The season of birds and soft petals fades into the drowsy heat of the summer, a lazy one, Illynx makes note of as she and her son journey southward. The chill of the mountain almost follows them in the form of a crisp and pleasant wind that chases at their tails, the dark plumes of the boy’s dam wrapping and flailing in each rivulet of breeze around her golden legs, obscuring the platinum that wraps around the right hind limb and Rikyn’s wild and erect mane is tousled about whimsically, the sunlight pure and pristine. She gives thanks, silently, for the pleasantness of the season, which normally delves relentlessly into the pounding heat and rainless weeks of the Sun’s most accursed season with little more than a playful bat of its proverbial lashes; the weather, this year, seems to comfort the citizens of Helovia the wake of the disasters that had ravaged it the seasons prior, or perhaps it is only that the Gods require a respite from the usual drab toils of life on the mundus, a more beautiful plane to view from their lofty palaces.

She does not know. She is only thankful that the sweat that lines her velveteen folds is minimal and does not drip in rivulets down her sides by the time they arrive to the ancient and calm shade of the Threshold. Her son’s pelt is slick and black, his own dampness having hidden the brown tinges of his body into the darkness of the majority of his pelt but for a few brassy sections in the tenderest linings of his growing frame that retain their brown tone. They are, together, golden and shining, the Lady having left her armor at home after their morning bath and wearing only the golden amulet that had been given to her by Abishia and the silvery metallic one of her own God. It seemed suiting, not that the mare gave much heed to symbols and their portent meanings, to wear the emblem of her heart and the one of the season.

Rikyn, his youth boundless and the innocent nestled in the cores of his eyes allowing him to see magic and wonder at each step, leaps into the covering shade of the trees with a light, playful laughter that leaves his dam smiling ever so faintly at the sound of his play; his cloven hooves crunch and disturb the foliage and fallen branches, leaves swaying the low laying brush that is still fully green beneath the cooling eaves of the trees. Every so often, an uproarious sound of chatters and wings fills the air as he disturbs gathered birds which dart into the air on spread wings, fleeing the oncoming maelstrom that is her son in high spirits.

A familiar smell calls to her, beckons them towards its source. As with most scents that pull her attentions, the one it belongs to is not immediately recollected in her thoughts, though it bares the faint undertones of being one she knows from the snow. Whoever it is, he no longer smells like stone and ice, only the vast expanse of Loorien outside of Helovia’s boundaries, but beneath it is the streak of pheromone that marks her brother somewhere in these woods.

She and her golden son make their way towards it, Rikyn now trailing behind the Lady at a floating, high footed trot after realizing he was being left behind and venturing quite quickly in the wrong direction. She’s taken less care to monitor his every move since the season of his birth has risen into the full heat of Tallsun, the boy two months old and quite strong and intelligent. She has shown him all the paths nearest to the Basin and fears little that he’ll get so lost as to not be able to come home should they be separated, his only true risk while wandering those who lived outside the mountain; even then, she had made sure that her children and the children of her kin would never again be without a place to go.

The memory of Arah and her twins weighs heavily on her still, a guilt she cannot really understand because she is usually so absorbed in herself that the lives of others hold little consequence. But Time, as Illynx is apt to think, is prone to change even the most hardened of paths, and it is a softening of her heart that leaves her so lost and conflicted as to why she holds such concern that the Impersonator and her children had been forced to walk so far when they had passed two herds to arrive home, bloody and broken. If she had only gone to Kahlua sooner…

But there was no room for what could have been in this life. Illynx knows this more purely than most. All she might cling to now is the comfort that, should the unspeakable happen to her kin again, they would have the safety of the World’s Edge to cling to.

Among other things, of course; nothing the golden bitch does is of truly pure intent. Any who know her expect nothing less than to be cut by her gleaming presents and silvery words; it is no different with her contracts, her guises and carefully constructed facades of friendship and communion.

"Puppy!" her son’s shout is accompanied with a rush of his gangly limbs and dark frame, the colt darting ahead of her, his small frame temporarily obscuring who he ran to greet until a pair of figures is revealed, drawing, most immediately, a smile to the woman’s face, one that is bold and brilliant for she know this man and has missed him but also because her son draws these things from her with his youth and innocence; the child of the Engineer comes to a clumsy and eager halt in a less than respectable distance from the man, his nose lowered and golden eyes glittering enthusiastically as he looks at the coyote pup with laughter lingering silent on his lips.

"Rikyn, leave that poor man b- Ruka!" her own voice calls only seconds after her son makes his charge towards the newborn companion, her words initially spoken to draw the boy’s speed to a halt but transforming at her realization of who it was the kid barged in on so rudely. The man’s name is said sweetly and with cheer, true enthusiasm lighting in her heart to know that the deep chestnut stallion had not been stolen away by the darkness; it does not help, perhaps, that her last words with him had been less than chaste or kind. She arrives before the slender and elegant figure of one of her few friends and nods cheerfully in greeting, her son sparing neither of the adults a single glance as he remained transfixed on the dog.

"You have come home!"

There was a river once,
with many round stones
enchanted by shallow hopes
of embracing the ocean;
water is peculiar this way,
how its life is a line
that cannot bend or change
without the approval of its bed.