As soon as he crossed the wall he was running, bulk streaking as fast as his legs could carry it across the waving grasses that fringed the forest of their home. He didn’t know where he was going, only that he needed to get away, somewhere that Kahlua couldn’t find him; she had hurt him today, yes, but it was not her fault, and the Queen was not the sort to just let an obviously upset friend of any sort simply walk out of a conversation without hoping to help him feel better.

He was making sure that couldn’t happen. The thought of having to explain himself to her now was horrifying, the sort of fear that brought his tears to life now that the wind buffeted his face and he was moving too swiftly for many to see him long enough to notice him as more than a tank of a stallion barging through the wilds as if on some mission across the country. How this would look to any who had seen him bolt from the Edge he did not care; let them think something horrible was befalling them, or that he had been chased from within.

Both were true to him, in their own ways.

His heart was breaking, an agonizing feeling for any who have never felt it before, and as he runs and the tears sting he tells himself that this is what he gets; this is the fate for any fool who reaches for the stars and fails, and he deserves all of this. The sensation that the world is falling in on him, that demons have barred his way home because within its safety is her face and her smile, and he cannot bare it. He cannot stand for this, not alone, not now.

Why was he such an idiot? All he’d had to do was keep his damn mouth shut and none of this would be happening, he could still be there alongside the sea with her laughing and hiding himself and still able to smile when he thought of her. Now she was just like everything else truly important to him in his life – unreachable as the Moon’s throne.

He doesn’t know where he’s going truly until he sees the sandy red earth that surrounds the entrance to the caves, the place where all of Helovia had hidden not so long ago, and while he doesn’t want to go under ground he can at least place why it is he has run here of all places.

Ranjiri.

She had said she’d be his friend, and she was all he had outside of the Edge because he was an awkward fool who never left it long enough to forge any meaningful relationships outside it. As his mind found her name it registered just how long he had been running and how very dry his eyes and tongue were, his muscles suddenly seizing up as he glances at the morning sunlight rising on the horizon.

Had he really galloped all this way, he manages to think as his knees give out from beneath him and he hits the hard red earth with a loud SHOOOOSH and a rising cloud of crimson dust, the skin on his legs shredding on impact and leaving him with raw, faintly bleeding sores.

As he lays there, sure he has nothing left to give from himself anymore, the tears come again.

Not caring enough to rise at the moment he simply lays there with his legs tucked close to him, blood and saline dripping to the ground in silence as his sides heave and he holds his eyes shut so tight that the wrinkles spread from the lids to the flesh around the orbits and he looks like a miserable old man softly sobbing into his own knees, a golden feather dangling from his mane.

[ OOC: Open for any! <3 ]

Of all the bodies to alight on the sand, it was one he knew by smell and sound before he even looked up. No other creature was so subtle in their landing, or smelled so strongly of the sea and the old, wise trees of his home, the metallic tang of her scales burning through the salty odor of his dust covered tears; embarrassed, above all things, he buries his face deeper into his knees and makes several large choking sounds as he tries to stop the crying, Semira’s gentle half touch to his shoulder barely noticed through the blurry reality of his eyes being pressed into the bones of his legs.

She says only his name, painful enough to warrant another piteous whimper from his covered face, the press of her body against his own comforting but agonizing in its own way for it is not the embrace he had wished for today.

For a long while, it is quiet, the only song drifting across the red earth the sound of the dragon’s breathing and the quiet weeping of the stallion on the ground alongside her travelling in the wind. He wishes that there was some easier way to revert the hours and to have never said what he had back on the cliff, but he also knows that it is better to know that his love is imagined than to continue living in a false reality; he also knows that it was foolish of him to expect it back, that it is even worse that he is here crying about it.

It’s not like he can change her, either of their hearts. And that she had not heard his sonnet, that she was such a fool and that he was the bigger one for believing that she was wise and insightful…

It makes him want to laugh.

The more he thinks about it the more it presses at him, until finally he lifts his eyes and they no longer leak tears and he’s smiling like a madman; he’d thought she was a kindred spirit, of sorts, when all she ever had been was a pretty girl shrouded in the lies of his youth.

Oh, father, if you could see your son now. You wouldn’t claim him.

