Яikyn

Some did not sleep, were not starry eyed; some were restless as the other male who paced the beach before the gold and black’s golden gaze.

His legs ache beneath him as he approaches his chocolate dappled sides dark with sweat and chilly in the autumn air. The roar of the beach fills his ears as much as the sound of their hooves together, the princely stallion taking note of the dual crowned hellion with some measure of interest rather than just superiority. It is mostly because the stranger is peculiar, and yet obviously of unicorn blood, and so the Puppeteer (oh, Volterra, you may be cursed, but you have a flair for names to be sure) wishes to know more of the fellow, and if his impressive array of daggers and knives can be turned to his purpose.

Or, he thinks with a smile (despite the fact that the man he approaches is in a much less friendly mood than the black youngling is), perhaps he already walks it.

"Unlikely to find another this late," says the boy to his elder, but there is no ounce of such respect in his tone or demeanor (rather like that of one who considers himself superior, but in a quiet way that might be mistaken for equality), "and I was taught not to believe in coincidences."

By a ghost, he thinks, the smallest bit of poison fading the handsome smile that adorns his face to greet the irritable and impressively armed male.

"Rikyn, once of the Aurora Basin," elaborates the boy, having recovered enough from the initial shock of his mother’s second abandonment of him, his subsequent arrival home, and Ki’irha’s foul temper, to be amiable and forthcoming with himself for once, "perhaps still. I have not decided."

@Demothi
[ OOC: Lemme know if you don't like tags! :D I've subscribed to the thread, so I don't need them unless you do. Excited to get to write with you ~ ]

in every heart a hole

Яikyn

They strike a bond, most immediately; it’s been so unusual an occurrence in the young stallion’s life that he finds he can’t stop the smile rising to his lips from being genuine. Whoever the stranger is, the lost prince is pleased to have decided to put his wanderlust aside for the evening, discovering a bit belatedly that he is rather confused as to why fate must be female. He’d always imagined it as a genderless entity, like a tree, or a stone, (the maybe twice he’d really even thought about fate), but that wasn’t really important…

”Demothi. I also was once a member of the Basin…” the man is saying, and Rikyn lets his ears lift and his interest rise into full attention as the chocolate and ivory stag turns about, a smile on his lips that determines (to the black and gold, anyway) that the amiable air is shared. That they are also both wanderers, wandering away from the same place, only deepens the sensation of kinship between the pair, and the not always socially successful stallion allows a small hope to kindle in his breast, even this early on in the conversation, that he might have made something like a friend.

And he had friends, or so he thought, unlike his mother, who used the word as a cruel lie over the faces of those she wished to use – and while, surely, Rikyn did wish to use everyone to his advantage in whatever means possible (like many who want more for themselves), he was willing to die for things like honor, and love. So when he is met with the question of why he’d leave the herd – and possibly the only real friend he had left in the world, that hadn’t been soiled by his own impudence, the selfishness of others, or simply the coming of time and distance – he takes a moment to look away from the tilted smile on Demothi’s face and out to the sea.

He thinks of the things he saw, and those he met while here last. He thinks of what his father said, and his mother’s retort. He thinks of what he feels, in his heart, when he thinks of the land in which he was born, and that he cannot help but feel that his life there had left on the hooves of his parents, the ideals carried on their backs having left with them as well.

“The place we are born is usually not home forever,” he decides, having heard these words from a warrior of the Nightwalk (though he could not remember his name), deciding that, while the words had offended him at the time of hearing them, they now held more truth than he had been willing to see in his stubbornness. The words would have met with the chilly ocean air had Demothi not spoken first, stealing whatever philosophical sense Rikyn’s own statement would have made with his own.

It leaves the young stallion feeling a little bit smaller than he had at the beginning of the conversation, to be honest, and he lets silence steal him away for a while longer before he lets his eyes, and smile, fall back on Demothi’s face.

"I am glad to have met you, Demothi," he says with a grin, his lion’s tail playing behind him across the moonlit sand, "you make more sense than most."

His smile falters ever so slightly as, in as swift an instant as he accepted the advice, he realizes he will have to find another path now. Maybe it’s the real reason he’d taken this long to decide… because it was easier to follow in the hoof prints of another than to forge one’s own way through the deep snow.

"What possibilities do you chase out here?" asks the young man with the tangled mane, truly interested in what the man will answer, eager to share his own aspirations like any young man with a head full of dreams, "Many seem to want only adventure, which I suppose is fine… but I believe a real man, a man worth remembering, wants more than a new horizon each morning."

