So I kept walking, and have found the meadow that makes me think of Aithniel as night steals the last red light from the horizon and the world becomes one of shadows and the silver glare of the partial moon and stars blinking in the heavens above.  The withered flowers peering from the veneer of snow are capped with quicksilver, the moon low on the horizon, still seemingly larger than it will be later in the evening, spilling so much light across the meadow that the white earth gleams like a ribbon.
 

Held in this ribbon are the divots of my hooves, and the course I will continue to follow.  The idea I’d held that I might travel north is one that seems to fade as I leave the last known location of my sire in my dust, figuring that, if fate is to have us reunite, that Erebos will cross my path out here, while I wander.  He, as myself, is an adventurer, a traveler of boundaries and wild lands – surely he won’t hole himself up in the Basin like his hermetic sire, and that surely means that, one day (and soon!) we will again cross paths.
 

Ahead, the vision of the delta becomes the living sound of water, not yet tamed by the chill of the season, procuring a silent thanks to the Earth and Moon that the winter was serene – mostly because I was out here in it, without the promise of a cavern and fire as was usually present in the Basin, some small part of me believing (arrogantly) that Frostfall was calm simply because I was wandering in her wilds.
 

It’s with this brazen belief that I pause before the chilly water, the slushy snow along the border of where the earth became river smushing into brown murk beneath a golden hoof as my lips lower and tenderly breech the surface of the frigid flow.  Uninvited, a shiver steals along the length of me, and when I’ve forced down a few swallows of the unpleasantly cold water I allow my head to jut upwards and shudder its way into a full fledged shake, crystalline droplets breaking across the surface of the snow from their prior place along my black nose.  

@Rhiannon
[ OOC: Starter post is awkwarding. ]

So its not her face, or the overwhelming desire to see more of her curves up close that reminds me of who she is, but her voice which sends her name to me, a name that arrives alongside a memory of being in a much smaller body alongside that woman as I stared up at this pretty thing, newly come home from some place.

A first crush, some might call her, though those feelings I have now are much larger, the titanic fathers to the small and piteous being that was a child’s attraction to a pretty girl. With water dripping down my chin and ears at full attention (some other things threatening to make their way there as well), I drink in her saucy smile and the addition of our names – as if I’d forget either.

"I remember," I say with a smile, though her name is what little I do remember of her – mother had tried to tell me her lineage after we’d parted ways with Rhiannon all that while ago, something about both her parents having been important among the Basin’s people at one point or another, but I was too busy thinking of how pretty the amber eyed young woman had been to hear much of what mother had said.

As my words close on the chilled night air, I leap up and over the cold water in a sporty bound, my tail drawn up around my side to avoid any unnecessary contact and to be nearer to her while we converse, having found this branch of the delta an annoying nuisance chattering between us, making me have to shout in a most non-seductive fashion. Closing the distance with an easy trot, I pause alongside her, extending my muzzle in hope that she would exchange breath with me as I had with Tiamat (an experience I remember as being oddly erotic and which I desire ever so desperately to share with Rhiannon). Regardless of whether the embrace is given, I withdraw in some seconds to continue on with conversation, not wanting to linger too long in any case and coming across as weird, or overly desperate.

Such a stag as myself is never desperate.

"You are an outcast again?" I ask with interest (suave, I tell myself, with a mental high five), having gathered from the lack of the familiar odors of the North and the myriad scents of the wild upon her that she is much as I am, wandering, perhaps disenchanted with the notion of that little patch of green hidden in all that stone and snow, "was the mountain not to your liking?"

And then, breath, sweet and warm, it smells like scavenged green things and the soft layer of flesh between bark and tree, and the crisp ever so pure smell of winter water and snow. Yet, as wonderful as the initial grasp of the embrace is, the scents of nature entwine and are overwhelmed by her in her purest intangible essence. My own breath, hot and perhaps overly eager, is returned, my ears having found their forward position again and my neck strenuously arched, the muscles delightfully screaming in a way that says, you are doing this right bro.

So the forever long four seconds ends, my gaze running over her again, with a measure of distraction that lingers on her curves and her tantalizing smile, as her sultry purr sounds over her breath still swirling about my sensory memory. Though I hear the words, they are muffled in a haze of hormones, and it takes me a moment longer to reply than it might have with Erebos, or someone else platonic enough to not invoke these strange and curious devils within myself.

"Do you speak of the Rift lands?" I ask, not sure what else she could mean of a land that was ruled and shaped by magic – such a place was always changing, or so mother had said, though thinking of her now makes me feel so strange that I can’t help but frown in the midst of my smiles, the tell tale signs that screws rolled and rattled about more than I let on. I try to quickly recover, but she probably has noticed none the less. It is probably why she looks away from me now for the first time since our embrace of breath.

But she asks me instead of myself, a thing of which I am ever happy to oblige those who are as succinctly pretty as Rhiannon, and others who are much less so.

"I left home almost two years ago," I tell her, leaving out the fact that I’d followed mother – but if Rhiannon had been in the Basin at the time and wasn’t an absolute moron, she would add up the time frames and could likely conclude as much, "and stayed with a herd some weeks away, not very different than the Basin when I’d left. I’ve since left and come again, and have only been in Helovia since the very last days of Orangemoon."

Maybe I sound bitter, but my return to the Basin had been to discover Thranduil, the Lord of Fools, ruling its peaks, which stood shelter to winged things who served, not as miners and toilers upon the earth as was proper, but as warriors, proud of their appendages. It had never settled well with me, nor had being told what to do; equally abrasive was the annoyingly friendly seer Ashamin and his posse of bouncies, the emptiness of the tent that my father had sacrificed some of his power to create. Mother now soiled the only other home I had to return to, and Xynia with her pretty face and many suitors had no use for a boy whose kingdom had been lost with his mother’s concern for others. With no family there left to hold me, and too many lost or irritating things ghosting about in one home or another, I had found very little in the land of my birth (or that of the Nightwalk) but pretty girls and Erebos; I could find pretty girls anywhere, and Erebos would surely be my friend no matter how far our paths pulled.

@Rhiannon