The wind whistled and roared, my hooves tapped and rattled; with slithering smoothness the scraps of the bark and wood skitter and slide across the stone, occasionally threatening to steal my footing, yet never managing to thwart my assault. The sound of my heart begins to pulse in my ears, and soon I forget that I’m in a cave at all, or that the land outside my focused thoughts is full of wandering others who may or may not be watching me.

The dampness of the melted snow is devoured by the heat that builds in my veins, and with a quick movement, my haunches bundle, my front half rises from the earth and I lunge with the precision Furen demanded in my training. My mother would be proud, if she could see her son in the dance our people perfected, my horn whistling through the air to make an oddly loud crack! which resounds through the cavern and sets my whole head to ringing.

So unexpectedly dazzling is the sound that my ears flatten to my skull, my whole body pitching about wildly with hooves dancing about the spark and flicker of dying light on the floor and walls. It is electricity, I know as much, the same ethereal stuff which ran though my father’s machines, which struck dead beasts from the radiant tip of my dam’s horn, but most prominent of my memories involving lightning and the storm are those of the God who ruled them, his form ensconced in the crackling power that he held mastery over. But from where did it come?

A brief terror that it is the God himself, coming to punish me for abandoning his given task, though as swiftly as it rises the fear fades, similar to the smoke, swirling bleakly through the shadow of the cavern, of the dying embers born from the flash of the sparks; the figure that stands in the threshold of the cave is not the awe inspiring strength of the Lord of Storms, but a small, similarly bihued stallion and a curious, deer-like creature, the stallion wearing a horn that makes me shudder and silently whisper a prayer to the First Gods on his behalf that he had been born so blighted.

My breath is heavy, but the panicked beating of my heart is not due entirely to the rush of swordplay, rather that he has startled me. The rush of my heart grows hard as his words hit my ears; the heaviness of my thoughts return, coating my thoughts in a black veil.

“Looking for a fight, are you, boy?” he says, and I feel my chest clench and my guts roil at the taunt hidden in his words. He talks to me like I am nobody, and it makes me narrow my eyes at him and fill my mouth with poison. He is the nobody, for I don’t know his name, so brief his years here that he was not among the faces of my youngest youth. I am far more valid than this stunted man, his crown warped and sloping down his face, glowering at me from the threshold of a cave I had been minding my own damn business in.

"Seems you are," I snottily remark, letting my ears remain flat against my head and my lion’s tail lashing behind me in annoyance.

I want to look away from him, to continue my imaginary battle as if he hadn’t come waltzing in to my private space and handed me a note that said, “please kick me in the eye.” I almost manage to turn around before I find myself glaring at him again, my neck arched and chest pressed forward threateningly, all the training in niceties and princeliness given to me by my dam forgotten in a hot rush of anger that rises up out of me like a red wave. The bark crunches under my hooves, the occasional bright sensation of pain reminding me of the sparks that had arced across the littered cavern floor momentarily, a threat given to a stranger by a stranger, and it makes me want to rip his throat out for treating me as small as I feel on the inside.

My mother might have exterminated him on sight, so rude is his entrance and so impure his appearance, but, to me, it seems wrong to hit someone so obviously loathed by the fates that they made him a jester among kings, his crown flopping and useless along his less than handsome, large nosed face. I'm so mad that I barely notice the white glint of the gem in the knotted mess of his horn.

"Just who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?" comes my voice; it’s so harsh, so hostile, it bites through the whistle of the winter wind outside and makes a metallic hardness flash through the depths of my eyes.