Talking to Rhiannon had left me two kinds of frustrated, one of which had driven me north with flattened ears and an irritable twitch to my tail. The other had initially left the space between my back legs feeling as if someone had spent the evening beating against it with something hard and unpleasant, a sensation which slowly eased the further I made myself walk. If I’d hoped that the anger would have gone away as easily as this feeling, I was now being proven a fool – but to be honest, I’d only really sought to make the queasy tightness go away.

Now I’m left with this frustration, this self annoyance at being, despite the physical changes that have taken me, a lost child. For all the words I’d shared with Demothi along the beach, and the following days, in which I’d walked full of faith and belief that I would be an outcast with no holes in his heart for the snow and the stone, I now made my way precisely there. Her words follow me, a poison that hadn’t afflicted me when she’d first spoke them – but Rhiannon’s spell was cast none the less, and snows in the southern realms and the wild places of Helovia could not ease the knot bound tight in my chest.

The knot that calls for home, for more than just ankle deep white that seems a ghost of Frostfall, not the true nature of the season, but a mockery that cackles at my back.

So its in this state of cursing and longing for Rhiannon and doing the same of my homeland that I see him, Volterra, with his earthen magic and his rude little red lizard. Something else with a V, wasn’t it? Though I can’t recall as I adjust my direction and plod though the snow, I find also it’s not uncommon – I barely remember Orsino and Kyst’s names, and sometimes completely space Kirchoff’s. If I don’t bother to remember my friend and family’s bonded, why would I care for Volterra’s?

"Volterra!" I say no sooner than I am in earshot, the glimmer of gold scales alongside the red making the smile that might have been friendly (I can sort of like him until he starts making little Volterra’s, right?) fade away as soon as I spy her, a secondary thought as to whether this one is so obviously a wild beast as her crimson friend, "it will be hard to see your tables beneath all this snow. What brings you and your lizards so far north? Testing yourself and the lizards against the chill?"

The question settles with my hooves, a trail of white mist standing separate of his own breath some manly distance from him, trying my best to set aside my annoyance – but unable to avoid the brash commentary, regardless.

@Volterra

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