how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
After months alone on the isle, ravaging for food and saying a word to no other, it is overwhelming to be surrounded by so many in such a short time. First, there is a girl—larger than him—who comes up to him so quickly that he takes a stumbling step back, his silver eyes widening just slightly. His somber face lights slightly, brightening as he looks at her and sees something familiar in her face.
“You know me?” he questions, curious, before another stallion approaches and he is everything that his mother had ever told him in his first days. The great dragon of black and ivory, bronze and gold. He is not draconic in this moment, but it is not terribly difficult for the young boy to imagine him as one.
It is not terribly difficult for him to see the fire in his lungs.
Something like relief—like awe—washes over his features as he hears the words. My son. He glows with it, turning his young, angular head toward the girl. “Then you—you must be Reia.”
But before he can say anything, or move forward into an embrace, his mother is there.
She runs forward as a tiger and shifts mid step, her face an unreadable mixture of relief and fear and other things she would never be able to discern. She crashes into her son like her daughter almost had and pulls him close into her chest. There are tears on her cheeks and she shakes with the overwhelming emotion.
For a second, she says nothing but presses a fierce kiss into his curved neck.
She releases him slightly and looks to her daughter, that fierce love cutting through her as she smiles, and then finally to Castile. “Our son is home,” she says as Nikolaus’ somber face breaks into a grin.
Home.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )