He feels made new again by the sudden familiar regularity of day and night. Or maybe it is from the changes within himself, the feathers that burst painlessly through his skin and the wings that erupted slightly less gently from the bone and muscle of his golden shoulders. He’d always guessed at what it would be like to fly, at what it might feel like to have only the sky and wide open blue to sail through, to have nothing to hold him back. But he had never truly understood what he was missing until now.

It is a freedom that had been robbed from him by the dark and restored tenfold, a weightlessness unlike one he had ever known. He has a new understanding for the everchanging shades of blue that drape themselves around the clouds, he knows what it feels like to fly through one too - cool and damp, like fog and yet somehow more.

Or maybe he is just more, in his quiet jubilation.

But even he can not fly forever and his wings are still young, still new, the muscles not yet hard and corded with the years of use they would have if he’d been born with them. So he lands when they ache, but he is careful to pick a new place every time. There is so much more to see and know now, places he would not have found from any place but the clouds.

He is headed for a rock outcropping now, a formation of cliffs in the land that walls off a small meadow with an even smaller clear pond inside it. But there is a swirl of color somewhere beside all of it in his periphery, something teal and pale and shining like a jewel. She would be striking enough like that, but the aura surrounding her is what really captures his attention. There are swirls of blue and pink that make a smile pull at the corners of his mouth, paler swirls of an almost golden shade of yellow that makes the smile fade again.

It is no decision at all to redirect his flight and land quietly nearby, though she will have certainly heard the rustle of feathers in his large wings. He keeps his face soft when he turns to join her, moving to the edge of her little pool. Up this close she is like some kind of ocean treasure, and he can see in her skin every shade of ocean-teal and the almost opalescence of the paler shell-marked places. Her face is quiet, her eyes wider in a way that leads him to believe she is unsure, though perhaps it is just the delicate plains and hollows that make them seem so large. But she is undeniably beautiful, like an ocean siren, and the desire to be near to her wells inside his chest until it builds into something he reflects back to her unknowingly. A desire that binds them silently together.

“You’re worried about something.” He notes, examining the hints of yellow swirling in her aura again, and though the question itself is prying there is a gentle kind of genuine concern that warms in the brown of his searching eyes. His wings fold in against his back, the feathers whispering as he moves close enough to the water to let it lap at his hooves but no further. “Is there something I can help you with?” This close, with her delicate curves and a thousand shades of swirling teal, with those solemn seafoam eyes and the way sunshine spills over the hollows of her face and her hips, he is entirely unimmune to the magic of her.

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He wonders at the way her aura shifts as soon as she notices him, the way the yellow morphs into greens that swirl bright like emeralds, like jade, like entire forests come alive to dance across her skin, invisible to all but him in a way that satisfies his ego. Green means curiosity, it means that she is as taken with him as he is with her, and the knowledge only serves to deepen the smile at his mouth until it draws careful creases at the corners of his warm eyes. His aura would be green too, if she could see it.

Then she’s moving towards him and there is something in her eyes that feels entirely delicate, entirely fragile, and he notes the swirls of teal that dance beside the purer greens with a softening in his gaze. Attraction, he realizes, and his buckskin wings lift and flare with an inherent arrogance all their own that is still entirely new to him. He should be glad she likely knows as little of the language of wings as he does. There is no warning before that shade of murky gray washes over her, before it smothers everything around it like smoke through her forests of green and teal. Her discomfort is like a briar under his skin, and for the briefest moment he wonders if it is something in him that she objects too. His closeness, his wings still flared wide for her, the glowing golden feathers along his shoulders and tufting from behind his ears. He would not blame her for finding him strange, he still thinks the same of his own reflection some days.

But then her voice finds him, soft and breathy, and even though she steps away from him there is a new strand of orange that winds through her gray. So curious. Orange is extremes. Bold and brave, upset and regretful. Orange is hard to place with so little context.

Yet -

“Sure I can.” He disagrees, and there is a light in the warm honey of his eyes as his navy mouth twitches with a small, secret smile. “Pasts are always changing, evolving with the layers we add to them.” He steps closer to her again, closing distance he no longer thinks she wants based on the swirls of deepening red throughout her aura. It should feel like spying, to know without a doubt that she finds some kind of attraction for him - perhaps in his grin or in his eyes or the shameless way he reaches out to touch his mouth to the corner of hers for just a moment, breathing in the scent of sea and summer and her. “Spend the day with me.” He does not pose it like a question, and from the way those warm eyes shine with amusement, it likely sounds more like a dare.

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