[open] molten eyes and a smile made for war; any

[Rhonen]

rhonen

molten eyes and a smile made for war

It hadn’t been supposed to be anything.
A dalliance. A flirt. A rebound. Perhaps revenge. Nihlus may have not chosen him – Nihlus may have chosen the other boy, the sweeter boy with the smile that wasn’t full of sharp edges and broken pieces – but that didn’t mean there was something wrong with him. She had certainly not thought there was anything wrong with him. She was all fire and fury one moment, sweet like the boy Nihlus had chosen over him the next, and very attractive. She didn’t hold his attention the way Nihlus had, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that she was classically pretty.

One would have thought he’d have learned his lesson, after he met Kolera, the daughter his last dalliance had never bothered to introduce him to. One would think Rhonen would have learned that actions of this sort have consequences, but when he and Kellyn had parted ways after a few weeks of mutually enjoyable time-wasting, he’d assumed that was the end of it. He wasn’t looking for anything long-term, and neither was she. Besides, in between moments of passion she’d demonstrated her powers for him, and she scared him. He fiercely guarded a power he was terrified of, a power he has always been sure would destroy things, and the little pink mare played with hers like it meant nothing more than the grass crushed under her hooves with every step. And she dropped names, too, telling him casually of not one but two grandfathers wielding powers Rhonen could hardly dream of.

No, he hadn’t been sad when she took her leave of him. Lonely, again, but it was better than the tempting of fate that had been twoing with mercurial little Kellyn.

Everything had changed when she reappeared in his life, dragging the filly behind her. The girl looked like her dam, for the most part, down to the bright green eyes. And the wings certainly weren’t something she’d gotten from him, or his side of the family. But that slight shimmer to her coat, even now as a baby – that was all Rhonen’s. Or, rather, his father’s. There’d been no denying his daughter, even if they hadn’t spent every moment together throughout the entirety of the last fall.

Kellyn hadn’t even named the girl. She left that, and the raising, of the filly to Rhonen. He doesn’t know how to raise a child – but he loves her anyway. He names her after his mother’s family, because if there was ever anything pure it was the Queen line of the Dazzling Waterfalls. He should have been the line’s first King, his mother had always wished he would grow up to be that, but like his great-great-great-grandfather, he had fallen short of that, and then the Waterfalls had been no more. He has no tumbling waterfall under which to raise his daughter, nor any home at all, and so he stumbles along, just trying to keep from fucking it up like he has everything else.

“Noah,” he rumbles now, voice unhelpfully brusque as he lifts his brown eyes and shifts, watching her scamper just a little too far away. His heart starts to race in a way that he refuses to acknowledge as fear (it only makes sense that he’d want her to stay closer – his last sight of his twin had been something terribly similar). “Come back over here.”