He had so very nearly forgotten her. 

Almost.

….but not quite.

Ka’Ora is gone. Ka’Mate—gone. Both of them on the wing, hunting in a place so sparsely populated with the meals they crave as the season drags ever longer, stretching endlessly across the horizon on wings of white, blistering ice. He had just come from the mountains—the caves of frost and a little foal he is disappointed by, whose birth he chews on, wondering what she may be good for, if she is indeed a child of the Basin as he calculates. It is the only thing that saves her life; a maybe.

He had not come here looking for the bag of bones and fire, the Witch of the Desert, the Harlot of his ensnared Heart. He would never have thought to come searching for her here, for this place is not theirs. She is (was?) a woman of the Throat, and yet her scent has faded, faded, faded long ago (an absence he has noticed despite himself). Their passions had raged for many moons under the pale rainbow light of the ancient rotunda, the seeds of their hate blooming there, bursting in all glories of color, of shades and hues rarely traveled and painted. But she had left. She and her odor had disappeared from the world, and there was a piece of Reginald that would wonder, occasionally, if she had finally keeled over dead.

A piece of him wondering of her, refusing to forget an ugly, slash-marked face.

His head had been buzzing with things. With a plot of daughters and a meeting with his Leads; of strong Oizys, how he needed to see her soon and discuss, of her little twin Enyo and how he must keep that tab prepared; of feisty Merlin at his heel whenever he trod his homeland, of the girth of Shida’s wide, delicious ass just there, right there at the darkest edges of his mind, looming, eager and patient for a rendezvous he might find himself in, if their paths decide to cross (and they will make such a decision, surely, for addiction is ceaseless). His mind considers all these things, twisting inside and out of a familiar, dark-and-grey daydream that lulls his savage heart with a pleased purr, and as he crests the hill with these grand schemes, all his plots and planning, the maps carefully unfurled and marked in his mind, the schemes, the careful considerations—all of them


cease.

And he stands there, breathing. And he is stripped of himself. Those dark machinations, those grand visions—they are shred from him, the faces of his daughters (has he ever had children?), the curve of Shida’s barrel (has he ever known lust?), the vision of a bright, conquered future (has he ever held ambition?). They are taken from him. 

Ka’Ora is gone. Ka’Mate is gone. There are none to pull him back.

He is naught but a man with a deep, deep chasm filled with flames that lick the brim.
She stands at the edge of a cliff, mane whipping about her neck like white flames licking her cheek, her coat seeming to glimmer in the bitter cold, a farce of beauty, for she is still boney and small, too long everywhere for his taste. And yet his eyes are not searching her body for his tongue. 

The flames lick the brim, and yet his stomach does not rumble.

“Leap,” he does not know he says, for the word slides from his maw so silken, so soft it could be lost between them easily. He does not know where she might leap, where she would go. Would she fly into the heavens on wings of fire? Would she leap into battle? Into his arms?