Zèklè

He had been creating something.

It had taken a long, long time (basically forever) for him to find all the right materials. For a while he'd thought that he might never find the exactly perfect metal- and then in a stroke of luck he'd run into a nugget of gold, literally stumbled over it in the Heart caves, and inspiration had struck the aspiring artist just when he needed it most. He'd retreated back to his stash in the rocks of the coastline, and for then next couple hours, he'd worked, while Squishy dutifully watched.

The finished product was small, and crude, but he'd poured his heart into it and he stared at it with a powerful pride. Now he only had to find her, and his creation would be complete.

---

Zero wandered through the forest where he'd first met Isopia, with Squishy trailing dutifully behind. He wasn't sure exactly what he expected to find. Something awesome, hopefully, or at the very least pretty darn cool. The sun slanted lazily through gaps in the trees above, casting puddles of light on the forest floor, and Zero had been jumping from sunbeam to sunbeam in a strange, reversed game of the floor is hot lava! He liked it beneath the trees, though he also liked the desert, of course, and the ocean- he liked everything, pretty much, but he was learning to distinguish between what exactly he liked. The forest felt safe, like a hug from the Earth. It wrapped around him and held him close, blocking out the terrible endlessness of the sky. The forest held secrets, he had decided, but not big ones like whales. Little secrets, tiny secrets which sat beneath rocks and under roots, just waiting to be unearthed, and he was gonna find all of them, and show them all to Ma.

He didn't get anywhere particularly fast, but that was okay. For a boy whose brain never seemed to stop, Zero fell easily into his own worlds, losing track of time (and himself). He'd abandoned his lava game in favor of a finding game, one which made him stop regularly when something interesting caught his eye, and he might have missed the girls entirely had it not been for a lucky shift in the wind. "...You love it?" came a familiar voice, drifting calmly through the trees, and the boy's ears pricked up as he recognized his friend, delight blooming in his heart.

Isopia! Grinning, the boy picked up his pace, darting and drifting through trees in the direction from which the voice had come. The thought of her brought a strange (but not entirely unpleasant) tightness in his stomach, and he wanted to jump in his excitement to see her. He could show her Squishy, tell her that he'd found his magic after all, share tales of his adventures; and he could hear her stories, and it would be wonderful, he expected, because what else could it be? He wondered if she had changed, and if she would notice the feathers in his hair?

"Iso!"

Triumphantly he burst out of the trees, dark legs striking haphazardly at the ground. Surprise! his body language seemed to say, before morphing quickly to surprised! and the boy nearly stumbled back in surprise. The creature before him was his friend, but not- his eyes traveled up her impossibly large figure with increasing amazement, the maturity which dwarfed him. He blinked at her, speechless, black mouth agape; was this really his Isopia? And if so, how? Had it really been so long? Why was she so much bigger than him? They'd been the same size last time, he was pretty sure, but now she looked like a grown up, and he was still a short and gangly colt, and, and...

And was that Zah'a behind her?

It was officially too much for the lightning-backed boy to handle, though the appearance of Zah'a gave filled him with nothing but brilliant delight. Between the magically grown Isopia and the remarkably returned Zah'a, Zero really know where to turn or what to think about first. Zah'a was okay! Isopia was huge! And he had a present, and so much to tell them, and so much he wanted to ask! In a flurry his head flipped from girl to girl, words rising half-formed and dying on his lips. It was rare for the boy to be at a loss for words. He wanted to say a million things, but in the end the only coherent exclamation that made it from his lips was an explosive, elated, "Hey!"


@[Zahra]
We invaded. Sorry not sorry. <3