12-31-2020, 10:29 AM
----------------tell me: who do i run to?
A large piece of driftwood looms ahead: grey and still dripping from the gnarled tips, the dead tree still draws his attention. Drying barnacles and bits of juvenile coral cling to the wood. It’s been displaced from the sea floor here in the tropics, Pteron decides, and nibbles gently at the coral. It is disappointingly salty and very hard, and he spits it out just in time to see movement at the edge of his olive eyes.
There are few pegasi on Ischia, and none of them up this early or prone to morning flights over this beach.
He nearly brushes it away – greeting visitors to the tropical isle is a responsibility he neither has nor wants – but then the distant shape circles back, and soon it becomes clear they’ve spotted him and mean to land.
In the dim morning light, with the wind in their favor, Pteron is only able to eliminate possibilities of who this might be. It’s too small and pale to be Gale and Eyas never visits. He nearly decides its Nashua before the horse lands. She is not too far in color from the half-lit sand and his feet, and Pteron recognizes the dun mare with a bright laugh.
“Vastra!” He calls out, lifting a wing in greeting, and then making quick work of the distance between them.
How long has it been, he wonders? Time has an odd way of passing here on the islands, Pteron has found. Quickly, but gently, not at all like the way the Forest had felt when it took a year from him. That gentle sensation has only added to the quiet sense of inevitability that Pteron experiences as a creature away of his own immortality, and it seems perfectly serendipitous that Vastra would arrive now when he very least expects it. Fate, he thinks as his smile turns bittersweet for just a moment.
She asks how he has been, and the question doesn’t elicit the sadness he has nearly come to expect. The loss of his parents had been anticipated, but still it had struck him far harder than he had expected. The damage of his own hurricane still lingers, but perhaps interaction with others will be the tides that slowly work to smooth away the damage.
“I have been worse,” Pteron answers, and though he sounds quite light-hearted, there is a edge of weariness to his voice, and he hears it as soon as the words touch the morning ear. Unaware how closely her thoughts mirror his own, Pteron falls back on old habits, deflecting attention from himself and taking comfort in familiar interactions. “You, though, seem to look better each time we meet. Have you found a Fountain of Youth where I might get my own glow?”
@[Vastra]
-- pteron --