Her heart still beating, her breath still caught, her eyes still adrift... she almost didn't catch the low voice of her son. Almost.

Ampere turned a blue eye on him, lightning blinking as her nose tilted towards him. She reached out a gentle touch, slow, and careful, as if she was afraid of him - more like what he asked. Actually, she was afraid of why she'd been promoted at all, but she couldn't share that with him. Not now, not ever. So instead, she smiled, and pounced a love bite towards his scruffy mane on his nape. The hesitation vanished like fog in the morning. "Because he knows we don't spend enough time together as it is, and he wouldn't want us to miss even more adventures than we already do!"

Then, she stilled, and withdrew, holding her child in the hard grip of her serious stare. "Little lightning... more power means more responsibility. You should never want a title, just to have it. The title should want you, anything else is greed and folly."b She snorted, and sand billowed out a little bit from her nares. In her opinion, no one in power should want to hold it. She hadn't, then again she hadn't done much good with her rank, even if she hadn't done much bad. "Besides, Megaera is a fine horse, she will make a good lead." Then Megaera burst into light, and Ampere lifted a wing to shield her eyes, but gasped in awe and soon broke into laughter at her warrior Sultana.

Tandavi...

---

As the meeting died down and the crowds dispersed, Ampere looked for the tiger mare, hoping to catch her before sands were put between them. "Maren!" she called out with uncertainty, not sure if she remembered the name right. Her hooves pushed the sand around as she trotted after the new Diviner. "I don't think we've met. I'm Ampere," she greeed quickly, head tossing after a mild bow towards the priest.

After a pause and a sidelong glance, Ampere got to the point. "When you call the Sun God in the fires, as Diviners often do each season, I'd like to be there." It wasn't a question, although maybe she should have phrased it as much, since the fires were not her place. Still, she would not rest until she had spoken to him. "The Sun, he doesn't always show, but if he does... I have a question for him." She held Maren steady in her gaze, hoping for an answer to a question she didn't ask.

Ampere had never done this before. She had never stood in the warm embrace of her sands, peering into the flickering of her fire, and hoped to summon her god for all of his wisdom and guidance. Of course, these were his sands (and how reminiscent of his strong touch...), his fire (dancing like his clever gaze), and she supposed Maren. Yet he was her god. Even if she knew the worth of them all, she felt she understood him the best, because he was more a part of her than even the Earth, whom claimed to be within everything. Even if she was decorated in the cold lightning of the Spark, he had always been the one to shed light on her darker moments, leading her back into salvation. Even if her heart fluttered near the son of the Moon, and her passion drove her into the secrecy of the night, he provided for her all that had been missing from her life. To him, the Sun, Ampere owed everything, and it was for him that she toiled in sweat and blood for each day.

That was why she did not seek out the smooth stone of the Veins, as she had so many times before when she'd needed to bow her head to the heavens. This time, she felt that she belonged here, that she owed it to him to pay homage in his own kingdom, and that it was he alone she wished to speak with.

So you can understand the swelling hesitation that mounted inside Ampere as she stood with her diviner beside the desert fire. Not only was it such an unfamiliar part of a place that had become her, it was very intimate, the act of summoning a god in his own realm. The rush that had carried Ampere like a songbird to tweet in Maren's ears, didn't seem apparent today as she stood statuesque in front of the face of her god. Though, it had not left either, but rather hummed just beneath her skin, as alive and jumpy as electricity. The congratulations that Maren had provided only the day before was just another loop of metal on the heavy chains that Ampere wrought herself in. Chancellor, Gladiator, Throatling, Sun worshiper, Mother, Mother of Companions, Pegasus, Ampere, Thunderhead. How many names had she been given in her lifetime, and how many more awaited, each one with its own additional weight?

Every echo of them was another task to be done, another duty to be upheld, another moment of the day slipping away like sand upon the shore. How could she simply relax, when there was so much to do? How could she be selfish, when she scorned others for that very thing?

Yet, that's precisely what Maren was asking her to do.

