Blood.

It’s a simple word, but a foreign one, to the one who shares it with me. On a rise not far from me, hidden by the shade of the forest of a familiar haunt, my buck stands and stares out towards the Rotunda, to which we are heading.

I smell it now, too, perhaps through the bond, or my own nose. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, so strong is the connection between two hearts, bound together like ours are. Regardless, its there, wrong as the Sun in a starry sky, bright against the cool, familiar smells of the river, the snow, and the trees, and it adds speed to my pace, where it leaves Duir standing still, his woodland eyes staring worriedly at the distant tragedy.

A howl breaks the silence, a pained one, and the trot that had been born from my walk becomes a canter, knowing such cries from fields left by the felling of Gods. I rush towards death, unprepared, unskilled in any art that might save the wounded but for a clean, swift end to their suffering. Arriving to the familiar clearing about my favorite place in all of Helovia, I feel everything in my chest drop hard onto the forest floor, my long steps suddenly jerking to a halt.

It’s the boy. A metal wolf clamors to the ground next to the only person in the world that could be: my father. Pressed against his strong chest is my childhood friend, my warmly remembered guardian, and neither of their chests move.

Blood.

Blood stains the snow.

"Dad…?" I whisper, not wanting to say it, not daring, hearing the God’s words echo in my head, how I took it all for granted, how time would move forward, and I would come to regret how I had attempted to cling to its shores, ignoring that it carried ever onward. My hooves move beneath me, somehow, perhaps carried forward by the strength of my companion, who arrives alongside me as I approach where he takes his final sleep.

I have seen the dead before. They were strangers, faces new, not as familiar as the sky, or the smell of rain. Looking at him there, glancing at the child with my own mourning evident (who I assume to by my kin, from his sorrow, and his metallic, dark colors, recognizing him, also, from the meadow, when I’d been too late, late as I am now), I fight the tears the press against my eyes. I press them back, deep inside myself, and build around them a wall of steel, looking at the remains of the only man who’d ever truly been proud of me.

"I thought…I thought I had more time," is all I can manage to say through that heaviness, reaching to touch Kirchoff’s head, and then my father’s still warm shoulder for the last time. I won’t ever make the mistake of being so careless again.

Looking up at the boy, my brother, I admire his similarities, and jealously look upon the things that had once been my father’s. Duir, however, quiets that ugly emotion with the same logic that had driven the actions of the Engineer: you have more than he does.

"I, uh… I’m Rikyn. I don’t guess he’d ever mentioned me," I say, looking back at down the scene that would likely keep me far from this beloved place, for a long time, "I haven't been a very good son, after all."

[ OOC:I WASN'T READY FOR THIS!!! D: sobs onto keyboard with stepdaughter judges me ]