Dog’s yip carries over the clear region between the two forests and the river, her nose pointing outwards towards the trees on her side of the running water, as if she hears something moving at the gate, or perhaps scented it.

”Lady,” she says through our mental bond, excitement trilling across the space on invisible tethers into my less than enthused heart. Skýlos is young and vibrant, innocent and unbroken for the most part (but for all the ways I have already stunted her light), and she is always excited by the notion of meeting others in the herd. My own feelings on such things differ greatly.

An ear slips back as I think about obeying her silly need to bother everyone who breathes, the usual reservations rising in my heart as I take several deep, calming breaths of the cold air. It has been seasons since I have come here, and not yet have my blackened beasts reared their ugly heads, but each encounter with the horned and wingless creatures that I share this land with sours my chances at remaining as stoic in the face of so much opposition.

She is of no use; she could probably tell me it doesn’t have feathered wings, but if the beast is wearing leathered appendages, she won’t be able to smell them as being different than the pelts that cover the body. Horns smell of nothing. I have asked her as much.

”No feather,” she says after a pause, with a wag of her tail and the easy way she smiles with all her pink gums glistening in the sunlight.

Whoever it is calls out into the cold, and Dog yips her reply loudly, regretfully summoning the wanderer to us if they had any sense or sense of direction. Both ears fall back.

Skýlos stills her childish flailing of joy as she feels the weight of my irritation rise, white tipped tail curling beneath her, cowed against the grass as my wings stretch and I gracefully drift the expanse of water to the opposite bank alongside the dolt of a companion I have been strapped with. One of my wings sweeps low upon landing and topples Dog paw over head in passing, a cruel smile marking my face as I trot out towards the trees, out towards the call of the stranger before she can find us first.

We find her before too long, Dog keeping her distance behind me and sulkily prowling along with her mood dark and regretful; my mood is dark and agitated, not the best to be meeting a unicorn mare with, but I’ve had much practice in controlling my temper as of late. I swing to a curvaceous stop a fair distance from her, wings held firm to my sides to allow easy passage through the trees, blue eyes cold and filled with judgement.

"’Lo," I say softly, running my eyes over her again and finding her a stranger to my gaze – not that it was uncommon (I rarely leave the company of the wind and nothingness to waste time with living things), "what brings you to the realm of Midas?"

Cealestis

There is the usual moment of silence between the two of us, the other mare more hesitant than I prefer in females I encounter but no less calm and belonging than she should be. Most strangers startle when discovered; she merely returns my gaze, the sweep of the iris as it swallows the details before her.

That she was once here was not a fact I could verify with my own knowledge; Dog, in all her socialite prowess, would have known her had we done more journeying among the others, had we left our lonely burrows to dwell among their voices, their auras. But I am not Dog, and their company most often hurts.

It does so now, as I listen to her tale. The tolling of the bell is dark and wicked as it spies her horned face and the smooth flesh of her shoulders, and while her words are still grasped by the logical mind that lay beneath the smut of my blood, it is only my practice in overcoming its rancorous sound that allows me to continue the conversation in a fair light, rather than one of arrogance and rage.

She had been rendered unconscious during a storm, something that I had my own tribulations in; I’d survived a broken wing, having been tossed from the heavens into boughs, and the limb still suffers in the deep cold from time to time, the wound not old enough to have sunk away into the realm of phantom pains. If I dwell on the memory long enough, I can hear the bones snap and pop, I can feel the fire spreading through my shoulder to the fine tips of my wings, and perhaps an emotion reminiscent of pity floods me as I think of being unconscious in a wood with no friends to search for you.

Her laughter is stiff, drawing one of my ears back in agitation at the sound. It was useless, unnecessary – if there was no humor in her tale, why display it?

Even more annoying is that she wants to talk to Midas, and that I have not the slightest clue where the painted man roosts or where his jester Czarina may be. Both ears fall back, not a flattened state, but rather one that implied thought, a lack of something that I should have. My tail curls about my ankles.

