It was time.

He could not tell how he knew with such a bone-deep certainty that the life within his egg stirred, moved, awakened - he simply knew, as if the tremors of warmth somehow changed pattern. As if a God had whispered in his ear. The knowledge seeped through skin and muscle, wove itself around bone, flowed with the blood in his veins, to the steady rhythm of his strong, steadfast heart. A thin carpet of snow swirled about his frosted hooves, the blood already soaked up by the hungry, thirsty ground.

A ghost, a wraith, he moved, flowing over the ground with an easy grace, something sure about him. Not a single hole nor root caused his stride to falter, and the winds around him promised winter as they nipped at his frostbitten skin. Food. Warmth. Rudimentary requirements for life, especially so for young ones. Mauja's dark mind swirled, forcing aside the memories of fire and bodies, focusing instead upon the season approaching rapidly: cold, cool, soothing. He remembered sun across a snow that had fallen a long time ago, the clipped speech of an owl, the blue shimmer of an egg. His egg. A creature that had lived - and died? - in ages past, reborn. Would it remember anything of what it had been?

Dark muzzle pushed against the snow, uncovering the little nest Arathea had crafted for both egg and prey, but barely had he snuffled at it that urgency made his head shoot up. Such restlessness, the click and clack of a shell breaking - birth. The loop, a thing both foreign and now so intimately familiar, it slipped off his head, and gently lowered his precious burden to the snow between his large hooves. How easy it would be to crush it. That knowledge sent a chill down his spine, but no urge to follow it came - he was glad for that.

After breathlessly watching the egg shatter and the small creature roll out, he was, for a moment, unsure of what to do. Was this like having a child, or a brother? What type of love would manifest in his heart? Curious eyes of ice skipped across the pristine feathers and their marks - odd, how they were blue. The owls he had seen previously had had deep black inked onto their feathers. A shimmer, like the shell itself, a set of eyes a mirror to his own meeting his straying gaze, capturing it like a prism holds a sunbeam.

No, his mind breathed in the space of silence. Not a brother. A sister.

Her screech split the air, a note of urgency to it, and with a small laugh Mauja's muzzle went back into the burrow, and began to nudge the prey into the open, so his owl - his soul's sister - could feed.

He could feel it - or, well, something. Something that was within, yet not within at all. A spark, an ember, in the darkness behind his eyelids. Something he could reach out towards, touch, feel, know. He could feel the traces of overpowering hunger, a sensation which only grew the longer he kept his mind upon that peculiar bond. A small black beak tore into dead bodies, and the feeling leveled out, balanced by food even as their link grew firmer, more secure. Fascinated, the King watched the small bundle of white and gray feathers as it tore into the food, making a short work of it. Eyes which softened, something uncannily alike the play of his own, marked the end of this meal. The hunger had paled, dissipated, leaving a warm feeling of satisfaction in its wake. Smiling, a genuine gesture reflected in his eyes, Mauja brought his muzzle across the ground, resting it against the small bird. They did not need words.