Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
 

The summer heat that had stifled the air the last I was here was now a crisp and thin thing, cold, and pleasantly combated by the high sun beating through leaves to touch upon the black velvet of my back.  Still, no wind ripples the unchanging fabric that dangles from the stone structure alongside the still living brook, the same peculiar feeling rising within my chest as I’d felt the last time I was here returning as my golden eyes lay upon it.
 

The origins of it puzzle me, for even mother had no reasons for its existence, but also its strangeness; it is both eerie in a way, because it is unknown, but also highly interesting, for the same reasons.  Perhaps this is why I continuously return to this place to look upon the bedazzling rainbow lights that dance along the floor of the structure, the glass above depicting nothing in particular – but good to look upon, none the less. 
 

Bounding over the chilly path of the brook, I’m soon within the encompassing ring of the stone, the rainbow lights playing across my skin rather than the empty gray beneath my golden hooves.  The sound of the water outside of the Rotunda is peaceful, the occasional chirrup of the stubborn sparrows and other birds (who denied the approaching winter every year, remaining to struggle through what other species fled) filling the song of the brook, and to this serenade I tilt a single ear, the other ever moving, seeking the sounds of hooves.
 

But soon, I loose track of it all, dwelling instead on the stone work, and a wonder as to why the cloth does not change, why the metals above have never tarnished or faded beneath the wear of weather and time.  How, in Gods name, for instance, had falling branches and things from above not shattered the glass?  Whose God tended this place, and if not a God, what?


[ OOC: <3 others are welcome to hop in if they'd like. ]

@Sjal

"Speechy speech"

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


The arrival of a gryphon is first.

She is pretty, all amber with black spots, a cat and bird creature very similar to Kyst – but also quite different. She manages to earn my attention as she rattles the upper branches surrounding the river’s crossing, golden eyes flashing to her through the rainbow light pouring down from the colored canopy. Within seconds, a secondary turmoil draws my gaze downwards, and my smile, which had been the faint one of wonder as to why a gryphon was here when I’d seen none before, grows into the full bloomed smile of a young man looking at a pretty girl.

It takes her longer to see me. I guess that’s to be expected – I’m standing still while she was obviously chasing her bonded, I silent, she noisy. When she does see me, her eyes, as golden as mine, burn with a vivacity that signifies, to me anyway, that she is quick of thought; her hello is cheerful, the subsequent question one I cannot truly answer with much more than suppositions. I’d much rather she asked me something I was a master of, so I could seem more than a dullard in a pretty pavilion, but it seems often I am left appearing less than Knightly in these moments with pretty girls. One ear tilts back, though my smile remains.

"I’ve been told it is called the Rotunda or the Pavillion," I answer, rainbow light playing on my dark pelt the way the branch shadow toys across her snow flecked skin, "and it is very old, though I don’t know much else."

The flutter of the wind through the colorful draping fills the brief silences between my words, my tail casually drifting about behind me in slow arcs.

"Have you never been through this forest before?" I ask with some interest, mostly because I’ve been through all the forests in Helovia. However, because I’ve seen most of the regions to behold in this land, I can understand why someone else hadn’t – it was a big place, and it was easy to miss landmarks like this unless someone had showed you where to find them, or you had a penchant for following rivers.

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


The arrival of the griffon within the Rotunda is followed with golden eyes and a smile, at least until she lands; the image of the creature is one which reminds me of home, and the pride the people who live there. That I don’t currently hang out there doesn’t change the fact that I was bound to the mountains in more ways than one, from friendship, to blood, to the very moments of my creation and arrival (though I blessedly know nothing of my creation). It is good to find strangers who remind me of the Basin, even if the memory now comes with a bitter taste upon my tongue.

It almost eases the loneliness I veil in nonchalant, adventurer’s delight.

Her wariness goes unnoticed – I’m rarely uncomfortable or hesitant around anyone, and she’s no different. What I do notice is that she smiles, which is good, an image which I drink in and hope to feed, to elaborate on. Her question, following her pretty little grin, is answered with a rolling shrug of my shoulder. They probably have, as have so many other things.

Time devours the weak and unworthy.

