He wakes with a start just a few hours past midnight.
It had been the dream again, the one where his bones grow thicker and his wings begin to shrivel into his shoulders. Too much time spent on the ground, Pteron tells himself as he works to steady his breathing and the rapid pounding of his heart. After a moment he stretches out one wing to look at more closely. Still there, he finds, and surely no shorter than when he’d fallen asleep. The moonlight casts odd shadows across the ground around him, and the creak of moving wood sounds overloud.
There will be no returning to sleep tonight, Pteron is quite sure.
Instead of pursuing rest the pegasus stallion rises from where he’d been leaning against a jutting boulder. He has found no suitable place to nest despite his months in the woods, but this place is as good as any. Still, he is not reluctant to leave it the way he recalls being loathe to rise from his beds in the rushes of the Pampas. Was that childhood, he wonders, or had the Pampas truly felt more like home than the Taiga does?
This is a question that plagues him almost as often as the dream. To put it from his mind, he breaks into a canter nearly from a standstill. His bones (they can’t really be heavier, can they? Surely that is a figment of his dream?) and muscle complain loudly, but soon adjust to the relentless pace that the tobiano holds. He travels through the unpopulated redwood forest, places rarely touched by hooves other than those of the fallow deer. His pace is dangerous, and though he tumbles once with a loud crack and his leg hangs briefly at an impossible angle, he does not slow.
Not until he breaks into the open meadow that separates Taiga from one of the Hyaline rivers does he stop. Ahead, the peaks of the mountain kingdom rise into a sky that is just starting to glow with the early light of dawn. Sweat streaks down his pale sides, and plasters some of his blue mane against his tobiano neck. His breath is heavy but he is a young stallion in the peak of health with an unnatural speed of recovery, and soon enough he is eyeing the high-altitude trails leading into Hyaline with a considerate eye.
He’d been planning on turning and running back through Taiga, but he has never been to Hyaline. Now seems as a good a day as any, and surely it will be a respectable hour of the morning before he finds the lake and valley that he knows are the main part of the kingdom. Knowing that relations between his home and this place are unsubstantiated, Pteron makes no effort to hide his presence. He keeps to the trails with the heaviest use, moves with no special attempt at silence, and remains perfectly visible.
@[aegean]
It had been the dream again, the one where his bones grow thicker and his wings begin to shrivel into his shoulders. Too much time spent on the ground, Pteron tells himself as he works to steady his breathing and the rapid pounding of his heart. After a moment he stretches out one wing to look at more closely. Still there, he finds, and surely no shorter than when he’d fallen asleep. The moonlight casts odd shadows across the ground around him, and the creak of moving wood sounds overloud.
There will be no returning to sleep tonight, Pteron is quite sure.
Instead of pursuing rest the pegasus stallion rises from where he’d been leaning against a jutting boulder. He has found no suitable place to nest despite his months in the woods, but this place is as good as any. Still, he is not reluctant to leave it the way he recalls being loathe to rise from his beds in the rushes of the Pampas. Was that childhood, he wonders, or had the Pampas truly felt more like home than the Taiga does?
This is a question that plagues him almost as often as the dream. To put it from his mind, he breaks into a canter nearly from a standstill. His bones (they can’t really be heavier, can they? Surely that is a figment of his dream?) and muscle complain loudly, but soon adjust to the relentless pace that the tobiano holds. He travels through the unpopulated redwood forest, places rarely touched by hooves other than those of the fallow deer. His pace is dangerous, and though he tumbles once with a loud crack and his leg hangs briefly at an impossible angle, he does not slow.
Not until he breaks into the open meadow that separates Taiga from one of the Hyaline rivers does he stop. Ahead, the peaks of the mountain kingdom rise into a sky that is just starting to glow with the early light of dawn. Sweat streaks down his pale sides, and plasters some of his blue mane against his tobiano neck. His breath is heavy but he is a young stallion in the peak of health with an unnatural speed of recovery, and soon enough he is eyeing the high-altitude trails leading into Hyaline with a considerate eye.
He’d been planning on turning and running back through Taiga, but he has never been to Hyaline. Now seems as a good a day as any, and surely it will be a respectable hour of the morning before he finds the lake and valley that he knows are the main part of the kingdom. Knowing that relations between his home and this place are unsubstantiated, Pteron makes no effort to hide his presence. He keeps to the trails with the heaviest use, moves with no special attempt at silence, and remains perfectly visible.
@[aegean]