"Perhaps he is at the steps," I say, accent laden voice rich and trickling while my eyes are distant and thoughtful, Dog’s tail wagging in approval at the notion – together, as one, we pivot to where the meetings were most often held, hoping the stranger will follow us, "what skills have you, while we search?"

My features bob with each step, curvaceous frame captured in the sunlight that ripples down the strand of land exposed to the light by an absence of boughs alongside the rivers. We will follow this one to the steps, for it is the most forward stream and will most efficiently take us anywhere we wish to be – the cold denotes there will be no swimming and the useless mare has no wings to cover them, anyway, and so I am left to my hooves, walking as a lesser beast among lesser creatures.

The bell snarls.

"I am Cealestis, of the learners, oh," I offer, searching my brain for the rather foreign word that I have been told is my position, "a Genetrix?" A dismayed whine comes from behind me, the emotional flood reading that Dog does not like being left out of the introductions, and with a twinkling eye, I glance back to her before returning my forward aims. "She is Skýlos, Dog. Either she knows to be herself."



C e a l e s t i s</style>
who knows how deep the heart runs</style>

The woman most regretfully does not seem able to even remember what comes naturally to her body, and I glance over at her with a stern and judgmental glance. Even Hemera remembered her skills, as little else as she retained of herself in her madness, and all that this unicorn had been fated to was a knock on the head that had obviously left her whole enough to speak and remember how to get home after a time. She remembered the name of Midas, at least, but to not remember herself? It was a shame.

I return my eyes coldly to the distance ahead of us, and dog wags her tail almost in apology at my stern expression and often rude demeanor. While she can touch upon my memories of once being a proud princess obeyed and respected by all I met, she cannot truly remember them, and she is too humble a beast to understand that dominance is a hard trait to forget.

"A noble career," I chose over my various other thoughts and replies, more eagerly latching my words onto the question she asks me – I am not foolish or stupid in very many ways and talented in hundreds, and I’m proud of it, "I study history, mostly, though I understand much of the arcane and of nature because they are one and the same. All things worth knowing hold foundations in the truths of the past."

A great black feline not unlike the younger one that had accompanied the painted hen I’d met recently in the waters of the Falls approaches, followed in tow by a white blanketed mare of red coloration and sweet demeanor. Wingless and crownless, she is plain, and the preferred company to the horned thing that I guide to the stone pews that often house the proud painted liege of the lands, though I do not know her name.

I remember her face, however, and know that her talents lie in the healing arts, a suitable task for a female of her breeding and nature. Whether or not the teachings of my homeland are viable in the world outside her cruel boundaries is a subject I haven’t tested, but I’ve seen time and time again an equine healer with skills to surpass some of their winged tutors.

Kindly, Kiara introduces herself and she offers her assistance to the dark mare, who refuses the offer and earns another long and stern glance from myself as she claims to have problems but no problems at all. With a control practiced over years, I manage to pull my eyelids shut and to breathe a slow, deep drink of air, soothing against the riot of my blood and the myriad tugs at my soul that wish to drag me downwards into the earth’s burning core while lifting me high in praise of the wind.

As her companion is introduced my tail curls loosely around my hocks, agitation at having been assumed, once again, to be a coward almost enough to steal my temporary serenity re-earned in the quiet behind my own eyelids. That Serene (a stab of pain, it burns, it writhes; why must she be named so?) again asks after Midas is bothersome to me, but with another push of forced calm I still the bell long enough to see clearly, to think with thoughts that are my own.

I probably seem mad.

"Cealestis, and Skýlos," I offer first, and Dog cheerfully grins and beats her tail against the earth, ignorant to the giant cat as I try to be to the demons that roar within me, "she claims to have come here and suffered an accident shortly there after. I do not know her from the dark side of a stone and cannot offer her welcome, though she obviously has suffered cranial damage of some sort and seems to be truthful in her tale."

@[Kiara]

Cealestis