If she wants an answer, she doesn’t really give me time before she’s talking again, mostly I guess because she’s busy trying to answer my questions, and I can take too long thinking sometimes – not to mention the almost rhetorical nature of her inquiry, now that I’ve had enough time to muddle my way through eager hormonal fluxes to think about it.

"Not really," I reply to her question as to whether or not I’m new around here, "I was born in Helovia. I just got back from a journey, too."

Mine was adventurous, in a way, if your mother leaving you and all her duties for some other kingdom (a kingdom that was your safe haven before she usurped it) could be deemed adventure. The eagerness with which I’d discussed the Nightwalk when I’d first come back has been lost to the bitter feelings that well up when I think of it now, and thereby my words leave out any mention of the land that had given me so much purpose.

That had given me Xynia…

The thought of her makes the rainbow light playing across this girl’s face less pretty than it had been; as with all first love, the silver filly shines with a radiance, particularly in my memory, that outshines even Lothiriel, or other such delicate damsels made for visual devouring – this white speckled lass is no where near as voluptuous, delicate, and purely seductive as the Reaper’s daughter. It’s not to say that she doesn’t have something to offer, of course, but it also doesn’t make her a girl forever away in a firefly forest.

A soft sigh fills the air between us, a sigh on which I try to send Xynia’s image away from me, the cheerfulness I’ve brought into the conversation so far faltering only momentarily; looking towards the dual horned miss, I reapply my charming smile, trying to let the past ease back where it belongs.

"I’m Rikyn," I offer, figuring that there is little reason to lie to a unicorn, and a lady one at that (especially because she seems as stricken by wanderlust as I, by her words and smell).

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.

The presence of another here has never really been welcome, anyway, the only company I truly like to have while here the soft babble of the brook and the play of the light through the glass above. While this girl, Sjal, as she describes herself, is not the most unpleasant of company, my eyes wandering across her at will as we talk, she brings up unpleasant thoughts. The sound of my name rolling from her lips is only partially as delightful as it usually is when spoken with feminine lilt, soured by the question which precedes it.

The croon of her griffon covers, what I imagine anyway, to be the almost audible sound of my heart steeling itself against the story that rubs with jagged glass fingertips against its soft lining. With the swift grace that a clever mind provides, I pick out the sharpest pieces, leaving only the delightful portrait of a home coated in the dust of time.

I can tell the story again. I have to. I believe too much in what was instilled within my heart there, and, no matter how much I dislike the feelings of weakness that overwhelm me at the touch of some of those memories, I miss the soft serenity of the mists, and the hum of the fireflies glinting through the air.

It is good to occasionally walk our sanctums, if only in thought, isn’t it? Even mother can’t tarnish my memory of being a yearling newly crowned, wet, shivering, vastly over confident, finding his way through those behemoth trees.

"It is called the Nightwalk, and it is many weeks walking," I reply, wondering if the story of a boy wandering so far will impress a girl who has wandered, herself, as it seems to impress all the other girls I’ve told it to, "but there is a herd there, of unicorns, mostly, who live in a forest of enormous trees, which, in the evenings, is so alive with fireflies that the stars envy its shine. The people there are warriors, and they fight for the redemption of this world, and those who betrayed it."

It was a notion that was wonderful to me – to be a hero, a warrior with honor, and purpose, who fought for the goodness to be savored in the world. And, what better goodness was there than the salvation of our race, the unicorn, from the destruction wrought by the selfishness of so few?

"And what of your adventures, Sjal?" I ask, using her name as she used mine, enjoying its short, rolling melody through the curve of a smile, "where did your heart lead you?"

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.

I’m glad to have distracted her from the Nightwalk, and the thoughts that lay in those memories, having seen the light in her eyes that meant she thought it all quite interesting (intriguing, on any day but today). I didn’t know her well enough to show her the weaker facets of myself yet, being the sort of fellow who believes in stoicism, and bravery, that men are men, made of steel and stone. That I fall short of this ideal, that pretty much everyone (except maybe Deimos) seems to, does not deter me from trying to deny the heat of the blood flowing through my body.

That she calls my story one of nobility makes my insides hum with pleasure, my golden eyes lighting up with delight as my neck deepens its arch, my figure very visibly angling towards her (her seeming distraction is probably a good thing).

