I don’t think momma has followed me, but its hard to tell; the trick of using my nose to look for her doesn’t work in our home because it seems that she has rubbed against every bush, boulder, and tree on the entire mountain and doused it in her pine and metal smell. Everyone here smells sort of like snow and conifers, but I can pick out momma from the traces of her armor and the way she seems to always have a lingering, electrical odor to her from her work in the mines or practicing her power.

Her power is beautiful. She says father has magic too, but I haven’t seen it. She’s been sure to point out that the big bronze statue at the front of the place is his work, and that it lives when it is asked, but I don’t know how well I believe her. I mean, it’s not like he isn’t there tinkering with them often enough for me to doubt that he made them, but that they can come to life? All I’ve ever seen the whole one do is stand there looking like a gleaming statue of no use, though I do admit that the idea of it moving is thrilling to me.

He’s so big. Even from way back here behind the lake in the trees along the northern most border of my home you can see his bulk shining in the sun, those big vacant eyes staring into the distance as if waiting for an army to march up and challenge him; there’s no one in the herd as big or proud as the sentinel, not even father, and though I still don’t believe it will ever happen, some day I hope to see him fight alongside our people, plumes of steam billowing from his creaking joints.

I prance about through the pines and stones littering the foyer of the vast majority of housing caves, the place momma picked for herself way over to the east of me and well out of my thoughts for the time. I’ve looked through that thing up and down, top and bottom, and mother is such a bitch when it comes to moving anything out of place that the simple act of staring at it all has grown to droll to bare and I’ve gone out to find caves I’m allowed to disparage at will.

I wonder if I have magic too, looking again through the gaps in the trees to spy the bronze, thinking it is possible to be so. Mother has her lightning and father has his machines… it is souring to think that I’ve been left with nothing. I’ve tried before to do what momma does, but my horn doesn’t glow or shoot out blue light and I certainly don’t even know how to begin to think how father does what he does. It’s not like I’ve ever seen it.

Momma says I likely won’t see much of him, either. She says she only does when she looks for him; father is a wanderer, she says, with a heart that seeks distance, and I guess I can understand that. This small adventure, my first stolen moments away from her glaring and overly protective eyes, fills me with what I imagine he feels when he’s out on his own in the mountain passes.

I just wish he took more notice of me, but he’s busy and doesn’t care about children like most of the adults I’ve encountered. I guess our problems are too small or we’re too hard to hear from way down on the ground.


[ OOC: Rikyn has escaped the clutches of the mother monster! :o Open for any. ]