It's evening in Hyaline, and he should be asleep; but oh, how could anyone sleep when there's so much to think about! Even with his Dream Mother gently pressing sleep upon him, he resists; and, having far too many children to put to bed to be able to worry about the quiet and obedient one, Kagerus moves on to the next of them.

Minutes pass, the soft twilight shifting gradually to night. The golden boy considers trying to sleep, but the more he considers, the wider awake he becomes. There's mountains all around them, there's a lake and so many forests - it's too much to think about, and though his family is prone to dreaming, he prefers to contemplate life in his wakeful state.

Maybe I can just go for a walk...

Like a little groundhog, his head pops from where he'd been resting it on the ground. With bright, wide-awake eyes, he scans the grotto for one familiar figure in particular: Warlight. The antlered princess has an annoying tendency to disappear in the middle of the night without rhyme or reason, and so he banks his decision on whether she's present or not; and when he spots her lightly snoring figure, his mind is made up.

As silently as possible, the pegasus heaves himself to his gangly legs. In his naivety, he assumes that he is successful in this venture; but of course, Mothers both have a half-open eye on him, watching carefully for his next move. Usually they'd get up and put their middle child back to bed; but they'd discussed it recently, and decided that the three were getting old enough to go for some reckless adventures - supervised, of course.

But they didn't need to know that.

With what he thinks is the utmost finesse, Rhae creeps towards his older sister. When he reaches her - it felt like eons of the most silent sneaking - the little buckskin lowers his head to her ear, praying that his soft, nearly unused voice wouldn't earn him a sharp, nearly grown prong to the eye.

"Will," he whispers. "Wake up!"

His eldest sister opens her eyes as if expecting to be somewhere else, to which Rhae rolls his. Impatience roils across his skin like boiling water, but he forces himself to wait for her to come-to, knowing that any excess noise would definitely get him sent back to bed. Still, as Will snuffles and blinks, he presses his most-used sound into her ear, a little ssssss of needy anticipation that he’s sure will get her up.

And it does. With a care he’s never before witnessed, the little bay raises herself from the floor of the grotto, barely making any noise beside some scraping of her keratin hoof against the stone below. Nostrils flaring in excited roguishness, Rhae nuzzles and bumps her cute baby face like an overwhelmed puppy all the way through the cave and to the entrance way. He only stops, like her, when they pass the little body of their youngest triplet.

“Koko!” His stage-whisper rings through the cave, and he cringes at the noise of it - but even still, it does nothing to wake their palomino counterpart. Frustrated and getting nervous of being caught, Rhae sends a last nip to his brother’s ear - and gets a swift kick to the shin for all his thoughtfulness. Sleepy bastard!

As he finally makes his way to freedom, the openness before them banishes any venomous thoughts he’d been throwing - without any heart of course - Sviko’s way. The steep downhill of the mountain path that the family meanders down every single day suddenly seems a thousand times as intimidating now, and for a moment, Rhae wonders if he had been right to want to go on adventure - but when the wild breathiness of his sister’s voice finds its way to his ears, he knows he made the right choice. With Warlight by his side, he is invincible.

“I want to go to the lake,” Rhae offered. “I want to shine my light at it and - maybe we can see the bottom, or maybe it’ll reflect like the stars.” Even now, the boy’s brown eyes twinkle like those very same astronomical objects; even though his idea is quaint and perhaps boring, it couldn’t excite him even a mote more. Hoping that his big sister would like the idea, Rhae spread his wings, and then thought better of it.

“Come on. I’ll beat you there!”

As if he hadn't just kicked Rhae's shin to the point of Total Destruction, their brother Sviko comes skittering out of the grotto, all legs and head and no anything else. Giggling at his brother's antics, Rhaegor playfully half-rears and bites at the other's ear again, barely understanding what he says because in the end, it's definitely not no or go back to bed, and therefore, Not Worth Listening To.

That is, until the palomino shoots down the mountainside like a flash of lightning.

"Hey!"

His screechy little boy voice is the last thing their mother hears as they grin at each other in the depths of the grotto, laughing nearly to the point of crying at the antics of their youngest three; it'll be nice to have the cave to themselves for a while, and anyway, kids would be kids.

Outside, the triplets are already halfway down the mountain. Rhae is right on Will's tail as they zoom down like reckless baby-demons, laughing and whooping and all bumping each other as they race. When she cuts left, and Rhae sees Sviko cut right, his attention is pulled in two directions and before he can --

CRASH!

As if in slow motion, the colt is flipped a full three-sixty around his head in the most graceful front flip ever performed, having been tripped by a low-standing bush the size of a small pond that he'd not seen in the obscurity. Landing in the softly vegetated plant with a cackling laugh and splayed wings, it takes the colt a fair bit of time trying to extricate himself AND all his limbs - he had two more to account for than the other! - until at last he leaps from the accursed plant, wings outstretched.

By this point, he can see that his siblings are in the final push for home, having reached flat ground with only some meadow and then the beach before them. Thrilled and hoping to still make it there without looking like a TOTAL loser, Rhae pins his wings at the elbow and uses the small amount of extension left to dive towards their destination point, using tiny shifts in his body weight and feathers to navigate between the ever- bigger trees the closer to ground level he gets.

Realizing he will not be able to pull up in time, Rhae screeches a warning to Will and Koko - who have already made it to the lake - before plummeting head first into a relatively deep part of the lake, which is luckily quite close to the shore. After a moment spent looking around in the blackness of underwater, Rhae unfurls his wings and gives a mighty push. As such, the princeling surfaces very quickly, using large strokes to bring him to the shore in quite a fast way.

"That was crazy!!" He sputtered, absolutely sopping, wings looking so bedraggled that an observer might worry that he'd ever fly again, the foolish thing. "Wow!" As the adrenaline still pumped through his veins, he totally forgot about his plan to beam the lake; instead, he dragged himself to higher ground and then flopped into the sand, head up staring at the stars in total breathlessness and contentedness.