Still, my piqued interest in what she has to say delivers a backhand, as happens more often than I’d like, my friendly face becoming a consolatory frown that somewhat understands the loss of a mother, and which reveals the softness of my heart towards those I call my family. The thought of either of my parents dying is unpleasant, to say the least… and she seems to be taking it in stride, almost as if there is not a hole weeping in her heart, as surely there is.

While my mother is not dead, she certainly is not here, either – and Sjal said nothing of a father. I’m smart enough to assume a few things about that.

"Do you believe in realms beyond this one? Like, other worlds, not just kingdoms," I ask, after some time, and a small sigh of submission to the small voice within (steel and stone, steel and stone). While I don’t want to talk about the Nightwalk, I’d rather talk about a place that had been a haven to me than to dwell in this dark silence. Besides, the Starpool is likely the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen, besides, perhaps, being in the presence of Gods – and if it can’t get her mind off depressing things, I don’t know what else will.

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Perhaps I should have asked, leading to a truth as to who the girl’s dead mother was. A truth that we had both been lied to with almost the same meshing of words, that we would be Lords of the world, crushing all our foes beneath split hooves.

It had not wound up that way, had it? Her mother was dead. My mother was gone. While Erebos still ruled in the drifting snow of the mountains, my home was here, in the wild lands, with nothing to my name but the pretentious belief that, someday, any day now, I’d come home to take back what was mine.

I wouldn’t. It was all Erebos’ now, in all the ways it had been ours before.

Still, my thoughts are mostly directed on how very sad she’d looked, and how very interested she becomes when I ask her if she believes in worlds beyond this one. Her answer leaves me feeling a bit stumped, because its not really what I meant – the thought that the Rift could be an entire planet had eluded me until she’d said as much. Thinking of Ming Yue, and what she’d said about the Rift, I turn over each detail, comparing the scant few of them to what I know of the Starplane, which certainly is not on Loorien.

The notion that this Rift could just be a place of deceivers, floating somewhere with a cruel God mocking me from afar… well, needless to say, I don’t really care for it.

She’s quit talking while I think. I shuffle through the heaviness of these thoughts (doubts) to find words for her, discovering that whatever thread I’d intended to follow through the conversation has been snipped clean in two. I don’t know what to say anymore, because a sarcastic “well I do” just doesn’t fit in place anymore. So I wing it – which can get bad, fast. I’m not the most polite and amiable of fellows, more the guy who says it how it is and deals with being punched afterward.

I settle, at first, on a nod, and an overly tense smile.

"I guess that’s true," I stall, glancing over at her through the rainbow light of the glass, "I had always thought the Rift was just somewhere far away. Like my father’s Northland, or Isilme…"

I look back out into the trees, the soft whisper of the brook trickling, my smile becoming a thoughtful expression; somber. The notion that Heaven was just some planet full of liars made my stomach clench too tight for comfort. It made me want to yell at Sjal, though she’d done nothing to deserve it. It makes my tail curl around my ankles anxiously.

"Are they all worlds like Loorien, or the Rift, though?" I ask after a short pause, eagerly glancing over at her with my eyes burning, perhaps frightening to some (the glimmer of genius is dazzling, after all). She probably has no idea what I’ve gone off about, and I don’t care. A hope I cannot expect her to understand fuels the erratic explanation I try to produce from the coils of my thoughts, my tenor voice building in momentum, enthusiasm, as I contrive a set of building blocks from which my Starplane might be produced.

"Or could some of them be… be built with… oh. Dreams... A place made of all the things we wanted, and could not have. A world of perfection built, not with rocks and trees and metals and flesh like this world, but from thought," I think of the Starpool, how they had danced like silver lined ghosts through the eternally green forests and meadows, surreal, ever reaching; the flowers had all had the perfect number of petals, the unicorns each unmarked by scars, the pegasi wearing gold where wings once reached, their brows adorned with Godly crowns…

It had to be a real place! It had to!

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


It takes me sometime, but as I mull over the concept of worlds beyond this one, I decide that I like it.

The thought of the myriad possibilities, a thousand realms to be conquered, and the many more beyond that, an endless array of things to be seen and known, makes my heart quicken as much as it rouses fear that my Gods are false. It does not steal away my hope of becoming something greater in so far as my life here is concerned, rather inspires it; should I fail in one kingdom, a thousand more waited for me, and a hundred thousand beyond that. With such an array of places one could aspire to be a King with a strong measure of belief that, one day, he would be.

