Just know this too shall pass - any

[Falk]

THE STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW

When the Reckoning had undertaken, some thousands of miles away from the foreign shore he was traipsing, it had been a small mercy for Falk. He had never wielded fear like a weapon. Not like his father, not like his younger brother—both of whom are but distant, strange boughs on a tree he had broken free from before he could even catch a glimpse of it.

As far as he knows, he is the only one for whom the horror sinks like a rotted gut and makes him feel irreparably immoral. Not that Falk is perfect, he is the cast off of tyrants and villains—he is the body of monsters and the blood of extermination.

Underneath, it boils and surfaces as tar in his throat, rendering him hard and bitter is spates. But unlike them, he tempers it with the honor he gained on his own terms, off distant shores and in rain-soaked skies.

The fear has always felt out of place in his bones, the thing that made him clumsy in his own fit body—he was paying a price, he had decided long ago, for whatever sin it was that made this seed grow thick and mean. Mother had never minded the ungainliness. She believed it, likely, to be childhood sea-legs; he believed it to be imps tripping him up at every step.

Mother is dead and imps don’t exist.
He is who he is and he has grown much in his migrations.

He comes back a man, one of no particular note. 
He is medium-height, dark-skinned and eyed. He no longer bears the horns that curl tightly around his head; his wings are the same (or, they look the same, even if they are made of borrowed material), white and stark again his side. The muscles of his back and shoulders hulk and move brutishly under his dusky skin, having spent so much time charting the wide open skies and developing those machines.

Flight had been spared when his horns had shed from his head and his hooves had soldered shut. When the fear had released itself and slunk back to the dark, ancestral soup from whence it came. Waiting, it would seem, though Falk also returns ignorant to the Mountain and its larceny and to the reclamation process.

He spots the open, spring-brown meadow and pumps his wings, slowing his body to descend. It comes at him fast and when his hooves touch down, the momentum stumbles him, as it is wont to do. Every time. For him, it is normalcy. The giving, soft ground squishes under his weight as he makes a wide semicircle to catch his balance. When he does, he stills, breathing the crisp, fragrant air—home’s air, if it could be called that, now.

It has been so long, he realizes he feels like a stranger in wild lands, which is really no different from the past who-knows-how-many years.

FALK, SON OF POLLOCK AND SYNTYCHE