He realizes that he is laughing, in an exhausted sort of way, and gives into it, his sides rippling uncontained and the sound echoing forward, legs sprawling out on the ground alongside him as he rolls flat on one side and feels the hot sand grinding against his face. He is staring at nothing as his eyes slide shut, the laughter dying with his vision, words finally finding their way to his lips.

”I’m an idiot,” is all he says, the faint rounding of his words evidence of his dying laughter, ”an absolute hopeless fool.”

She asks him, when he finally finds the air in his lungs to speak, if he wants to talk about it.

No, he immediately thinks, the thought sharp and ruthless in his frustration, trailed after by a stream of thoughts that ring to the tune of, not in a thousand years. But the silence comes swift and is swallowing, the song of his friend’s voice a comfort he had not known he needed as the vibrations died in his skin from where their bodies lie touching on the sand.

She was so warm, as warm as the sun burned earth beneath him.

He opens his eyes, and the horizon ripples and weaves in the illusions of moisture evaporating into the desert air, distorts, in ways, so similar to that in which his own life had suddenly twisted and contorted into an unrecognizable figure. In his heart, he feels the dreams of belonging to Kahlua and she to him writhing, slowly slipping into death, right alongside his childhood aspirations to one day run alongside his Gods, the twelve of their hooves drumming the song of his people; it dies with the fears that he will be alone, forever, comes to rest, at last, at the very bottom of everything that had left him in his short life.

He leaves her there, his Glass Goddess.

”I’ve already tried talking,” he answers morosely, deep voice low and calm despite the slip of agitation that meets his tones, hinting at the fact that he has little interest in reviewing what has come to pass, the taste of the red dust settling against his dry tongue as he continues to lay and stare at the blue lip meeting the rim of the globe, ”it doesn’t work.”

You wouldn’t understand, anyway.

Not like he would know; it’s not like he follows Semira around ensuring she’s not falling into spike laden pits of love like he had.

Sighing, two miniature clouds of dust swirl into the air and away from him, his blue eyes watching their path away with half hearted interest, seeking something to look upon that was not the repeated image of her face as his confessions slip through one perfect ear and out the other.

She does not love him. He would have been wiser to listen to his heart from the beginning, to have kept his secrets as they were; it was safer that way, he’d thought then, no one could be hurt by his foolishness if he never spoke a word, even if it ached in his heart that he must pine for her always. It would have left him with the dream it might be requited; it would allowed him to have only assumed he was unworthy.

Now he knows, and it is cruel, too cruel for even the comfort of a friend to so easily soothe.

”Nieque has lined my path with briars,” he mutters scornfully, dramatically, even, not caring that he uses the name of a forbidden God in front of the daughter of the woman who had forewarned him of its use. It’s a slip of the tongue, really, one that rises from his most elder memories of being small and hearing his father curse the life that he himself had been given in such a manner, and even while he cannot know Semira will take no offense by it, he does not care.

Is it so much to ask for one, single rose?

”Nieque?” she asks, and his ears fall back on his head.

Son of a bitch, he thinks from his prone position, realizing all too late that Semira was too curious to let such a slip go without explanation and not wishing to dash that dream here as well. He had found something like friendship with the dragon child, the first to welcome him into the wood and one of the few faces that he found around himself time and time again when he needed someone the most. Another was back in the Edge, standing along the sea, probably looking confused, the others spread far across Helovia and Loorien, for he did not know where Mirage was or where his other friends at been at the time of his unfortunate display of affection. But this one… this one was here.

And she had heard that name, that horrible, forbidden name, rising from his mouth unbidden from phrases knitted deep into the fabric of his being for it was a part of him, that God and his land and the stories that had died with them both. His father would have been amidst all the horror that befell it had it not been for that damnable God of horses threatening to kill his dragon, his mother would not have discovered the grey king as he left his home, and Dragomir himself would never have come into being.

It was that God’s fault. The one that had made him and all the others that had come before him, leading him into this terrible life where he would pine and desire for all the things he could never have – and for what? To punish him for the sins of his father, his father’s father? He cannot find an answer more solid than the magic he has been given, and that seems quite a cruel joke of a purpose to give life to a man who would long so desperately to feel truly happy as youth had promised him life would be.

