a storm's comin'

[Pyroclast]

The passage of time isn't really straight forward, is it? One minute it is dark and black and warm and comfortable...beautiful, really. I am lulled by the endless nights, the cool breath of my mother's voice. And I know things in the way all sentient beings know things. I know that I am a child, and that I am comfortable and happy and my mother wishes the best for me.

Or something. We all feel that way at some time.

I don't understand the sudden changes, the stress, the sudden expulsion of myself into an entirely new environment. I think only of the beautiful warmth of just a few moments before, of the last few months, and I am stressed. I am coddled though, Mother cleans me and makes sure I am well fed. I follow her around for a few months, until my stomach can handle grass, until I am my own child, and then she leaves me.

Or, rather, I leave her. She's told me stories of who I am, of who I'm born of. She's told me little things here and there and I know I will learn the true weight of them one day soon. For now I am content to stand on the border of the frozen kingdom, feeling the prickling cold air on my skin, feeling my short black and green coat stand on edge for the cool. It's spring now, a season of coming warmth, but the air whispers something else.

Will they accept me? Will they see me and know who I am and disown me? I hope the green will throw them off, Mother told me so many stories.

Pyroclast

[Brennen]

the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love
great clouds rolling over the hills
and if you close your eyes, does it almost feel

like nothing's changed at all?

He doesn’t recognize him. There is a certain amount of familiarity inside him for his own children, and Neraza’s, but some of that he is convinced is in the magic threads of Beqanna. As for the children of others – the likeness would have to be uncanny or he’d have to be much more familiar with the family. As it is, he barely knew Mountain. Certainly not well enough to see him in a child he’s never met.

And to an extent, it wouldn’t matter. He doesn’t believe the sins of the father are the sins of the son – not really. There are some of course who choose to follow the unwise pathways of their parents, but not all of them. Not even most of them.

But all Brennen sees is a child, black and green and standing alone on the borders. He meanders that way, wings tucked closely into his body, tips trailing far behind him against the ice-hard ground. A half of a smile quirks on his face as he takes a closer look, staring at the boy dwarfed by the ice wall. “Hello,” he drawls the word, an accent he picked up from his father so long ago. It’s heavier when he’s at ease; and he’s at ease here, facing nothing more than a colt. “I’m Brennen.”

For a moment, he looks away, eyes tracking their surroundings, the skies; finding nothing. There’s no mother out there unless she’s invisible entirely. Brennen looks back to the boy, shifting his weight to relax into ease. He doesn’t say that the boy’s a little young to be out here by himself – he knows that would just annoy the young man – but he thinks it. He wonders.

He was a lost child once. He found his father in the Tundra. He wonders what the boy will find.

brennen

immortal, winged, bone-bending, ice-manipulating, wind-manipulating Tundra warrior