[PRP] Beauty in the Breakdown (Asban, Yaariq, Lakisa, Cub)

[Hopefolly]

IC Timeline: Near the IC start of Breytast Vindar, in the days following April Showers and somewhat overlapping Stone Cold / Hold Your Peace and Crocodile Tears.

Asban had been relieved to see his brothers return home, most in good spirits and those shambling having grace enough to keep to the tail end of the bunch. None more so than Meshindi, son of the captain and the late beauty his first wife. Asban inquired about his condition under the guise of judgment, for curiosity was too akin to gossip and liable to be frowned upon by his fellow reavers what with all the iron fresh in their blood. Some knew, some didn't; others did but wouldn't tell, lest they risk Kondo's ire. The captain had always been diligent in culling the craven from his flock. They weren't easily made to dread, but Kondo's tirades were, if nothing else, long enough to expend an entire evening and loud enough to wish yourself deaf. His only son was a sore spot for him, and acted as if each day he survived was a splash of seawater in the wound.

Asban vowed not to stay behind again and planned to keep an eye on the both of them during the next trip, if he found the time. Fair weather, the company kept, and for the most part mended wounds made this nefarious excursion more enjoyable than the last. Sebor he hadn't seen since then, nor had he wasted the breath it would take to ennoble her reputation among this particular group of males. Not all were as Kondo, with his paws firmly planted, rooted in mindsets and traditions older than him, but they knew the rules: No females reavers in this brotherhood. Besides, Sebor was not a reaver.

Though he dissuaded her from these ambitions and himself questioned the justice in their running rampant throughout lands, in the heat of the moment he felt going a-viking had no parallel in mortal experience. A lion was forever apart from the Freeborn after it. To fight beside his most personally revered kith and kin, whether they shared the blood in their veins or on their claws, was worth the risks during, the guilt after, and keeping compliant to a captain he had more respect than fondness for.

Kondo ordered him to march straight east and report back with any news of a pride. This time they were to pursue the most reclusive and downtrodden rather than the most mighty. He portrayed it as born of pure spite and a desire to prove to those suffering they hadn't know real misery until his reavers appeared on their borders. Asban wondered if it wasn't a tactical move meant to placate the lust for combat while not exerting the lions he led. From Asban's headcount as they first marched back, they were missing several.

Their numbers were still hardy, but any further loss of life and the captain would need start his tedious recruitment efforts earlier than planned. Asban suspected he wanted to wait until after Breytast Vindar had come and gone. A wisdom that betrayed his savagery, if so, since it meant he wouldn't be inducting new fighters only to lose them should someone best him to earn a rank equivalent and take all his reavers in turn. He would gather those he had his eye on to help rebuild if need be.

Or perhaps that was what he would do, not Kondo. Asban didn't have the same unabashed arrogance to cloud good judgement; however, he did have mist — steam? Fog? A cloak of visible air, whatever it was to be called, surrounding him that morning. His eyes pierced through it to the distance a lion could jump, but nothing beyond that. The copse of trees here were closer than Meshindi and his "friend" Gepeto (they had been sent west, and moved in mute accord, their paws even hitting the ground in tandem). Asban trudged through, the smell of water and fur urging him on. He'd found two sets of prints embedded in the mud. Huntresses? Returning ambassadors? Rogues?

His mane snagged on a bramble bush and he yanked himself free with two steps and a stumble, discharging a growl. Here the trees were cleared in an uneven circle, encompassing the fresh water, the bloomed flowers, and her. Asban wondered if this surreal environment wasn't the well-spent effort of a Goddess. He'd heard they could don mortal skins.

She had to have heard him, had to have seen him standing there.

Her alabaster coat was brushed with fine markings, neither too intrusive nor too subtle. They melded into grey from birthright, not age. Her eyes were his sure defeat, as they had always been the color he preferred. She looked pure and radiated sorrow. A lovely, broken thing.

"Beautiful," Asban breathed.  

[Kaelyndra]

In the thick brush, tightly wound trees, Yaariq and Lakisa had found rabbits plenty to subsist them. The last belly-filling meal had been weeks. Without Ahlsen, hunting larger game was perilous. More importantly, it took hours, wasted valuable energy, and left Lakisa entirely alone.

The only fortune that smiled on them was a lack of purpose. They moved only a few miles a day to maintain a minimal diet. The rest of their hard-earned days were dedicated to the slowly growing cub. The progress of the small, roany creature alarmed her. Though he seemed intent to eat, his body remained small, his coat refused to sleeken, and the moisture still in the earth matted his fur.

