It’s the seemingly parent-less hybrid boy again.

We never learned his name, but Duir bounds across the rolling grasses towards him as if the child is our nephew or something. The metallic glint in his antlers and struck across his chocolate coat twinkles, my own golden bedazzled figure trotting along after him with much less eager steps.

The child has crested a hill, the uselessness of his wings much more evident now that he’s older, and their more than the delicate tufts of youth. Though I don’t know a lot about flying, I’ve seen enough wings to know that this boy barely has them. Aithniel’s wings at this age were graceful and large, though it was hard to know; she’d kept them tucked fast to her sides most of the time, and especially after the Haruspex had offered to remove them.

I eye his dark, feathery stumps as I approach, a frown drawing deep lines in my face, mostly because I know he could hurl himself from this hillock all day, without accomplishing much more than wearing an obvious trail into the grass.

"You’d think you were half goat," I say with a smile, testing the emotional temperature of the colt, somewhat expecting him to remain mute, as he had before, "always climbing up on top of things."

Duir offers a loud, bleating hello to the foal, prancing up to the crest of the hillock, where as I stand at low ground, looking up at the boy’s piteous struggle against physical reality. Having not quite figured out that leaping off the hill was not the game, the young deer peers off the edge of the incline for a soft place to land, himself.

"raddaaaa"