And then, breath, sweet and warm, it smells like scavenged green things and the soft layer of flesh between bark and tree, and the crisp ever so pure smell of winter water and snow. Yet, as wonderful as the initial grasp of the embrace is, the scents of nature entwine and are overwhelmed by her in her purest intangible essence. My own breath, hot and perhaps overly eager, is returned, my ears having found their forward position again and my neck strenuously arched, the muscles delightfully screaming in a way that says, you are doing this right bro.

So the forever long four seconds ends, my gaze running over her again, with a measure of distraction that lingers on her curves and her tantalizing smile, as her sultry purr sounds over her breath still swirling about my sensory memory. Though I hear the words, they are muffled in a haze of hormones, and it takes me a moment longer to reply than it might have with Erebos, or someone else platonic enough to not invoke these strange and curious devils within myself.

"Do you speak of the Rift lands?" I ask, not sure what else she could mean of a land that was ruled and shaped by magic – such a place was always changing, or so mother had said, though thinking of her now makes me feel so strange that I can’t help but frown in the midst of my smiles, the tell tale signs that screws rolled and rattled about more than I let on. I try to quickly recover, but she probably has noticed none the less. It is probably why she looks away from me now for the first time since our embrace of breath.

But she asks me instead of myself, a thing of which I am ever happy to oblige those who are as succinctly pretty as Rhiannon, and others who are much less so.

"I left home almost two years ago," I tell her, leaving out the fact that I’d followed mother – but if Rhiannon had been in the Basin at the time and wasn’t an absolute moron, she would add up the time frames and could likely conclude as much, "and stayed with a herd some weeks away, not very different than the Basin when I’d left. I’ve since left and come again, and have only been in Helovia since the very last days of Orangemoon."

Maybe I sound bitter, but my return to the Basin had been to discover Thranduil, the Lord of Fools, ruling its peaks, which stood shelter to winged things who served, not as miners and toilers upon the earth as was proper, but as warriors, proud of their appendages. It had never settled well with me, nor had being told what to do; equally abrasive was the annoyingly friendly seer Ashamin and his posse of bouncies, the emptiness of the tent that my father had sacrificed some of his power to create. Mother now soiled the only other home I had to return to, and Xynia with her pretty face and many suitors had no use for a boy whose kingdom had been lost with his mother’s concern for others. With no family there left to hold me, and too many lost or irritating things ghosting about in one home or another, I had found very little in the land of my birth (or that of the Nightwalk) but pretty girls and Erebos; I could find pretty girls anywhere, and Erebos would surely be my friend no matter how far our paths pulled.

@Rhiannon