It smells like Father here. It makes you pine.

You do not know that Father had been here recently, instructing your sister without your knowledge. It’s for the best, anyway. It would’ve given you a stomach ache if you had known. Now, only your heart aches because you miss Paaapaaa and you want him to see your treasure, your prize, your gift.

Onei sits upon your back, so docile and fluffy, so unlike Ker. He is a pale little bauble gracing the black of your coat, and it’s astounding how attached you’ve grown to him already. Those little cotton balls, you had allowed them in your head, and it’s amazing how he makes you feel. Nothing specific, mind. His mind is much too vague, much too new, to form solid opinions and facts. But he is so curious and there is a vibrance there that feeds the gaping chasm in your breast. He is not so boring, and you are not so bored.

So you explore, because he wants to learn and so do you, but his learning makes everything so colorful bright. The thistles, for instance, underneath the melting, re-frozen snow. You are both dying to see what a world can look like when it is not snowy and cold all the time. Winter is all the either of you have ever known. Onei is eager for the melt of spring, and suddenly, you find yourself eager as well.

You watch a shadow—no, wait, shadows are not brown. You are a shadow, truly, with only a speck of blue to mar your coat, yet shadows do have blue lining sometimes don’t they? They’re certainly not burned brown at the joints. But you do not care, because you approach anyway, watching them kinda sorta fly to your side of the river.

It reminds you of the scene in the Edge, and how that spittling of a boy had danced with death at the edge of a cliff. This one—this boy (now that you’re near enough to smell it) is not so small and has many, many more legs, so you’re not sure how old he seems. He’s certainly skinnier than Father and all the other adult males you’ve seen. Does that make him young, or unfortunate?

“Hello,” you say, eyeing the line of his broad wings as he shoots past you in obvious glee. You suppose it might be exciting to fly through the air—Onei is certainly impressed, cheeping animatedly from his perch at the young colt—although you yourself have never felt the urge to soar. You think it might become boring after a while, because there’s nothing up there, nothing but clouds and the sun and moon and stars—and you can see those from the ground anyway, so what’s the point of flapping? “Would you jump from a cliff?” you call out to the boy suddenly—a nonsensical thing to say, of course, but you cannot help it, because you’re becoming bored already and yet Onei wants to stay.

talk talk talk