He knows this place.

        It belongs to his dreams. The silver creature moves between the trees on quiet feet, cloven hooves pressed to moss like a finger pressed daintily to his lips. Shh. He is not the same beast he was when last he tread these paths. He comes without the butterfly, this time. Without the burden of memory a raw wound on his mind. The movement of his legs is too organic, to graceful, to call machine-like but something of the unicorn is less like horse and more like knives.

        He calls this inheritance.

        No observer could now brand him child with sincerity. He has grown into every promise his soiled bloodlines ever made, and yet he is not the prodigal son setting foot on the soil he was birthed from. No; he is simply a traveler, a wraith passing through again as if called by business left unfinished. He hesitated before, when he was small. Now he drifts between the trees without apology: usurper, trespasser, traitor. A cold part of his heart beats slow recognition. The sparse, silken strands of his whiskers quiver as he fills his lungs with pine, with mountain air and the promise of snow. And in his dreams, in every one he set foot here, he walked this way - was drawn. In his dreams, there was a reason.

        A part of him wonders if he is dreaming now. He hesitates, though nothing in the forest threatens him. Briefly, curved silver ears cup forward and the blue, blue winter of his eyes seeks out in the shadows the promise of flame, familiar and cherished.

        None is there.

        He knows she will not come. He knows he left her far behind for no reason other than his own carelessness. Caneo wonders if the snake now eating up his heart is called grief, or if that, too, is merely his birthright. He stands a while tasting it, whatever it is, feeling it pulse in his veins. The evening stinks with the promise of a coming winter, and his thoughts shift to the cold, to machinery and great, horned creatures laboring through snow. Does he return to them? Does he seek the desert elsewhere, the daughter of a god he despised? Or is it the moon, the cunning moon, who sings to him now in her own sweet voice? She is just visible behind him, a crooked white sickle to mirror the silvered sheen of his coat. And Caneo knows uncertainty.

        This is the only gift Helovia ever gave him.

        He is wary now, as he peers into the woods. Because a moving target is a more difficult one, he presses on. No specific destination calls him; no face floats in the surface of his mind, begging to be found. Those who would be there are drowned in memory. Those who will come... he looks forward to them, instead. New faces. A new self. He is not the boy who left, not the stunted creature begging for something like family. All that softness has bled from him like the black bled from his coat once, long ago. Now, he is a knife.

        He wonders if tonight will find for him a wielder.