She seemed almost enthused to be discussing a bloody God, but he supposes anyone would be if they only knew the most surface of details about him. He had once been enamored with the whole vision of the Lord of Horses, back when the world had been small and he had believed that all creatures that were not the equine were wicked and set to murder and maim or were broken beings most mercifully laid to eternal rest. He had loved the stories of Nieque lifting the mountains from the continent of Isilme and the God’s impressive powers over stone and plant life, the grand tales of battle between Gods and mortals alike for the honor of their creator.

So blessed had the equines of Isilme been that they had been granted dragons, the only creature of companionship allowed to any of the species, and how could a boy not love tales that painted him as a chosen person of such a great entity?

Her question plunges into his heart because he knows the answer and he does not want to go there here and now, but it is better than dwelling on his broken hopes and thoughts of Kahlua framed in the sunlight. He draws up the names of the other Gods, muted and worn in his mind, not the bright, permanent emblems of his people – Sepagus, God of Winds, and Cinnoru, the master of the sea.

Her dragon purr urges him to answer her even more, and he mulls it over until deciding that, surely, her heart is too pure to be tainted by the wickedness of Isilme’s dead Gods and fallen kingdom. He’s still thinking it over when her cough and next question lift his ears and his thoughts, the stallion lifting his body from the earth to rest with his bloody legs beneath him and a frown still caught on his lips. ”Yes,” he answers to the second question, hesitant to move into the first though he has decided he will oblige her desire to know, ”Gods of a place called Isilme, which is no more. I can only assume they rule over the nothingness that is the birth land of their children. Mother tried to return there before finding father again and told us terrible stories of the black pit it had become, consumed by shadow and evil.”

He sighs.

”There were three – the dragons have no God, as far as I know. The pegasi were born from Sepagus, and the unicorns from Cinnoru, and the mother for each was the element which they wielded. The equine was born from the earth, the pegasus from the clouds, and the horned from the sea,” he did not know whether or not the fish had a God, but he doubted it intensely and still held to his own opinion that Nieque had made all the wildlife, ”I assume the wolves and fishes and birds belong to Nieque. But maybe he only made the wolves and Sepagus the birds and Cinnoru the fishes. I was born well after my parents left that place and so I do not know anything more than what I have been told in tales.”