Tembovu

His intense stare does not leave the tigress as he fights the flames that lick his vision, his ears, his memories. He focuses his attention on the man’s words beside him— they are his lifeline, now. “You are stronger than I for being able to bare such pain and move forward.” Disbelief flashes through him, taking him away from the brink of his mental hellhole. Move forward? He had not moved forward. He had devoted years of his life to revenge and destruction of an empire.

But then Ciceron stops his saving words, and he begins to slip. Desperation pulls the very thoughts from his lips, “Our pain is different— one is not more weighty or worthy than the other,” he pauses as the silence stretches, pulling more words from his thick lips, “And I spent years avenging the deaths of my mate and son. I destroyed a nation.” Darkness clouds his face where pride used to gather at such a confession. He was proud of this no longer. “It was not until l came to Helovia that I began to truly move forward with my life…” he voice trails to silence, words of how he wished it had been sooner left unspoken.

He listens in silence as the quicksilver stallion speaks of his daughter. Then questions him, “Have you ever woken up one day and realized you were living a lie? That nothing you knew was actually the truth?” He could not know the angry memories that such a question would unearth in the elephant. Though the anger was preferable to the fearful black pit of despair that had been dangerously circling all evening.

He moves his stare to the bright horizon— so full of promise while they were so anchored by their past. “I do,” the anger timbre vibrated his voice. He half-heartedly tried to control it, though it kept the pain at bay, “The very powers I swore to serve murdered them. Murdered my family.” He was nearly vibrating with rage, though his voice was still even, “When I discovered that… It made everything I had done, what they had died for, a lie.”

He fell silent, reining in a temper that he thought he had controlled so long ago. Though, as Ciceron continued to speak of his mother robbing him of memories, anger on behalf of the dappled stallion roared in his ears, making it even more difficult to control.

This was the beast that he had funneled into revenge. Used for duplicity, for whispering the right things into powerful ears, for charming the influential. This monster had erupted from the ashes of his mate and sun and had been fed with vengeance for years. Now it was bored and hungry. It wanted a feast.

The mammoth trapped and wrestled this fiend, still listening to Ciceron. When he fell silent, he searched for words— words other than the disingenuous words the monster fed him. It wanted a voice, a being to destroy. But Tembovu would not give that to him. So he spoke the first, genuine thing to come to mind, “For what reason could a mother to that to her son?” He did not want to pry, but he needed to put his beast to rest.