I did not shrink away from the vastness of what expanded before me, once I really dwelled for a while on the concept. I was actually… fascinated by it.

So much so that it’s hard to pull myself out of my thoughts to hear Själ answer me. Her first sentence is muffled, as if heard through really heavy rain, her second as if she has simply walked closer. When I do hear her clearly, I find myself glancing over at her, aureate gaze alive with the curios wonder as to whether she’s this easy to manipulate all the time. She’s quickly moved away from her position that the Rift might be another world entirely simply because I’d thought differently. I don’t say anything, allowing her the comfort of thinking she’s redeemed herself.

I could hum with laughter, and I almost do; glancing back out into the rippling sunlight shadow of the forest around us, through beams of colored light, I am again struck by the notion of the Starplane being less true than I thought it to be. And so I question her again, because questioning her and throwing these strange concepts at her foreign mind seems to have yielded interesting results so far.

All I get for my efforts is a raised brow so characteristic to women, a judgmental stare that stabs right through me, one that says “well you are crazy.” It makes me want to turn around and huff right on out of here, and what she says in response to my queries is equally frustrating, but I don’t have a lot of friends. I tend to huff out or blow up with most everyone, and she’s been very patient and open with me so far.

Even if she is a malleable moron.

I sigh, a long, angry thing.

I try to swallow back the agitation that she just hasn’t thought much about worlds beyond this one before.

Stupid, earth walking Gods, condemning the unicorn to small mindedness, forever tethered to the belief that they were all that there could be out there; it was hard to wonder if there were other places when you did not have to search for your guidance in the stars, but walk to a smoldering collective of shrines, and behold it in the flesh. The First Gods understood this. I think that, maybe, on some level anyway, Helovia’s Gods do too – it’s why the Sun floats overhead, and warms the Earth. It’s why the Moon casts her shadow over the world, to praise the circling of Time; Time who does not sleep, and holds them all.

Are these concepts foreign to her, as well?

"Maybe we should talk about something else," or I might not want to talk anymore at all. I let my aggression slip away with the sound of the water, and find a new topic in the meantime. If she can’t talk Gods, surely she can talk adventure. "What herd lands have you been to? I've been to most of them."

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.


Something in her hardens. I only notice because the griffon turns about and scowls at me like I’m a cobra, or maybe even a slug inching across her paw. One ear flips backwards - what did I say? - the other remains upright, golden eyes tilting to the dark female alongside me, hardening. Some of it is defensive, an expectation for violence throwing up a sudden wall (mother hadn’t liked being verbally out maneuvered, at all), while some of it is arrogance, and the last portion of it a simple lack of understanding…mostly about women, and their flippant moods.

Fuck you, too, lady. It’s not my fault your mom taught you how to wander around, thinking about whatever girls like Själ think about.

Her nod is cold in all the way the cat creature is hostile.

Still, she doesn’t walk away. We just stand in close proximity to one another and act frustrated, like absolute social fuck ups; maybe we are. Maybe for all my courtly experience, I’m just a little too rough around the edges still to really be all that noble after all (I obviously know nothing about nobility going hand in hand with humility).

For instance, she dislikes me, along with around 80% or more of those I’ve met. I also don’t notice that she’s mostly bluffing in her response (still floating about on my extensively heightened cloud podium). I nod when she shrugs, understanding the urge to follow ones personal whims rather than the uptight regiments of others.

I played soldier for a season. It was too much structure for me. When could a boy find time to adventure when they were forced to run drills, patrols, and attend meetings all the time?

"I was raised the Basin my first year and have pretty well been aimless since," I don’t remember seeing her there, but that doesn’t mean shit (I was probably out on one of those seven million patrols I mentioned earlier), "it’s much more fun this way. Having someone boss you around all the time sucks."

Especially if it’s d’Artagnan, Ashamin, or Thranduil: one old as dirt, the other filled with cloud fluff, and the last a great big, golden asshole in a fancy cloak.

