[private] loved and loved

[Tarian]

It is such a distant, hazy world to Tarian now.

More than a decade has passed since he last saw his family. The roar of Paraiso's waterfall still reverberates in his memories. But it is no longer as strong as it once was. What had once seemed so irrefutable, is now shrouded and veiled by years that have grown doubt between them. Tarian knows it is still out there, somewhere. That had always been Malachi's unfaltering belief - and the sole one that Tarian picked up after learning of his father's demise - but if it was powerful as their legends told, why had no other lands heard of it?

If it was such a place of great magic, why hadn't it resurfaced?

Why hadn't the bonds of family - one of the purest, strongest ties in this life (or so they had always been told) - been enough to resurrect it?

Why hadn't it been enough to save his father and mother?

Tarian had buried these thoughts long ago. He had buried them in the grave of the boy he had once been; the brother that Minah so lovingly remembers. His unanswered questions had been the only reply that the young pegasus had needed: everything he had ever been taught had not been enough. The prophecy about Windskeep had propelled them towards a fate that had been full of suffering and it seemed fitting to Tarian that he had learned most of it while in Liridon. A land filled with strange, foreign gods and beliefs; the land where his mother had been born (and she had been a daughter of one of those gods). The stories and lessons that the young Tarian had grown up with had been about the fierceness of Ichiro, the compassion of Legado - their gods had been the elements surrounding them: the Wind, the Stars, the River, the Seasons. Beings that followed the laws of nature; everything within balance.

Liridon - like Beqanna - had their own gods. Some had been mortal-born; some had seemed like they had been crafted along the blurred lines of Magic. But whatever it was called - Fate, the Winds, Gods - Tarian had learned that it was everywhere and endless. That regardless of what they had been taught in Paraiso, he learned that it loved to inspire suffering.

(What God loves? When something lives forever, what is a single mortal life but an amusement?)

His granite face is a statue carved from all that hatred.

Until she cries.

The way her face falls (he should have turned, should have left her there) summons the boy who had been buried long ago. It was the face Minah made when Maren had started to discover her wings and left their flightless sister on the ground. It was face that gave away how much she longed to go wherever Liam went when he was too busy to look behind him. And more importantly - the memory he can most vividly recall - it was the face she made when she had been very young, when she had traveled alongside their mother with Maren after Kalina's pilgrimage and all Aletta could stare at was the empty space where her beloved Brynn should have been when they returned.

He gasps, pulling back from the weeping woman who stares at him with their grandmothers deep eyes.

"@[Minah]?" Tarian intones. And then utters the only word he can manage: "How?"