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