently chiseling over the years. He has awaited (and is awaiting) the birth of his children - the beautiful, worthwhile pause before Sela and Kha entered his life. He is used to waiting; he has grown weary of only one standstill in his lifetime.

    She is accessible, but not. There, but gone. When he tries to visit her, the breaking, changing waves remind him that her company cannot last. When he tries to hold her, the edges of her skin blur; she slips right through his grasp every time. She is his black light, his constant and anchor against the universe and all its monsters. She had saved him when the langoliers crunched their way through faulty timelines and the infinite, inky sky. And even though his lips had been ready to spill any words that might grant him an escape from death, she had still chosen to follow him to life (to the afterlife, anyway, unbeknownst to them all). She had done it to keep them alive, to keep him alive. And he could – can - never do the same for her.

    He makes her wait and wait and wait.

    Fortunately, they are both used to the repetition.

    Ramiel is stuck fast in the stale cycle of another day when it is suddenly broken apart. The black speck meandering through the wild edge of the forest grows larger, comes closer. He can’t tell that it is her at first. His eyes tell him that the impossible does not become reality, that all of the seeds they have planted (all the time they have waited) will not sprout in this life. But his heart knows. The line that connects them is flaccid for the first time, no longer yanking on the meaty muscle buried in his ribcage. She is here, parting the dried out grasses and weaving through the towering, sentinel oaks. She is alive. Home.

    He wastes no time loosening the line some more.

    Ramiel runs to her and it doesn’t matter that the hard earth sends shockwaves up his churning feet. “Gail!” He calls, without hint of a question in his tone. The how doesn’t matter, anyway. When he is near enough, the grey comes to a stop in front of the black, a slow grin dawning on his face. She is different here, too. She shines with health, her coat as inky as the sky of the apocalypse. She sits more comfortably in her skin, on her feet – as if breathing the air and walking the earth has eased all of her ailments. “I’m here,” she says, and his grin widens.

    “You are.” And because his golden heart is finally whole (and beating madly alongside her’s), he pulls her in close. He presses against her, cradles her smaller body against his. For the first time she is there, totally and completely. Warm and alive and there. The ghost-king feels the final storm cloud pass over his very soul. The one accomplishment he could never claim (one that their dark god couldn’t, either, which gives him a strange satisfaction) is now moot. He doesn’t know that it can’t last. All he knows is that Gail is with him. All he feels is the curve of her against his shoulder, against his hip. He suddenly realizes he wants more. Even if it should be enough that she’s here, a fire lights in his belly that tells him it will never be enough. “You are finally free,” he says, withdrawing to meet her eyes, to tamp down the flames that rise in him regardless. “What does it feel like? What will you do with it?”





    R A M I E L
    this is a man pulling at his iron chains
    Reply
    #3
    tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us;

    She knows that by doing this she is defying things – defying death, which has long clawed at her, defying Beqanna, which had seen fit to lock her in the afterlife, dead and not-dead. More, she is defying him, and she is sure the retribution will come, but these are not thoughts she allows herself.
    Today, alive, she is reckless.
    All the caution in the world couldn’t have kept her from him, anyway, a feeling that redoubles, triples inside her under the way his eyes go light at the sight of her, like she is a thing to be beheld.

    She slips into his embrace and it’s so much more than anything she can recall, here with the fecund earth around them and hearts beating as they’re supposed to.
    Here, no one’s dead.
    She touches him, her own lips yielding to the solid muscle of him, a feeling she delights in. She tastes sweat and salt on his coat, tastes life, and it’s such a minute thing but it brings her close to tears.
    She’s spent so much time being dead that life is almost too much for her
    Almost.

    “It’s not forever,” she says, “I had help, and I don’t know how long she can hold back…”
    Hold back what? The shadow of death that cloaks her, suffocates her, the one that imbues her with power and strangles her all at once. She’s almost amazed it’s been this long.
    “It feels so much better than I remember,” she says. She had never been a lively woman, certain the woman she’d once been had never smiled like this, had never marveled so at the sky. The woman she had been – the live Gail – had been a rather macabre thing, enchanted with death and disaster, who had died willingly, once.
    “You forget,” she says, and her voice goes softer, “what it’s like. The sights, the smells, the way the ground feels. And colors! God, Ramiel. I missed color.”
    She’s not even speaking of rainbows, merely of the rich greens and browns of the earth, the occasional splash of color from flowers. Nature, as it’s meant to be seen.
    “Everything’s so alive,” she breathes, “especially you.”
    She doesn’t leave his side. She can’t stop touching him, convincing herself this is real.

