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