it is totally fine! no need to apologize
i know i'm not the center of the universe
-but you keep spinning 'round me just the same
She reaches out to brush his cheek and Ivar takes the opportunity to playfully tug at a lock of her lavender mane. He’s ever-so-gentle, smiling as he pulls away. Kylin agrees, but without a pause questions his method of arrival. He follows her gaze with her brown eyes, looking out at the turquoise water that he swam through so easily. Ivar looks back at Kylin, as though to be sure she is asking a serious question. It takes him a moment (just a breath longer than it should have) to remember that not everyone is like his family.
While it is with his father that he spends the most time underwater, Ivar’s mother has never hesitated to take him swimming. They are his main reference for the world, and the young colt had momentarily forgotten what he has been repeatedly told: You are different.
(Not better, not worse – just different. Different is good – everyone is different. Don’t hold them underwater.)
His mother’s words echo briefly in his mind, but the tobiano colt pushes them aside.
“I swam.” He tells her truthfully, “I can breathe underwater. The salt water isn’t as easy as the lake was, though.”
Kylin jumps into the air excitedly, and Ivar easily succumbs to the contagious bliss of childhood. He kicks out his back hooks, flinging a shower of pale sand behind them.
“I heard there’s a jungle. I’ve never seen a Jungle before.”
He has only heard of them. Heard of one, really, the one where the Nerinians had lived before they were Nerenian. It is a place of legends, now lost beneath the sea. Ivar will never see it, but it is more than enough for him to see the jungle of Ischia.
-------------------i v a r
------------------------------------djinni and stillwater--------------------------------- |
|
|
