The northern slopes that drop sharply into the sea are wild and dangerous.
He’s not sure why he chooses to live on them, because he is neither wild nor dangerous. But it is where he spends most of his time now. It is also where he spent the last four years of dutiful solitude. He’s circling around the slopes now, their watchful protector of nothing. He does battle, but it is with the errant trade-winds that whistle over the scrub land and toss him to and fro, rather than a breathing, physical threat. White, wide wings quake with the effort of keeping himself aloft. The alternative is a quick grave beneath the sea that roils and churns under his grey, dangling hooves. The trial of staying alive fuels him in a way that it never has before. And then he realizes why he chooses the north. It is like her, not him: wild and dangerous and breath-taking and challenging.
He is fighting her – fighting for her – in a way that she’ll never see.
Walter has never felt more alive than he has in Nerine. Lean, tough muscles have developed under his gold pelt that had never been there before. When he flexes them, they respond smoothly and instantaneously. On thought, he’s gliding towards land again. The tinny light of a cloudy day makes weird shapes of the kingdom below. It all runs together, hills and dunes, into an undulating and undefined grey mass. Still, he would know the way on instinct if need be. To his right, the land seems to fold into itself as a crescent that sweeps into the ocean. He keeps with the shoreline, his path similarly curved as he heads south. There is a compass within him now, too, that has grown sharper in his time here. He uses it to find the populated stretch of the sandy place when the storms roll in and the hard rain falls. Sheltering caves poke into the southern cliffs, wide and dry enough to hold the residents. Smiling, he remembers his recent time in one with Hestia. The dark woman had given him both her story and her warmth - one of which has left him, while the other remains firmly lodged in his thoughts.
He’s looking for her now as he glides effortlessly over the crashing break. His shadow races underneath of him over various terrains as it leaps from water to sand to scrub grass. The sound of the surf becomes hushed and then almost muted as he moves so far inland away from it. The stallion wonders how Hestia is settling in to Nerine the second time around. It will never be the Chamber, (or the Jungle, or the Deserts, or the Valley – as they agreed) and he is ever-glad. He is a different man here, and he thinks maybe she will be different, too. As Beqanna changes, so must its people.
A flash of gold is a blip on his radar.
Djinni. He is grounded. He doesn’t remember telling his wings to let the air fall from under them, doesn’t remember touching down, roughly, and running to her side. But he’s there, suddenly, and she is too. “You are a vision,” he tells her, taking in the whole of her before pressing forward into her space without hesitation. Because it never matters how long they are separated. Time is irrelevant when it comes to them. He meets her like the northern shore she is, crashing into her wildness as the sea does. He is her stalwart knight, and she is his adventure in the flesh. And she is home.
Walter
son of Liefde & Ellen
@[Djinni]