And he does not know how to tell Semira who this man is, the invisible dead martyr of a land built on foundations of hate and resentment, falsehoods and distrust; he has seen the way that his own home functions and he cannot imagine a world in which there was so little love or light. In his time within Helovia he had met very few of wicked heart to disparage him against the hope that most of Helovia was good and kind, that all his struggles to adhere to Mirage’s warnings had been valiant and worth the effort; there was peace here, long and colored with laughter, where there had never been so true a peace in Isilme.

He cannot tell her that this God shaped his youth and thus is a part of his heart, either, for this God is bloody and worn and tired where her Goddess shines with benevolence and grace, a mockery of his father’s faith that makes his stomach sour if only that it hurts desperately to know one’s kin have been fools.

He doesn’t even truly know who Nieque is, only that he blames him for everything that is rancid and terrible within this life.

”The Father of all horses,” he answers with a muffled tone, not really wanting to go into this conversation but finding no other option as the silence stretches long and tense between his mind’s rambling and the inquiry posed to him by Semira, ”my childhood God.” And who was his God now, if not Nieque?

It was not the Moon. He admired her beautiful and her power but he felt no bonds with her as he had felt then, in his innocence, towards the lord of all the land dwellers and the mover of mountains; perhaps he is drawn to the Earth, still, as he had been that long ago day at the shrines of the Gods, but that God had shaken the ground beneath him and roared from the heavens, sent the lost boy frightfully galloping back home with nothing to show for it and an emptiness still deeply buried in his soul.

Perhaps he had no God. It made him feel even more desperately alone, even with the princess’ precious warmth pressed against him as it was; no love, no God, nothing but his glass and dull witted dreams…

Unless Semira was still his friend, along with Resplendence and Ranjiri.

It was why he lied, in ways, for he did still believe in Nieque and the tales woven around the creation of the species, and why he did not tell of all the laws that revolved around that bloody totem. He would not tell of them.

She would find that answer somewhere else. He was too ashamed of it all to bare the weight of the thought for even as long as it took to cast it away much less vocalize it to someone he did not wish to upset or have abandon him, still fretful in all his naivety that they would all discard him once they knew the truth of his origins and the dark, dark day that had been born from that name.

She seemed almost enthused to be discussing a bloody God, but he supposes anyone would be if they only knew the most surface of details about him. He had once been enamored with the whole vision of the Lord of Horses, back when the world had been small and he had believed that all creatures that were not the equine were wicked and set to murder and maim or were broken beings most mercifully laid to eternal rest. He had loved the stories of Nieque lifting the mountains from the continent of Isilme and the God’s impressive powers over stone and plant life, the grand tales of battle between Gods and mortals alike for the honor of their creator.

So blessed had the equines of Isilme been that they had been granted dragons, the only creature of companionship allowed to any of the species, and how could a boy not love tales that painted him as a chosen person of such a great entity?

Her question plunges into his heart because he knows the answer and he does not want to go there here and now, but it is better than dwelling on his broken hopes and thoughts of Kahlua framed in the sunlight. He draws up the names of the other Gods, muted and worn in his mind, not the bright, permanent emblems of his people – Sepagus, God of Winds, and Cinnoru, the master of the sea.

Her dragon purr urges him to answer her even more, and he mulls it over until deciding that, surely, her heart is too pure to be tainted by the wickedness of Isilme’s dead Gods and fallen kingdom. He’s still thinking it over when her cough and next question lift his ears and his thoughts, the stallion lifting his body from the earth to rest with his bloody legs beneath him and a frown still caught on his lips. ”Yes,” he answers to the second question, hesitant to move into the first though he has decided he will oblige her desire to know, ”Gods of a place called Isilme, which is no more. I can only assume they rule over the nothingness that is the birth land of their children. Mother tried to return there before finding father again and told us terrible stories of the black pit it had become, consumed by shadow and evil.”

He sighs.

”There were three – the dragons have no God, as far as I know. The pegasi were born from Sepagus, and the unicorns from Cinnoru, and the mother for each was the element which they wielded. The equine was born from the earth, the pegasus from the clouds, and the horned from the sea,” he did not know whether or not the fish had a God, but he doubted it intensely and still held to his own opinion that Nieque had made all the wildlife, ”I assume the wolves and fishes and birds belong to Nieque. But maybe he only made the wolves and Sepagus the birds and Cinnoru the fishes. I was born well after my parents left that place and so I do not know anything more than what I have been told in tales.”