[ OOC: LOL little does he know Ashamin could smoosh him now ]

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
I’m still on guard for random violence of any sort when the conversation diverts away from the kingdoms of Helovia, into the lives we ourselves had led before our adventures had brought us here. She seems to lose some of the scary factor that had made me throw up the walls to begin with, but I let them hang out for a while. I really don’t feel like being stabbed by a girl today, and especially not Själ; she may think that I’m a pompous ass or a jerk, or whatever, but I don’t mind her so much, no matter her obvious character flaws.

She’s still here, after all, though the whole conversation keeps going from awkward to sad over and over again.

Her smugness at having been alone most of her life isn’t one I can understand. Having wandered out of Helovia after my mother, barely a yearling, had forced me into a similar loneliness. While I had learned a lot out in the world, and even made good friends in a distant land, it was not the same as what I felt in my heart when I looked back to the life that had been before everything had fallen apart. I let that feeling come back to me as I look over at her, wondering if she, too, has spent every day since looking for somewhere else to feel that way again.

It was probably why I’d left the Basin, at the end of the day – not because I didn’t like doing what others wanted me to, but because it just didn’t feel like home anymore. It seemed easier to blame it on patrols. Who wants to admit they had lost something as preciously intangible as home?

The next words that come out of her mouth redirect the train of thought to me, and my experiences. Not adept at reading people like mother had been, I don’t notice the parallels of how that means, maybe, she’s not so proud of having been on her own all this time, caught up in the opportunity to talk more about my favorite topic: me.

"It’s definitely different," I answer with a nod, "and it’s got its own benefits, I guess. I know a lot of what I know because the Basin’s teachers taught me, and having access to all their stuff is pretty neat. And I miss my friends."

Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
She agrees, but in the most distant, morose way to agree to something. I use those sort of yeah’s, too, the sort of sound that signifies that the mind is too busy working to come up with anything better to say. I like that she’s thinking, especially because it contradicts how I think she may not be very smart; maybe she is. Maybe she’s like what Grandmother Vaelenne meant, when she’d called me an accidental fool, when she’d accused me of not knowing simple things I should through no fault of my own.

I’d gotten mad at her then. I get mad at things I don’t understand a lot; I build walls, layer and arm them against the ways of the world which differ from how I think they should be. Now, however, standing in the peaceful, rainbow glow of the pavilion with Själ, maybe just another accidental fool like me, I feel guilty for having shouted at the old priestess. I feel guilty for not thinking about her as much as I do Xynia, waves of it washing over me as I remember how patient she had been to me, and how crass and short I can be with others.

Själ’s words draw me from those dark thoughts into others: it’s not always fun to be alone, is it?

No, no its not, is a long, heavy sigh I don’t give words to. You’ll never hear me admit it aloud even once, but sometimes I regret having left the Basin to be on my own. My heart drops into my hooves as she says the invocation, giving rise to that well of loneliness that reaches, burrowing its tunnels deep into my being. I’ve been alone a long time, the only one of my childhood friends to have left Helovia, and, while they probably didn’t mean to treat me differently now, they did. We all had too many stories that didn’t weave together; seen too many things that we hadn’t seen together. It was hard trying to be part of the same person, like I once felt we had been, when you no longer live the same lives. It was hard coming back to a home that was once yours, changed by time, not the same as it had been.

So I ran away, and made real distance to hide the distance that had grown between our hearts.

It’s easier that way.

I do it now, not saying anything but that broad exhalation in reply, as if not dignifying the words with a response will make it like she’d never said them at all. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I want to walk away, out, out into that wood, and leave her and these heavy thoughts behind.

But she keeps talking, so my hooves stay where they are, for now. In my hollow heart now erupts a flame of jealousy, which I try to stamp out before she notices its eager leaping in my eyes. Her smile hurts me in all the ways it makes her feel better about being lonely, mostly because she’s never really alone at all. Swallowing so my voice doesn’t break, I glance over at her with a dull smile.

"No," I reply quietly without as much bravado as I’ve stated most everything else I’ve said, "but I’d like to, like my family. My mother bonded to a griffon, too, but my father has a hellhound."

And Erebos has a kitsune, and I bet Aithniel has a bonded now too. That leaves me, the failure as usual. I hide that gaping wound with a smile, and a question which draws her attentions hopefully away from me, and back onto herself.

"How long have you guys been together?"