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!