Was there any mistaking it? Could it have been anyone else? I mean, seriously.

As luck would have it, I had been sleeping, ungracefully sprawled out underneath some low-hanging branches of a big-ass willow in the meadow. It wasn’t an easy sleep, though—sleep doesn’t usually come easy to me, and it sure as hell didn’t come easily to me then, what with all the undead trauma ‘n everything. Y’know, the usual shit. Usually, though, I would toss and turn and have some gnarly nightmares and maybe snore a little but I’d still be able to keep my eyes closed and get some rest. At that moment though, it felt like this...I dunno how to explain it. Like some metaphysical blindfold of sleep were being tugged slowly and irritatingly from my eyes, gently enough that I didn’t wake up immediately, deliberately enough that waking up was unavoidable. Whatever wack-ass nightmare I was havin’ sort of just…slipped away, and before I knew it, I was blinking open my eyes and yawning a gross yawn and feeling it even as I woke up, before I even understood what it was.

It didn’t take long for me to guess, though—and when I did, I sighed, I took a huge gulp, and I rocked my ass up onto my feet and got steppin’. Cuz that was all that could be done.

Yup. Dad needed somethin’.

It was…this…tether. Yeah, I guess you could call it that. A tether of shock that I felt really deep in my breast or my chest or my tummy or wherever the hell, it was in my body, but it was super ingrained so it…it felt like it was all of me attracted towards this one direction, like my stomach and my legs and my hooves and my eyes and nose and ears and my horn and my tail and just…everything, all of me, needing to go that way, so I went that way. I didn’t hurry though—I wasn’t in a hurry to see Dad. I ran, I trotted when I was winded, and I zap!ed when I had the energy, but I didn’t run myself ragged. I…

…I didn’t know how to feel.

I wasn’t even gonna try and attempt to sweep away all the fury and confusion and the fear, the goddamned fear, the resentment and all the other shit I had been feeling for the past…has it been a year, now? I wasn’t gonna ignore the shame I felt when I woke up with all this leg and ass and I panicked; I wasn’t gonna ignore how much of a fuck-up I was am. I wasn’t gonna ignore all the times I shouted at him in my head, or outside of it either (yeah, we’re talking about that one time at the Veins now, I’m allowing it). I wasn’t gonna ignore what I felt about discovering I had a father and that he was a god, even though I didn’t even know what the hell a god even was or what it meant or…whatever. I had let go of it when I attacked that Jiji-beast; when I decided I didn’t care anymore. I was done worrying about what I needed to do and knowing damn well I didn’t know what to do or why or what. If Dad needed me, he’d show.

And I…guess he showed.

That tether-shock-thing led me to this place I guess I had missed the last time I had run through this area—a thingamajig made of stone and bitchin’ glass pieces, all of it covered in snow to give off this rustic-ass effect. Thing is, I had all eyes for the black stallion standing in the center of the whatchamacallit, the dark stud that was shorter than I remembered and a lot more frightening than I anticipated. I gulped one more time; I zap!ed myself closer to the thing-a-ling but I didn’t step within it, because whatever Dad was or what he had done or what he wanted from me, he was a god.

So I stood there. I looked at him. And I didn’t know what to feel, or what to say, or what I should say, because dammit I’m still not sure what a god is, exactly, and standing there looking at this short-ass stud told me that I was a lot less prepared for this than I thought.

“Pa.”

It was tiny thing coming out of my mouth, almost hesitant—because, for once, my voice was matching the rest of me.




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