"How old do you think he is?" Yaariq had been asking Lakisa when they had paused in the soft grasses of a sunbathed clearing to rest. The ground was warm, welcoming, and it smelled of fresh flowers, hope. The atmosphere had been so serene, that Yaariq had been unable to walk further. She had placed the cub by Lakisa and laid down to sob.

These fits would come suddenly, seemingly without trigger, and were as violent as the sorrow which had gripped Yaariq at seeing Ahlsen's limp form. The exhaustion wore itself well on Yaariq's body. Her short-cropped hair clung to her bony face. The lioness' dark brown eyes had gone dull and had trouble focuses.

Despite this, she never took her sight from the undersized cub attempting to suckle. The elder lioness and she alternated his nursing, desperate to produce anything to keep him alive. The first few days, Yaariq had refused to move until one of their bodies could feed the cub.

Owing to the sun and tension releasing from her body, Yaariq moved to lay her head in the flowers. A snarl broke the silence, and the white lioness' head jerked upwards. The dark coat was readily visible, though her eyes blurred at the stripes. Yaariq's heart moved upwards, into her throat, and began to pound.

"Hello?" she asked him, though her body was rigid. It would taken only one sudden movement for her to scruff the cub and sprint into the dense forestland.  

[Hopefolly]

He stared hard at the lioness; his eyes bore into hers with a warning better suited to the deaf than the blind. His coldness was caution, not cruelty. The other reavers would learn her that if she tried to run, though. Asban did so much and asked so little he was confident Kondo would afford him the assistance if requested. He couldn't mar her beauty himself, but he would encourage impermanent damage on his behalf if that's what it took. From this moment on, her salvation would be found in his company or in death, but nowhere else. With no one else.

The way he studied the cub was not kindly. He'd never poised a paw to slaughter something still of weaning age, but if it were male, its presence could well be an omen of things to come. Kondo told them to spare cubs because they broke easy, male or female, but Asban noticed time and again the captain had not a thrall to his name. Some knew better than to underestimate anything with claws, regardless of title. And if no one else shared the sentiment, Asban took it to the grave — a grave he would die in when he was good in ready, not before, and not by the will of a grown cub whose father he'd killed and whose mother he'd taken.

"What's your name?" Asban calmly requested. Almost ruefully, he glanced back to Yaariq. "And your son's name," he ordered with the same impassive air about him. To ask for the cub's gender outright might clue her into things that need be told truthfully here and now.  

[Kaelyndra]

Neither bind, nor deaf, the warning raising Yaariq's hackles. Had she been alone, Yaariq would have been a dead lioness, for she would have run out of spite, out of lack of care, and out of the desire to feel something, for what could be more fearful than losing Ahslen?

The same was still true. Now, however, it was the Ahlsen she pulled closer to her. The cub was placed between her paws, and she curled her right carefully around it.

"Yaariq," she answered. A tickle at the back of her neck screamed at her to look towards Lakisa, but Yaariq holds firm and instead focused on Asban. A dead stare for his cold warning.

"And Ahlsen is my son." Her eyes do not leave him. The hair along her back stays tall and rigid. Swallowing, and continuing with a calm, careful voice, Yaariq asks, "What's yours?"  

[Hopefolly]

Ahlsen. A male.

Asban swallowed his breath, the muscles in his face twitching, contorting into a grimace quick to plague his visage and just as swiftly thwarted by a bow of his head jarring it from place. He told the truth, his tone as insidious as she was alluring. "Asban. You're... very beautiful, Yaariq." His eyes weren't long for hers. The foliage to their right ruffled and revived his awareness of the trail he'd followed here; two sets of paws, not one. He'd noted the larger prints walked in less a straight line and one front leg bared more weight than the other. An old injury, age, or weariness.

All of the above. Lakisa stayed couchant under the brush, concealed by the branches and leaves she'd slumbered under to keep the hanging moon and rising sun from her eyes. She saw the lion peering her way and held her breath.

"Who's with you, Yaariq?" Asban inquired with a brooding sort of patience.  

[Kaelyndra]

"Thank you." The response came out monotonous, automatic. These are all things she has heard before. Accepting compliments are as natural as breathing, now. Ahlsen, too, had been a flatterer, and his honest came out most often in the early morning.

Who's with you, Yaariq?

Yaariq felt the heat of blood pulsing into her head. The world around her began to spin. It took several, long, calm breaths in to quiet the panic. The temptation to lie was strangled rapidly by the direction of Asban's eyes. Yaariq struggled instead with properly wording the truth.

"A," Yaariq began, the pitch of her voice high. She gave herself a moment to compose, shifted her paw to make sure Ahlsen was still there, and then finished, "A friend." A friend, a mother, a steadfast companion she owed so much, too.

"She's not threatening," she added, rushed.

