ashamin

lochan

&rakt

So what about when Ashamin woke up?

When he woke up, it was pitch black. Ashamin suspected no one else was awake but his companion, who stared at him with a particular urgency. Stared, with those solid white eyes, as if the haruspex's oversleeping was causing him to miss a great event. There was something out there, didn't the painted buck know? There was something happening, and they could not be late.

Lochan led Ashamin first out of the cave, and then into the one adjacent. It was long and dark; its walls contained a narrow and winding corridor that was cold and seemed to take him nowhere. But Lochan was insistent, Lochan was overflowing with the knowledge that at its end, this tunnel would bring to him and the haruspex a new member, nay, beginning, of the family.

Every step Ashamin took was haunted by its echoes. Orangemoon was waning, Frostfall waxing, and almost a year had passed since he had arrived in Helovia. He walked taller, he walked braver, he walked stronger. His long tail did not drag, his soft heart did not sink. He pulsed with electricity, he burned with passions he had once never known. He was everything his father had wanted him to be, and so, now, he was ready for Rakt to join him in this life.

And there at the end of the hall; under the hole in the roof; in the light of a red aurora; beneath the watchful gaze of Orion's bloody nebula; pulsing with energy; burning with starlight; having named itself for the copper taste the haruspex knew so well; he was. Rakt, son of fire and light, broke free from his egg and steadied himself on four powerful, newborn legs.

Lochan's first painting of his brother was a long and formless slash of red acrylic, a permanent mark on Ashamin's mind. Lochan's first words to his brother, spoken in their shared tongue and hidden from Ashamin's mind, were these:

Is it really you?

And young as he was, as fresh as his milk teeth and un-budded his antlers, bloody red Rakt answered softly to the little eye, that yes. It was really him. With the stars shining down, the two brothers embraced. The elder yet smaller licked the wet from the newborn, and the bonded father of them both watched in awe.

Carefully Ashamin walked forward--carefully he joined in the moment. He looked over his new companion, felt the surge of a second, strong bond, and took in all that he could. The red fur, the majestic bulk of his body even at birth, the gold markings dripping from his eyes and down his chest that turned to stars on the sides of his thick coat: all of these made Rakt. When the young fawn shook away the wet, when he brayed and crushed the remains of his egg beneath his feet, gold and red stardust splattered from his coat like bloody light.

These were the things that made Rakt: these were start of their family.

""