The sun dapples Kyst’s wings as she flies, their expanse stretched wide to ride the hot wind blowing in from the south in heady gusts. Occasionally, she tucks her legs and wings into her speckled frame and dives, a speeding fur bullet, the thrill of her sudden and chaotic descents highly distracting to her bonded, who was, ironically (though she did not know it yet) trying to graze.

Its in one such swoop that the mare looks up with her golden eyes hostile and finds a figure has come across the horizon – and though it is too far to tell, there is something so familiar to his stride, the angle of his triage of crowns that draws her figure to moving, even before the speckled feline drifts silently towards the same disturbance, some meters ahead of her bonded unicorn.

And so the griffon is the first to see Kirchoff, rolling about in the Tallsun dust, and while the emotions which rush through her heart are those of disdain (just look at him, rolling around like some animal, leaving his dog stench about to assault a more civil creature’s nostrils later on), Illynx knows that familiar mental scoff anywhere, her mind honing in on the bond, to see through Kyst’s eyes.

They have shared this less, the more Kyst has learned to speak, and the image of the far away ground swirling about (the griffon wheels overhead instead of landing) makes the mare’s stomach churn – but, the negative aspect of the vision is over ridden by the excitement which lights suddenly in her usually dark, careless heart.

Wherever Kirchoff is, Ulrik is not far.

The familiarity of the silhouette becomes the familiarity of a face, a man – the only man who knows her as he knows her. That she has missed him, that she wished well of him in the hours they spent distant, apart, often wondering jealously if he had taken another woman, if she had given him better sons; these are things she will never admit.

But they ride in the tilt of her smile, the vibrant light of her golden eyes as she runs her eyes across the succulent curvature of his flesh, the dark ringlets of his hair caught in the heat of the Tallsun breeze; she herself arrives at a trot, graceful, barely containing her anxiousness to be near him (perhaps contained by the notion she was eager at all), legs halting in the rustle of grass and thistle as she simply looks at him.

Her aureate eyes are deep, deep like oceans; they are dark and cold beneath and yet, in that darkness, something stirs, something moves beneath the bright ripple of love she won’t accept, love she pushes away with anger that, too, shines as she looks at him. The only significant thing to be noticed is that these emotions are revealed at all, that the chilly porcelain of the mask she has worn for her entire life has been left somewhere in this Meadow…

Wherever she had been when Kyst had first noticed him.

The spell is broken when she breathes; she takes a heady drink of the air, hoping to dwell in the smell of snow and copper, steel and stone.

She finds instead mists upon the metal, the tangy taste of pine altered by the cool acridity of oaks, of more temperate trees, a smell that takes her back to being small, innocent, more vulnerable than she feels now (as she had been without her armor, both figurative and literal); a life before her Empress and the black path that she walked, a life before this man, the mountain… before Illynx had ever known sorrow, or the branding ember of pain. As if the light within her gaze was not scattered and myriad enough, she now adds confusion, curiosity, bewilderment to their depths of gold…

"Ulrik," she manages.

Silence, but for the flutter of Kyst’s wings as she lands on her bonded’s platinum covered back.

"You do not live on the mountain, anymore," says the woman, at last, but there is so much to the sweet song of her voice that one cannot assume this is all she wants to know of – rather, its all she can decide is decent, that does not involve her dragging out her feelings.

That does not make her dwell in how very weak age and life have made her.


@Ulrik