[ OOC: I am really enjoying it, too! It's seems like the beginning of a true broship aha ]
@Demothi

in every heart a hole

Яikyn

Rikyn has always sought friendship, even from those who, perhaps, in retrospect, would have been best left at a distance. Surely, to have met them was okay, but the closeness that had grown between he and certain others while he was small left wedges in his confidence, dented the sturdy walls of the faith he hid behind. Yet, as many of them as were regrets, there were more who he had become close to with no sense of remorse.

Perhaps this was what led him to continuously seek out friends, as he did now with Demothi in the stillness of midnight along the shore, as he horrifying felt himself coming to with Volterra, and as he had with Erebos in the midst of a herd meeting. Friends, for good or worse, were important, and not just to have flesh fodder to toss in the path of whatever malevolence one had brought down on themselves.

So it means much to the boy that the milk and mahogany finds pleasure in his company, because that means that Rikyn is a winning sort, but also that an ember may continue to grow. If he took nothing else from the manipulations of his golden dam, it was that embers kept you warm in the winter, and could be used to burn down villages, if left in the proper location.

So it is that he is even more pleased and brimming with grins that Demothi shares his grand story of nothing (though the thought crosses briefly through Rikyn’s inexperienced mind that he would prefer a woman’s company over a man’s conversation any night), because it means that Demothi is sharing with him. The son of the Engineer knows enough of his fellow mortals to know that any such utterances are good signs that, should they meet again, he would learn even more of the peculiar stallion – though for now, he listens, and nods his concordance.

He, too, has often felt that he walks a path to no where, despite seeing quite clearly his goals; being the cleanser of an empire took much more than one black and gold unicorn, he was learning, and it was rather difficult to find others like himself with his mother’s wolves scattered all about creation (or their bones, anyway…) or believing him to be only a child.

"What do you want to do?" asks the Puppeteer, glancing at his fellow with a glitter locked in his golden eye, lips curled in the most darkly delighted of smiles as he ponders his own wants, "other than not being forgotten, of course."

The smile lingers, his thoughts twisting to the being of Time who rules the mountain they both have walked away from; having met the God, having been impressed upon by the magnificent power that radiated from the two toned figure that was the Lord of Spark and Time, Rikyn could not help but hear mention of the river on which they were adrift without seeing that being. And, while the black bay son of the Engineer could not fully believe that the Time God of Helovia had made the world, he did believe that he and Demothi were very, very small in comparison. He also believed, without a doubt, that the Time God forgot no one he had ever met, or was destined to meet (and being master of Time had already known before their linear encounter). It was mortals who forgot.

So you had to brand your name into their being. One had to rise to such a height that his name was sung in songs, cajoled by mothers coaxing their babes to remain near their sides, until the man that was ceased to be an was replaced, instead, by an image that was painted, in part, by his own hand: but also marked and marred by those who handled it, and finished the lines when a man’s hand stilled.

He doesn’t say as much, because he knows enough from what his mother taught him that such a row of words might seem like he was calling Demothi a fool – Rikyn didn’t feel this way at all about the stallion, and so he kept his mouth shut, a task which grew much easier when his fellow unicorn (and elder) bathes him complements of his wisdom. A matter now of flexing his adult muscles, the gold and black lets his ruminations of the Time God float away, dwelling instead on the pull of his facial muscles as they widened involuntarily at the words of a stranger, his ego floating on a cloud of delight, that surely wouldn’t rain for some time.

"It is good to be seen as I feel inside for once, brother," he answers after some time, smiling an honest smile that fades into contemplation as he leads into the second half of the crested stallion’s words, "I would like to be something like that, too. My friend has tales of his ancestors that make them seem very much like the Sun, all power and fire and dominance, and I once lived in a forest some weeks from here which had tales of heroes so immense it was as if hearing songs sung of a God."

Fervently, his golden eyes search the pale peaks of the ocean’s sway, letting his imagination run wild as it often does – a sign he is as much his mother’s son as his father’s, to be sure, perhaps a perfect blend, as his golden eyes glitter madly with thoughts he cannot put to tongue, his mouth attempting to speak what mad, winding paths spread out before him when he takes too long a look inside.

"You can kill them, you know," he elaborates, "Gods. I’ve seen it four times. And if you can kill them, they are no better than we are, in the end, no matter their presence or power, no better than poor dead Ignatius, or the dead heroes of legend, of the Starplane. Maybe they are just men who once outran the Horizon, and have forgotten."

[ OOC: Anddd cue really strange Rikyn letting his weirdness happen to poor Demothi. :( Also sorry about the length of this? Muse explosions ]

in every heart a hole