Ampere blinked, the bright blue of her eyes cutting out behind black lids, like a neon light flickering in the middle of the night (she would be a bar sign). Her head turned, the first real movement since she'd halted next to the tiger mare. "Wh-what?" she stammered, her tones colored with disbelief and confusion, as though Maren had spoken a different language or asked her to tear off her own wings. Instantly Ampere balked, the electricity inside her resisting this insistence that it disperse. Whenever Ampere wanted to relax she flew until she couldn't go any further, she fought until she hurt, or she loved until she hated. She slept when she had to, which was frequently midday because the heat made it too unbearable to do much else, not that that always stopped her. She didn't just, lie down, close her eyes, and relax though - she wasn't even sure she could.

Maren didn't wait for her though, and as she settled in the sands like a hen on her nest, Ampere couldn't help but feel a strangeness rising inside her as she stood awkwardly besides the awfully content 'pegasus'. Blue eyes glanced about, searching for some kind of reprieve. Finding none, Ampere resigned herself to her fate with a sandy snort. She needed Maren to see the Sun, for no matter how close she felt to him, Maren was closer.

Slowly, but surely, Ampere knelt into the desert, then laid on it. The sand pricked against her body, familiar, but abruptly uncomfortable in this moment, as if she was hyper-aware of it. She shifted her legs once, twice, three times before giving up and pinching her eyes shut. Shapes and lights spun around behind her eyelids, distracting her as she tried to watch them. Her lashes twitched, and at one point lifted, before hurriedly pushing back together. She breathed deep and exhaled deep, but she still felt heavy, and that weight pushed her skin into the sand and the sand pushed back.

"When does the relaxing happen?" she finally asked, her voice a drawl of impatience. "Should I have gone for a run first?"

"No!" Ampere responded brusquely to Maren's accusation. Her eyes were apart in an instant, and her legs twitched out from under her, ready to rise. At her sides her feathers flared out, flushed with the embarrassment that Ampere felt racing through her. "How does she know?!" came the furious whirlwind of her thoughts, murmuring in tempo with her racing heartbeat. No one had ever called Ampere out for all her running away, except Tandavi (was being a hard ass a prerequisite for Diviners?). Even those who had been affected by it, really, had never bothered to ask her or condemn her for her actions. She had gotten better, she thought, since then. Of course much of this was owed to the Fire Dancer, who boldly stood in her way not even a few seasons ago when Ampere laid on the ground with another egg.

Still, she didn't like having someone look at her and immediately poke at her greatest weakness. So Ampere got angry, and even if it was wrong, it didn't change the fact that it was. "I meant running around. Sometimes it helps to sleep, when you're already tired." Ampere could certainly sleep, but much of that was surely due to exhaustion and habit. This time of day Ampere was ready to accomplish things, not to lay in the sand and relax.

Then Maren asked questions that Ampere couldn't answer. Did she want to do this? Was she ready for this? The question she had for the Sun was not an easy one for her to ask, and it walked so closely with the cruel stab Maren had already taken at her, ripping off an old scab and opening up an ugly scar. Ampere at least was competitive though, and in that moment, sure or not sure, she knew she couldn't stop now because then it would be failure, it would be defeat, it would be loss, and all to a damn mare with wings on her head and an easy ability to relax like it was a fucking job.

Sneering, Ampere folded her legs back up and thrust herself back into the sand. Her neck stretched out, jaw line pressed against the sand. She exhaled fast and heavy, the energy of the fight rising up inside of her, the speed of the defenses she had to erect against this tiger, and it blew the sand slightly, creating divets. "Yes," she said finally, by way of answer, and pinched her eyes shut once more.

Ampere chased her thoughts into submission, cornering all her worries, all her complaints, and all her uncertainties. In what was left of her mind, she pictured her favorite place, the one where she usually went to relax, the sea. If she listened well enough, she might hear the ocean where she lay, but they weren't close enough for the usual experience she wrapped herself in when she needed to run away. So Ampere imagined the seabreeze on her neck, the salt in her nostrils, the spray on her fetlocks. She let herself see the waves churning, back and forth, blue and grey and green and white. She let herself think of the sand crunching beneath her as she walked against the shore, leaving her marks in the wet sand which the water ate away, erasing her path the way she wanted it to erase her worries. She put each concern into each step, hoping that one day, maybe it would take them all away.

So it was, bit by bit, Ampere began to relax, however against it she was.