There are countless differences between himself and the mind reader. Color, size, mannerisms; it’s to be expected, what with them practically being from different eras. Consider the circumstances: Voltage was born into a world that no longer existed for Crevan. If the thought-snatcher had opened his mouth and relayed where he’d come from and what he was searching for, the names would seem like gibberish - Gemstone Ridge, Nexa... Just forgotten blips of time, now.

It’s not like the recognition that dawns on his face when Kharon mentions Ischia, moreso through definiton than by actual title, but Crevan knows it all the same. He’s heard of the island, seen it himself from the murky beaches of Taiga on a clear day - nothing but a speck of brown in the otherwise endless sea of grey. It’s never occurred to him that the water might not be so muddied there, that the weather and atmosphere could induce a feeling of perpetual enjoyment heightened only by the bliss of a feeling he’s never known  - a nice buzz. Despite himself he’d felt a prick of curiosity. He was yet a boy, after all, still restricted to home and family by expectations.

“Perhaps someday.” He had thought while Voltage made his decision. 

But now, with his eyes straining towards the West while he bodily led the bay telepath through the Forest, that day felt very far from this one. “Why do I still get the feeling that I’m uninformed?” Crevan suddenly spoke, breaking the silence that had shrouded them since the two had left the Field. In shock of having his privacy so horribly violated and made a mockery of all in one go, the mute shifter had only nodded his head and turned to acquiesce Voltage’s decision. No farewell, no invitation for the others to follow, just a simple, brutish sort of nod and then he was off.

His dark hooves fell heavily on the brittle leavings of twigs and root, each step driven by youthful resentment until the sound had a sort of repetitive, thrumming beat. “I can’t imagine that my speech might have had anything to do with your revealing decision,” he huffed with a thump, thump, thump. “brilliant as it was.” Thump, thump, thump.” “I mean really, to stand there the whole time and just …” Thump, thump, thump.

He stopped. Grating together as they were, a growl rattled past his teeth. It overpowered him, the very nature of it all - Kharon and Voltage exchanging silent, quick glances - and with the slam of a single hoof he rounds finally on the elder bay, ears pinned and mouth disposed to a frown. “Are there any more secrets you’d like to reveal? You know, before I let you loose among my friends and family?”

revan

A thousand thoughts drown him, unbidden. “Why would anyone want you in their head? Why should I even care? What else can you do? What else happened in the Field? Why did you go with me? Why did you go with me? Why …”

“For the love of -” Crevan spits suddenly, closing his eyes as if blocking the very sight of Voltage would bar him from gorging on the unspoken words in his head. The shifter boy has always been a solemn creature, prone to bouts of silence and moody reflection. It was the first time he felt truly exposed (embarrassed, really) and the sting of his new recruits calm demeanor only serves to drive him further into himself and therefore further into needless anger. It’s only the bitter lash of truth from Voltage that snaps him out of his temper - and none too soon since the bay has already lifted a hoof in threat.

“Wait,” He breathes then, expelling pent up frustration in the form of a deep sigh. “just wait.”

Fuck him. The telepath was right. It only serves to remind the youth that his own talents were yet veiled - Voltage had no knowledge of his wolf form, or that he could breath fire. “Well, now he does you idiot.” Conscious prods, and Crevan groans outwardly. “This is all just so damn much for me - it’s giving me a headache.” He admits, turning about to pace from one edge of the trail to the other. “I’ve never come across your ability before, it startled me. I can’t even stop my own mind from saying something regretful. I have no idea what you can and can’t hear.”

That admission halts him. With a hopeful glance to the elder stallion Crevan’s momentary lapse in decorum is entirely forgotten. “Can I keep you from hearing things I’m thinking?”

revan

And so the boy learns. Some lessons are harder than others to accept but with Voltage here to explain, most of the rash anger he’d summoned begins to cool into embarrassment. There were chinks in the armor of a telepath, it would seem - words lacking emotion, empathy were the trick to overthrowing an invasive leech. The last tip Voltage gives actually rouses the bark of a laugh from the muddy colt before Crevan furrows a brow to concentrate a bit too hard on staring at the bloodred stallion he’d recruited.

“You look like the offspring of a donkey fucking a goat.” He relays mentally, breaking the austere composure of his face to burst into further fits of laughter. “Like that?” He sighs heartily, swinging his navy tail with relaxed effort now that the tension between them seems to have passed. Voltage is right, though, they should be moving on and Crevan intends to do just that until another horse approaches from the long shadows of the Forest. With a matted pelt of stark white scars and eyes like blood to offset them, Gryffen’s demeanor serves to lower Crevan’s ears with distaste.

The fact that the white wraith looks over him first only pushes them further into his navy mane. “Taiga is no more.” Gryffen tells them and, unbidden, Crevan’s mouth slacks open. “Circinae…” He breathes incredulously, the shock of news sending him into an unwanted shift. His back arches, snaps, while the hair covering his coat thickens and bleaches out. Shrinking, his body melds quickly together once more and, wholly wolf, he leaps away from them without a second thought except -

Except for Voltage.

Torn, the bone-pale monster skids to a stop and rounds back once more with the lash of his whiptail. Rounded, navy eyes lift to connect with his recruit’s and, quick learner that he is, the boy switches to mind-speak. “I won’t go without you. It could be a trap, after all.” He thinks, lips pulling back in a snarl as his head whips around to glare at Gryffen. “I’ve never met this horse before anyhow.”

“Prove it.” He baits aloud, the sound reverberating past his locked teeth as a vibrating growl while Gryffen now holds his focus. “One lie and I swear -” The boy thinks.

revan

The two are quick to cement truth in his mind. Nearly as quickly as Voltage’s thought-speak penetrates his mind, so does Gryffen’s tongue clash against the tone in his head. Both speak of things he’d asked for - destruction, Circinae, Taiga - and end quietly with only the flick of their eyes towards each other. Stunned, Crevan lapses into silence while Gryffen parlays the final moments for his once home. Gone, then? All of Taiga?

“I should go.” The wolf says, earnest in his desire to leave now that such a thing had been confirmed. His troubled eyes jerk upwards, watching the stallions exchange a private glance he knew all too well from watching Voltage in the Field. He sighs, leans forward to press a cold, pink nose against the rounded bulge of Voltage’s knee for tracking him, and then presses a final, private goodbye into the forefront of his thoughts for the bay, “If you end up with this Gryffen, I have no doubt we’ll see each other soon.”

The sideways turn of his body allows for a final glance at the pale, red-eyed horse. “My mother is sharp enough to understand a benefit when she sees one.” He mutters darkly, (in warning?) before turning to flick an equally as pale tail up, over his hips. A trot lifts him into swift movement and then, with a single bound, he leaps into the shadows of the Forest to vanish.

revan