I'll settle for the ghost of you.

The canyons still remain quiet but he comes to find he doesn’t always mind the dusty silence. Of the stallion that stalks the caves, he has still yet to meet. As far as he is aware, it is him and Lillibet that call Pangea home and the longer it becomes just them… The more comfortable he becomes with it. After years of change, this season of normalcy is a welcomed respite. The ache in his head comes and goes, most prominent when he spends long hours amongst the Ruins (an obsessive sickness that he refuses to acknowledge) yet it does little to keep him from them. Not when he had found Sickle there or his once unknown half-brother, Prime.

However, today is different. Today the jaguar dappled stallion spends the waking daylight areas exploring Pangea. If this was to be his home now, he need to become better acquainted with it. So much time has passed that he had finally started to release the hope of ever finding Aela again and returning to the life he had once known. It was time, he realizes, to start letting her go. There was still an avenue where he could find out once and for all but it is too painful and the dark voice desires it too much. It is better to keep it shuttered, even if it means the pressure against his temples… The sharp pain behind his eyes.

Spring means the air is hot but unlike the excruciating warmth that was right around the bend, this temperature is at least tolerable for those that aren’t use to sweltering heat like himself. His hooves ring where he trots, echoing down the walls of the arid canyons as he travels nowhere in particular. Perhaps he might find this elusive Herrin who was supposedly marked in similar ways like himself. It’s why, when he rounds a corner and finds someone very much out of place… Someone that doesn’t match the description of the cheetah male and who is definitely not Lilybee… That he simply reacts without really thinking.

His fire is a raging thing that comes spiraling down the hollow space where the moon-faced stallion is. It blazes in his feral gaze as the dark voice in his head whispers of intruders, those that might ruin and disrupt the life he has come to know here. Those that might harm Lillibet and take this place for themselves. It was one thing to have those moments of questionable behavior when it came to her and him (those moments when he wondered what it would be like to watch her burn) and another thing entirely for someone else to cause that pain that belonged to him. There is a snarl on his mouth by the time he steps through the blazing chaos he has created and the look on his face is not his own as a soul finally manages to squeeze through the cracks. It’s not Terror. Nor Revna. It’s nothing that he’s ever seen before and yet he knows it, intimately. It’s something else that wraps around his neck and slinks into his subconscious. It's name is Terrible.

“What are you doing here trespasser?” His voice is a rumble of thunder, flames dancing in the yellow of his iris as he suddenly smiles darkly at the other and sends a wave of fresh flames to scorch along the desert floor towards him.