Even then, Yaariq did not glance towards the bush. This was perhaps a more telling sign that Lakisa was there than had she glanced where Asban had. Then again, her unwillingness to take her eyes from Asban may have overruled any desire to look where his eyes had gone. In truth, it was a folly based on both cases.  

[Hopefolly]

Not threatening... Kondo said the same about his snake despite the alleged venom in her fangs. Asban found her the least sinister when she stayed where he could see her. If the lioness was elderly or ill, she was no less deadly than a cub nursed with his mother's milk and nurtured with her spite. The dying had every reason in the world to fight to their last breath when they only had so many left to start. "Come out," he ordered.

The lioness crawled out of necessity. When there was room enough, she stood on forcibly still legs. Asban recognized the signs of age in her: thinned fur that hadn't regrown over cuts long healed; a lopsided stance; a wheeze that rattled her chest. "And your name?" he queried.

"Lakisa."

Asban repeated it twice, once by its lonesome and again as part of a foreboding roll call. "Yaariq, Lakisa... and Ahlsen." He turned to Yaariq, pinning her with his gaze. "Is his father traveling with you?"  

[Kaelyndra]

Hopefolly

The rustling drew Yaariq's head from its fixation on Asban. She pulled against the tendons that connected neck and shoulder to glance towards Lakisa. Yaariq's brows were heavily furrowed, ears lying nervous on her skull. When the elderly gave her name, those eyes shot back to Asban.

To distract herself from the teeming thoughts of bloodshed and dominance, Yaariq pulled her tongue over the underside of her teeth. She had not noticed she'd been clenching her jaw.

"No." The answer felt stale of her tongue and her eyes dropped to the roan cub. The protective right claw slightly unfurled. She did not seem to be suffocating him, but she drew a tongue over his forehead all the same. When he stirred, Yaariq shifted uncomfortably.

She could have asked what the strange, dark male lion wanted, but Yaariq does not want to hear the answer. Once again, the next move is his. At the very least, he has the pale lioness' undivided focus.  

[Hopefolly]

Kaelyndra

"It's dangerous to live among rogues."

Lakisa could hear Asban speaking over the heartbeat pounding in her ears. It's dangerous right here, she thought. He continued, "The whole world is dangerous for just a cub and two lionesses," and she knew he what he meant. Yaariq was timid, Ahlsen was small, and she was old.

I've married worse than you, big lion. Her legs trembled, but her eyes didn't. They shot toward Yaariq, speaking their own language. Run, she urged. I can hold him off long enough.

Asban was fluent in it too.

"Don't," he said, demanding and yet far too patient, staring at Lakisa, but speaking to Yaariq.  

[Kaelyndra]

She was small; the forest dense. Yaariq's paws unwound their protective grasp of Ahlsen. The lioness' tongue pressed into the roof of her mouth.

Don't.

The whole world was gone, save for this tiny creature. Lakisa was willing to give herself up for Yaariq, Yaariq was willing to give herself up for the cub. If she ran, there would be no one to feed them. She would starve, the cub would starve. Starve.

Though they had eaten recently, the thought of food made Yaariq's stomach hurt.

"We aren't alone," she said instead, breath pulling into her lungs. The image of Mwokoti, great white wings furled calmly at her side, a powerful muzzle, and eyes that shattered pulled into her mind. Though Ahlsen had died, she had cared for his body. And, perhaps, they knew what she did not. "The gods are watching us."

She put her paws out in front of her body to ready herself to stand.  

[Hopefolly]

Asban's head was held high, his stance as relaxed as the tension allowed. He didn't lunge, speak, or flee, so when his eyes moved it was all the more noticeable. Up they went, up to the sky and the Gods, since surely it was the only space open and vast enough to contain them. This world was too small for all the mortal creatures in it, trying to change everything to best suit their needs.

This place alone was too small.

"Yes, they are," Asban agreed thoughtfully. He had a good look at the group. Like poison, his questions. Death sentences with the gall to sound curious. "I wonder who they're betting on?"

Lakisa pounced.
 

[Kaelyndra]

Yaariq's mouth closed around the scruff of Ahlsen's neck. The cub was yanked off the ground, his mother's teeth so tightly clenched to his skin that it might bleed. Dropping him was not an option.

A patch of dirt was left in the flattened grass and flowers where she had shoved off. Beyond that, there were broken twigs, pestered bushes, and the scent of fear.

A branch scraped her back, and the sounds of a struggle were dimmed by her trampling heart and feet. Yaariq did not plan a path, simply heading for the thickest wood where she saw it and sprinting through everything else.

If luck was on her side, Lakisa's fate would forever be a mystery. The only way she'd know, Yaariq was certain, was if the male found her.