Elayne had gone out in the storms, just as he said she shouldn’t do. What was it with teenagers and not listening to your parents? He’d sighed, thinking that eventually she would discover it wasn’t all that fun out there, that her parents maybe were actually right about the experience - after all, she could take any aquatic shape, so a larger one that could swim back to Ischia should be no trouble.
However, it took days, and so one morning, the shifter set out in his usual unusual shape, that of a golden sea serpent, to find his daughter.
The sea however, kept her secrets. None of the whales, sea gulls, or tortoises seems to have spotted any sort of purple fish that seemed out of place (of course one couldn’t fully trust the seagulls, but they wouldn’t have been able to keep down a shifted horse for too long). Worry creased into his brow, and his search expanded from the sea floor to the beaches, and eventually the river and beyond.
He stepped onto the meadowlands from a creek, his golden shape reducing to that of a spotted horse, a young-looking baroque stallion. He wasn’t, of course, as young as he appeared, but honestly he had no time to adjust his apparent age to what might be more appropriate, instead on automation taking the shape of the young male he had been when he just got his shifting abilities.
Aodhan doesn’t stay in one place for long, however. Wandering from herd to herd and group to group, he asks around for a purple and mauve filly with golden sunset mane and tail, and oddly changing wings. She could be glowing? But no, such a color, he gets answered, would be one they would remember. What does he want with her anyway?
He sighs, standing still just a moment when it seems he has spoken to almost everybody here - when a cloud of dust rolling off the Mountain catches his attention. She wouldn’t…? But he should check either way. If it is his daughter, it wouldn’t actually surprise him - she knows the tales of fairies. Hoping it is both her and not, because she shouldn’t get involved with the magic creatures of the mountain if he could help it, he trots over with renewed energy.
But it is not Elayne he finds, broken and dusty after a slide off the mountainside - only stopped by a rock. Scraped, sick, and bloody, it is the Tephran mare, Warlight who had come to their little island meeting way back when.
She coughs, and then he sees it. The Plague. The blood is not all from her fall - he lungs as well, and her skin begins to loosen. Horror fills his face as he steps back, terror grasping his heart. ”You got the Plague?” he breaths, almost certain she wouldn’t be able to hear him.
He’d thought it was over! Is she contagious? Is it starting again?
He waits, waits for an answer, or for the inevitable feeling of dizziness. When nothing seems to happen, he slowly realizes the reason he got his shifting in the first place.
The Cure.
Would it save him still?
from the ashes a fire shall be woken
@[Warlight]