EREBOS

Excitement pulsed, radiant, enlightened, enlivened, given freedom and reigning supreme in the child’s veins; a steady beat of intellectual life carved and resurfacing, too bold, too audacious, and too valiant to be smothered and dimmed. Like everything thus far in his short life, the young lord grasped hold and clenched firmly on the designs of sagacity, roaming and unfurling through the vestiges of perception and rationale. While Adelric served as an agent of information, a merchant of wisdom, a vessel and container of musings, the lithe scion was free to observe, witness, and stoke the fine webs of knowledge, feeding, imagining, and brewing upon the riveting pieces of gathered, collected nuances and sentiments. A spark, an inferno, a blue flame dancing in the chilling wind, forgetting and forgoing all other essences of life, puzzling over the tribulations and trials of Tobias and his wonderful existence, stared from his prior pose on the glacier floor, features only shifting to glance towards comrade or deer. Though his rapier brethren claimed the new babe said nothing, something clearly made a mark, a niche, in his skull: for the fawn liked him, Erebos, gangly princeling and intrepid, undaunted beast of the north. The notion startled him for just a moment, mouth closing in the subtle graces of a creature acknowledged by another, pleased, content, elated, and thrilled to be recognized as a friend of a friend. His smile only grew, widened, lengthened in measure, long, leonine tail swishing in a youth’s idle, simple joy, pausing to gaze up at Adelric and his unwavering fortitude. “He does?” Then, with wild abandon, he awarded the bundled, struggling cervine a zealous, ardent outcry, passionate truth without the specious, spurious deceit of too many other babes lost in the outcrops of fallen empires and damned pinnacles. “I like him too!”

But his confidante stumbled into another unknown topic, and Erebos was left to wallow in his own ignorance once more. His brow furrowed, his mind swam, and the contemplations could be seen across his juvenile features, catching angles and passing thoughts, puttering and muttering over the ruins and trials they were doomed to meet. Neither his mother or father had a bonded of their own, and he’d yet to inquire Loth about her beautiful, ivory raven; his experiences with companions were sorely lacking, admiring from distances and stumbling through sullen curiosities, and with only the bare bones of understanding and comprehension, he was forced to play the fool. It was not a position he enjoyed. “No, not really. I haven’t met many of these guys.” The idle trappings in his core fueled and fermented, stole and absconded, and he revealed the only cards he had to offer, drawing his inquisitive gaze back to Adelric, granting the good sense his parents had given him in his flailing, silly days of romping, rolling boyhood. “But, doesn’t he need food? And protection? Like you and I?”