06-13-2021, 05:05 PM
The shift in personality began with the loss of his voice. Yanhua held onto words these days instead of speaking them so fluently and kindly as he’d done before Borderline’s “death”. They seemed hard to come by, when once he’d spread them freely as rainfall over a dry and parched earth. There had always been plenty of ears to listen back then, young ears and old alike who wanted to hear everything he had to say, but these days that much has changed. Saturnelle and Wit, his youngest offspring, are growing and leaving the boundaries of their home - they had gotten lost as well, thanks to an attack from a WolfSpider’s den in the darkest heart of the shadowy forest.
His response to the affair and to most everything else was short: “Do not go back.” He’d told them, and that was that.
The once roaming hybrid finds himself attached more than ever to his loved ones. He leaves the gist of patrols to Reynard whenever the younger stallion wants them, and spends most of his quiet hours silently thinking in the presence of Amarine.
His words have turned inward on themselves, into thoughts that gather among the corners of his colluded mind, growing webs of their own from being forgotten under new piles. He thinks and thinks some more, about what had been and what might’ve, wondering about the realism of his world and those that lived in it. He had hardly noticed the young chicklet that’d taken up roosting in his forelock weeks ago, back before he’d met the strange child at the borders of Taiga. Now the thing was halfway grown and his forelock was a mess of tangled hair. It clucked above him, ignored for the most part, as he trod the darker deer paths through a heavy fog on the western edge of Taiga.
He was searching for answers, hoping to find some lost remnant of the past that could confirm his suspicions of the present, when he began to drift into the parts of the redwoods that a specific family clan inhabited quietly for years. The ‘shadow clan’ (as he’d taken to calling them) had been in this sector for as long as Yan could remember, and he did well not to disturb them unless absolutely necessary, given their proclivity toward a quiet, withdrawn existence.
This evening, however, was different.
“They all went on the quest.” He murmured mostly to himself, the young hen between his backward-curved horns pecking tenderly here-and-there at his glowing strands of hair, arranging them as she liked. “But did they all come back?” He frowned, filling his head up with more questions that never seemed to have answers.
YANHUA
@[Illum]