Lost children, Grandfather once said, are destined to remain that way. Caneo had been a pile of matchsticks then, a bundle of nerves and dark fur propelling a pair of too-big eyes through the world. He had not known he was lost before he got found. He hadn't even a name... Every piece of him remembers namelessness more keenly than hunger, or fear. Down to its thinnest fibers, his body cries out, giving her back that which he never knew until too late.

        He fears she is lost (like him).

        And he wants to run. This body made for running, for stretching out under the moon, keens toward its oldest purpose. Instead, somehow, impossibly, he slows. It is her; every step builds certainty on top of certainty, until he knows it better than he knows the stars, or the sound of his own heart. He doesn't need to hear the whispered word caught on her teeth to recall the dusky softness of her voice; they spin here in his head, a thousand kindnesses, accepted and rebuked. He is a child again, staring into flames and grasping desperately at their warmth. A child, afraid of what the light will show. “Tandavi...” he breathes once more, softly. Caneo is slightly breathless, though not from the moving. His body coils and coils upon itself, now a thousand sharp points jostling, a snake curling round and round the thin architecture of his haunches. He stops well away from her, as if he fears she will be a mirage, as if touching will shatter them both.

        He can't look away. She is the same Tandavi, Fire Dancer tilting through his memories between shadows and stars, warm though nothing else is. She speaks, and it is her voice, that same voice, and a slow curl of heat - like smoke - begins in Caneo's chest. You look like the moon. He sees himself reflected in her eyes - himself, and nothing else. Those eyes have gone from pools of ink to flecks of obsidian, like wells running dry or freezing over, and he doesn't know what to think. Only this: he does look like the moon, like the smiling edge of a knife.

        Caneo's mouth opens to speak, but only the soft noise of air sucks into his lungs. He thinks, oh. If he closes his eyes, he is in this same place, laughing, because She is a goddess and he - this wayward child searching for answers among the stars. In the end, Moon never gave him what he asked for, and he left. Maybe it wasn't Her he loved, at all. Something crosses his face now, something ugly and too truthful, like a shadow kiting across the sky. His insides bite at him; the smoke burns, chokes in his lungs, and he wants to go down on both knees. But he stands, rigid. Stands, a child waiting again to be named, and not with that name - with another. Something softer. Something good.

        “I'm Caneo,” he breathes. In the back of his mind, Essetia's voice hisses, dreamer, and again his body strains to run. Slowly, as if it pains him, his long neck stretches out as if to brush his muzzle to the Fire Dancer's, never mind if it might burn. He doesn't make it all the way. “I found you.”