[private] our veins are busy but my heart's in atrophy

[Pteron]

and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
----------------tell me: who do i run to?

The familiar chuff of Halcyon’s laughter elicits an equally happy noise from Pteron. He leans into the embrace, continuing the ruffle the thick fur of the boy’s striped shoulder. Its different, he thinks, not the cottony fur of the cub that he’d been when they’d last met. Halcyon, like Elio, has grown up while Pteron’s eyes were turned away. The realization of this causes an uncomfortable twist of guilt in his stomach, and he is grateful that the nearness of their embrace allows him to hide his face just long enough to disguise the emotion that flashes across it.

He’d made many promises to Halcyon, and he had broken them all in favor of a single promise to the boy’s mother.

The warmth which which Halcyon greets him had been wonderous, but it had not been what Pteron expected. He’d feared the boy would hate him (and he would deserve it), but what he says – I came for you! – seems very much the opposite.

“Came for...For me?” He repeats cautiously. He is unable to keep a smile from his face at the boy’s enthusiasm, even if he is not entirely sure what Halcyon means. The young tiger seems to sense this, and tells Pteron of his recent activities and his current goal, and by the end he repeats back “Came for me,” with a nod of understanding. That Halcyon is old enough to patrol the borders seems hardly possible, yet surely a tiger of this size is nearly an adult. Pteron has seen only one tiger, and had only encountered her once up close, and that when he was a youngling himself. It occurs to him, just as Halcyon says something about his mother being the Caretaker, that he’s never seen the other as anything but a tiger.

Surely Halcyon has an equine form. He can talk, after all, and that seems to be the basic requirement of sentience to prove that one is horse kind. Pteron has heard of creatures without a form of their own, but Halcyon is clearly a tiger and so not one of the mutatios. 

Before he can think more on this, what Halycon said a moment ago finally seems to reach him.

“Caretaker? Aquaria? And who is Cormorant?”

He cannot recall anyone by that name, only the seabirds that he had chased down on his last visit to Ischia, swooping up into the air with them much to the delight of the laughing Halcyon and Aquaria below. The memories of that last visit, a few days at the very end of summer, are some of his favorites of Ischia. They had instilled in him a love of the tropics, one that is nearly satisfied by the place he and Aegean have found in Tephra.

@Halcyon]

-- pteron --