The sun is a scorching weight against his back, but the call of the western ocean's breezes keeps him comfortable high in the sky. Ilaria's familiar weight is absent from his back, and his mind is quiet through distance and solitude. The wind whispers through his ears, long mane striking back against his withers and eyes hooded against the breaking of the air across his features. Silence is a rare commodity for a bonded equine, but he welcomes it with a wholeness that completes the aching emptiness in his breast. Gone. She's gone. Why did she go? Ilaria is not there to remind him of the better things, to draw his mind away from the turmoil of his gut-wrenching loss. 

He cannot fault her for her independence, for she has never shown a real devotion to any divine being in his presence. And any herd would welcome his talented, kindhearted baby sister if they had any knowledge in their brains. But he had been under the foolish, naive impression that perhaps...she might have stayed. That they would grow old together beneath the sun. Disproving the disloyalty of their parents by remaining by one another's sides. He felt so conflicted, left behind with nothing but a gaping nothingness and a thousand unanswered questions. He wanted to hate her for abandoning him like everyone else had. But she was one of the few he'd never be able to really hate. The wind whistling in his ears is the distraction he needs from the furor and turmoil in his normally benign soul. 

Without Ilaria, his wandering mind has no steering gale, a ship lost at sea with no lighthouse or harbor in sight. But he is not deaf to the world, and his cyclical thoughts dissolve with a familiar sound of parting water below. Verdant eyes sway between bent knees to investigate the disruption, singular angelic wing dipping beneath the currents to circle loosely above the sun-scorched earth. Cera is a creature of love and affection, and he thrives off the connection he holds with others. The bedraggled, but still beautifully familiar pale primrose bodice is unmistakable. He cannot stand to see her there, a beaten and defeated mass. He feels her loneliness and despair like a sympathetic weight in his chest. There is no doubt in the pious Prince's mind that he has been drawn here, to her, for a reason. He is always there to gentle her calloused hands, bandage and heal what she cannot do herself. Cera is no healer, but he will not leave her to this darkness that looms on her horizon. So engulfed in shadow she cannot even see the helping hand reaching through the light. 

As he nears, dropping from the sky on quiet wings, his heart aches for his oldest friend. She is like a ragdoll, limply awaiting her next tormentor, prepared to be battered and bruised once more as her fraying seams give way quietly beneath her eroding spirit. He lands in a whisper of crackling, dried grass. It seems to croon and moan in the brittle wind, trying to speak to him in ominous resonance. But Cera has no time for omens and the natural energies of the earth, which he has always trusted. Not when Sikeax is crumpled and destitute before him, in need of his presence once more. Whatever fate has in store, Cera will not contest. His faith is unwavering, and while his own demons howl promisingly in the shadows (we are not gone, she is only a distraction, we will come for you) he is selfless in his desire to rebuild her once more. 

Like a praying man at an altar he glides to his knees beside her fallen form. Even here she is quintessential, and he recalls the love he used to hold for her as a colt, when he had been too big in the knees and too shy to pursue her any further. Romanticism had faded into a dull, bleak canvas over the years. But as he gently positioned himself at her back, he recalled with quiet nostalgia the love he'd held for her. His only friend, the one who had explored and adventured with him when he had still believed the world was bright and painless. But they had drifted apart in time. And they only seemed to return to one another - magnets, searching for their polar north - when life had kicked them back down to the bottom of the pit. They were like lone wolves that came together to lick each other's wounds when they were injured, relishing the temporary sensation of pack and family. 

Recalling her easily burned skin, Cera cast his wing across her body, shading her to the best of his ability. He ignored the burn in his radius bone, willing to sacrifice his comfort when she so clearly needed it more. "We need to stop meeting like this," he tried to joke, but even he could tell it fell a little flat. A little wrong. Sighing, the Prince dropped his muzzle to the spot just behind Sikeax's ear, wanting to comfort with physical touch if she as receptive to the motion. "What can I do, Sia?" Whatever she asked of him, he would do it. For her, he would. This was what they did. Propping one another up just enough to keep stumbling further down the glass-covered path, their bare feet bleeding and their hands clutched tight until the time their paths diverged once more. 

THANKS FOR THE FEELS ZUNO