[open] you can hear when the heart stops - anyone

[Set]

Pangea. He knows little about the land - little about any of this new landscape that his world has become. He vaguely remembers a sickness, some contrary entertainment in a frozen wasteland … When Niklas had come to him with news of his mother’s return (much like his sire, the hollow-eyed demon was inexplicably bound to his dam), it had been Set’s intention to seek the gray magician out straight away. Ana has always held a rare place of esteem in his eyes. His lusts affections for her are not tempered by love, but he is otherwise rather fond of the vicious creature. He has not missed how they flocked to her, ghost and mortal alike, and he is too self-important to chase anyone who would not cleave to he and only he.

He slows his galloping pace along the river’s edge, breath burning gloriously in lungs long-accustomed to sprints across unfamiliar territory. It is his own skin that he wears today, an unusually set piebald hide, criss-crossed with the silver and white of battles and lessons past. Eyas had pummeled his vision and compelled him to shift back; back to himself and now he remembers. Remembers what it was to be when he was little but an heir, before the wars and the alliance had changed him.

Leaving the main riverbank at a slow jog, he swings eastward. The aquaphilic vegetation of the southern parts of the river give way to hardier grasses, sparse and brown in nature. It is sand that sucks at his hooves now as he moves across a winter-dry streambed, the scent of the otherworldly servants of Pangea’s Queen growing stronger as he bypasses protocol and crosses territory boundaries. Lifetimes ago, borders mattered, but his crown now lies cracked and moldering at his feet, just another token of accomplishment.

He can feel her eyes on him before he discerns her location. An ice cold burn, it thrills in his veins, a sensation headier than all but the drunken frenzy of battle. Swallowing, he spins to meet her gaze, rusty laughter in his throat, golden eyes dancing with mischief. Though she is several hundred yards from him, it is easy enough to sharpen his vision and drink her in. “Ana,” he breathes, and then his dual-toned muzzle twists and jerks in lighthearted teasing. “You never waste time.” She toiled for none but herself. Why should they, when the world - and all others - is theirs for the taking?

@[Anaxarete] <333