Яikyn

Liking the sound of where this is going, eager as he always is to see new things and be new places, the buck looks up at the mention of the Basin, and doesn’t look away. It’s a minor distraction nagging at me as I continue to await the black hybrid’s answer, perhaps looking disgruntled as a result.

Maybe I look even more so when I realize he does live there, and when he can’t find his mother, either. Looking back out at the peaks that I know to obscure the valley of unicorns, I feel that same dark feeling creep back inside me. The feeling of not fitting in, of having come home to a land that had warped, ever so slightly, and into which my piece no longer neatly fit. I think of the soldier’s meeting, and Caleb, his wings as wrong as this child is, and of all the strange faces that didn’t quite fit in there. I wonder why Deimos has allowed all of it to occur, and whether I should blame him, or Thranduil; perhaps even Hotaru, though I’d rather not.

It’s far easier to blame men than pretty women.

No one walks over to us from there, either. A sigh, heavy and long, whispers forth, as if its wispy sound might stretch all the way to the mountain itself. I bid this dark, horrible feeling inside me anytime I think about returning go away with the sound, and while the majority of it drains away, there is still a shallow reservoir of sadness at the bottom of my heart. I’ll take him to the hidden pass, I tell myself, no further.

"I was born there, too," I tell him, hoping he doesn’t see the soft sorrow in the gold of my gaze as I look back around at him, that it hides behind my revelation. Needing more distractions, loathing the idea of walking all the way there in silence, I create one, pulling a dust laden game from the discarded memories of my youth.

"Have you ever played tag?"

My buck, as he did at the mention of venturing, perks up at the name of a game he’s never heard; this is mostly because it’d just be taking turns chasing one another with two people, and that’s the sort of whimsical, foolish game a stallion cannot permit himself to play. Now, however, we have the needed third party to make it a game (though my size means I have a rather unfair advantage), and the distraction sounds pleasant.

"I’ll be “it” first, though I admit I have no idea what “it” is… Something scary, I guess. Anyway. If I touch you, you’re “it,” and you have to try to catch me, or Duir," I smile, finding true warmth to the gesture, because you can’t talk about games you’d played as a child without feeling the weight of the world fall away. "should be more fun than just walking."

there's no place to hide down here