Morning came but Eyas wasn’t in a mood to enjoy it. The colors of the new day were beautifully mixed together on a blank canvas sky, not a cloud in sight, and the weather promised to be equally as pleasant; any horse in the right frame of mind would find it hard not to smile at the dawn. Eyas outright frowned.

No measure of good weather or pleasant scenery could distract her from the sound of little hooves following behind, picking their way carefully along as the pair of horses made their way up the common road toward mingled society and the shared lands. Eyas’ hoofsteps were louder, much more casual in their gait: they rose lightly but fell heavily, accented by the rustling of her mostly-black wings. Her son’s pace was more lively as he danced ahead and then waited for her to catch up, stopping only to look back at his mother impatiently every few hundred yards or so. Together they were headed somewhere new, but only one of them was looking forward to their end destination.

“Mother,” Eyas’ little colt spoke up, calling her the only name she’d allowed him to learn, “Are we there yet?” He asked his dam for the millionth time. Eyas sighed, looked at him piteously, and felt her heart break while she spoke.

“This way.” The small pegasus mare changed the course of his question and turned off the main path, leading them away from the field of long autumn grass and down a shaded lane to a hidden glen. Knowing better than to argue, her colt flicked his ears in confusion and followed meekly behind Eyas until the wonder of this secretive place began to captivate him. Something about this place seemed… magical. They walked further and the lane disappeared behind them, swallowed up by low-growing trees and high-rising shrubs, when at last the lane widened into a clearing as beautiful as any Eyas could imagine. Her boy loved it and was ahead of her in an instant, hopping gleefully from here to there as quick as his young legs would let him.

“You said the ocean was here - can we go now?” He paused once to ask Eyas breathlessly, causing her to smile through the sheer film of water covering her vision. She blinked her charcoal dark lashes and smiled.

“You can do whatever you like now.” The pegasus told him, then jerked her black muzzle in the direction of salty breezes. “That way, Narcisus.” She used his given name, doing her best to look anywhere but in his eyes when she followed her instruction with, “Go on. I’ll be right behind you.”

Her colt, the same dirty gold and smoky black she’d been when she was a child, tilted his handsome little head up at her and grinned with such austere beauty and innocence that Eyas thought she might break right then, but she didn’t. The seer held her composure and her wits together as she watched him turn around and gallop off. She waited for a moment until the sound of his exit was faint and then Eyas unfurled her wings, sunk down, and leapt up into the air with a few loud, windy beats of her feathers. By the time Narcisus realized he was alone Eyas would be long gone, leaving one of them to regret and one of them to perpetually wonder.