    And in answer to his question, she merely says, “everything I possibly can.”
    In that, of course, is another question – for she does not know what this body is capable of, if it could even conceive children, much less bear them. But ah, she had always loved being a mother.

    Gail
    Reply
    #4
    He is unburdened by the heavy weight of her decision.

    It feels right, after all, the way she curls into him (how they seem like a completed whole rather than waiting halves). It feels natural, as she presses her lips into his shoulder - a stamp from the Other Side he acknowledges long after the gesture. The crushing weight of the crown lifts from its long residence atop his poll when he is with her. The respite is not one he has ever longed for, but he finds himself grateful nonetheless. They are blessedly alone, freed. No eyes witness their embrace through the thicket beyond: not Ea’s, not his children, and certainly not His. They are alone. Alive. Whole.

    He is made lighter in her presence.

    The woman with a world’s worth of history behind her eyes talks to him and it is enough. Before, their words had been urgent (as he walked the precipice of life and death, convinced her to go home or be fed to the clanking, chomping langoliers). Before, they had spoken in the language of grief (as he mourned his murdered brother, as he promised himself there was more life to be lived beyond the veil – that it was not his time yet, as easy as it had seemed to stay). Before, fear had gripped their throats and made them anxious for every next breath, every next chance to see each other (because they were both changing; death was poisoning her, life was morphing him). But now, there is only conversation. Only happy words float air-light in the little space between their bodies. Words, and want.

    It is so much easier here, he thinks, not for the first time. She smells like she should. She appears as she should, like a vessel with an added soul, providing evidence in the form of breaths, heartbeats, movements. The false light of the afterlife had done her no favors (had made her into a hologram not representative of the real substance hidden beneath). But here, with the harsh sunlight filtering through the trees to fall across her glossy back, she is completely exposed to him. Here, she is attainable. He does not hold back in reassuring himself of her realness. Ramiel presses in tightly against her, feeling the jut of her hipbone and the bend of each rib. He relishes the heat she exudes, finds a welcome home in her shadow.

    It’s not forever, she says, but he doesn’t believe it. There is so much more to believe in – the simmer in her eyes, the tickling touch of her hair against his shoulder – that this last truth cannot hold water. He pushes those words away and lets the rest filter through. The black speaks of the world as though she has just been born to it, and he supposes she has, in a way. She speaks of color, of the sights and smells that are amplified on the Other Side of death. He knows exactly what she means, knows exactly how much it must mean to someone kept away for so long. Every time he had visited that stretch of beach birthed from a broken timeline, Ramiel had felt the same upon his return to Beqanna. It is truly a wonder she remembers at all.

    He doesn’t spare the colors around him any attention, though. The grey would much rather see her take it in again, her memories and senses unfolding with each new sight like a bloom to the sun. And if there is the subtle feeling of fleeting time, of grains falling too quickly for him to catch, he ignores it. He stifles the stiffness in his stomach that says this too shall pass; Death waits for no one. He’s stood before the Reaper and his scythe already and come through with his head intact. He is unafraid to do so again.

    “Only on my best days. And for you,” he says, his grin growing on his face. His bones are reluctant anchors, but he manages to put some space between the two of them (the heat is becoming impossible to ignore, impossible to become willingly consumed by). Each step away is painful, but no more than the clock ticking each second loudly in his head. “Well there is no time to waste, then.” Ramiel looks towards the river, his gaze tracking upwards and into the mountains. So much to see, so many moments he wants to make with Gail. So little time. He remembers his family, then. Ea’s face turns harsher, to granite instead of limestone, before shattering into a million pieces. It is not what he wants - to undo all the work he’s put into her, to harden the woman he’s spent years trying to soften – but he cannot reconcile the rest of his wants.

    “I will not deny a woman so worthy of her wishes.” His smile is gentle now, his golden eyes soft. How can he put out his guiding light once at the end of the universe, now here, before him in the flesh? Despite the guilt that wracks him and the falling time he cannot hope to catch, she remains his anchor. He is pulled by her and made weightless all at once. She steers him, but together they move unknowingly towards the abyss. Together, they walk several paces ahead of the Reaper, oblivious to His footsteps echoing in their ears.






    R A M I E L
    this is a man pulling at his iron chains
    Reply




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