The days had changed him and the nights had only melded those days together into a string of indecipherable loneliness. It was a never ending chain of loss that warped and transformed his confidence into silence and his normally reckless way of being into thoughtful reverie. Whatever he’d been, he was no more. Whatever he was now… well Atlas wasn’t sure anyone would know what to make of him. When his spirits were alight, he considered himself a beautiful disaster, but when they were adrift amid a stormy sea of chaos, he was nothing if not despaired.  But what, you may ask, sent him into such a downward spiral? Perhaps it was his mind and the way he longed for the kind of knowledge and power to overcome the effects of life and the hurts he’d come to know… or simply just his need to express more than he could positively name.

Either way, Atlas had gone from Helovia and returned with the wisdom he’d been searching for. He was certainly no master of the art, but patience had been afforded him and that patience was something that had clipped his wings in the past. As he roamed aimlessly through the vast range of the only place he’d considered a home, he took the time to truly see it where he had not before. He admired the lovely traces of an autumn sun as it poured through the branches above him or delighted in the faded blue of the ocean’s waves as they rolled in before him. All around him, Atlas found evidence of beauty and the kind of life he’d been avoiding to indulge his childish cravings. At last, the young colt had shed the veils of adolescence and grown into the man his father claimed he’d never be. That youthful belligerence has been tucked away in favor of maturity and his headstrong manner had been abandoned to accommodate humility.

Yet, to be frank, there still remained an essence of what once was. There was still that undeniable shimmer of intrigue in his eye and the promise of feeling in the way that he moved without reservation. Atlas was a force now instead of a lesson in need of heeding. He acknowledged his fears, but did not let them hinder him. He spoke outright with as much truth as any man could fathom, but did not let it become him. Yes, Atlas was changed, but he was in fact still just the same.

In the time it took for his name to be been forgotten from the lips of those he’d met, the starlit stallion had come to master himself completely, along with the magic he’d been keeping under wraps. At first it had been slow-going and incapacitating, but the time shaper had spent many a night staring at himself from beyond his body. He had learned of his power and come to understand fully how it affected him. He had watched the very same sunset too many times to count until his mind had collapsed from the sheer exhaustion of simply trying. But Atlas, the man who had once taken delight in evoking another’s frustrations, had learned how to manipulate time. Whether or not that was when his transformation had begun was yet to be determined, but somehow he thought it was the beginning of change.

As he travelled into new and unknown territory, still unaware of the rift Gods or the creatures that had risen up from the underworld, Atlas stumbled upon the most enchanting land of all. Above him, the stars reflected onto the waters below him. Amid the many constellations, he felt at ease, at home somehow. The region was wide and quite, the thin mirror of glass-like ocean water nearly as still as his slowed heartbeat.  Atlas had never found a place so suited to his liking and felt instantly that this was where he felt most at ease in his own skin. Reflective, the moon-kissed man waded into the shallow sea, his disruption causing the stars upon its surface to meld and shift against his gentle wake. Desiring to immerse himself in such beauty, Atlas tilted his face toward the fluttering of moon dust upon the water. It wasn’t until he’d done as much that he realize the faint refrains of song as they was lifted to the moon above, angelic. He imagined that the land was inviting him home, welcoming him into the tender heaving of life’s embrace, but even the narrow sea told a different tale than his mind’s envisioning, for the soft wavering of its surface radiated from a distance.

Instead of thinking, he followed Orion’s belt toward his curiosities and the many questions that bloomed from their very existence. Atlas had wondered if this was a message from the Gods, a summoning of sorts in the dead of the night, but what, or rather who, he found was certainly no creature of divinity at all… but something else entirely. She, for with a voice as pure as hers there was no alternative, was a woman he’d seen many times before in the faces of a million others. Atlas had in fact been quite the Casanova in his day you see, but there was something softer, something innocent, something the spoke of pain and of reckoning in the way she danced, the way she sang. He watched for so long, hidden amongst the stars in his coat and the stars all around… for she was beautiful and free. Selfishly, Atlas longed for her freedom and wanted nothing more than to take it from her unknowing hands, but instead found himself frozen by that which he desired so strongly.

What then could he do? He could not steal away something he could not touch and so he reconciled with the fact that something so sacred could not be taken, but perhaps learned. That girl, he decided, was where his journey began… even if the fates told different tales of the future. Without hesitation, Atlas moved forth to greet her, a man now instead of a child. Even as the moonlight illuminated the stardust along his coat and cast a vacant glow across his path, he still had yet to experience the woman’s true loveliness. Only her song had drawn him from his wandering and calmed the calamity in his soul. “Your song,” he began thoughtlessly, imprudently. “Where did you learn it?” It mattered not how many times she had been pressed with such a trivial questions, at least not to Atlas. He was effortlessly striking upon approach and sadly that arrogance had not yet faded. It was in that way that he often forwent proper greeting or introduction, even in the presence of proper ladies. He had grown, that much was certain, but there still remained an emptiness in his heart, a void and lack of caring that still riddled him useless. Perhaps that was merely the way he was meant and would always be.