_{Some say you're trouble, boy Just because you like to destroy All the things that bring the idiots joy} Well, what's wrong with a little destruction?

It is Ka’Mate who notices the scrawny spec of a stallion in their midst, for Reginald is too preoccupied by the tap tap tap! from inside a shell newly unearthed, a treasure he hadn’t anticipated, a jewel he would have surely expected to be crushed and destroyed had he known about it.

The scene plays before him, just as it had before; a fracture appears on the smooth shell, widening like spindly hands across the smooth surface of marble, or ivory. The cracks widen, and deepen, and from within he can hear the cheep cheep cheep! that reminds him powerfully of Ka’Mate’s birth—and yet, also casts a new shadow in his mind, a new memory that feels so novel, a wave that moves in differently, shifts his core once more. Ka’Mate shares a spark that Reginald feels every moment in his life, and when the chick had hatched, Reginald could feel the kindling of a new type of flame, yet a flame nonetheless—and the Grey Eye’d prince knows flames well.

He sees yet another black beak chipping away at the shell, and what he feels now is something completely different. Where Ka’Mata was nothing but blinding orange flames, mindless and powerful, this could only be described as water and moonbeams sliding down his throat, an oasis that blasts him with cool clarity that causes him to gasp—

CRAWGHK!!!

His ears pin; he turns his head sharply to Ka’Mate, to where the chick had traveled down his neck, settling on the point of one thick wither and shrieking a loud, coarse challenge. “Hush I said,” he spats at the chick, just now registering something wild ebbing from the fuzzy white thing that clutches with too-big talons to his skin. Narrowing his eyes, Reginald follows the bird’s gaze and the object of its excitement—and sees.

Ears are flattened fully against a powerful neck; eyes pierce like granite daggers; a wall of flame erupts in his chest, a wall that cannot be subdued by the tentative wave of life-giving water that emanates from a newborn chick still trapped within its shell. “Who are you.” Stones and snake-hiss rattles in his throat, angry with this bag of presumptuous bones that dares to intrude upon his business, his victory and his discovery.

He waits for the words of a scrawny stallion; he wonders if such a weak-looking thing is capable of speech.




@[Arrakk]

"talk talk talk"