He feels it when his slumber broke at last, feels how the burning of life flowing actively in his veins licked like fire out in fingers from his heart. The empty thud of decades, now, suddenly sounded as if it had... that 'something more' that separated the undead from the living. It had substance in the way that oobleck differed from plain water. The thud met with resistance; echoed, but less so than for so long.

The black of his body does not immediately expose this change, having dove into the ether within for so long before turning back at last and taking equally much time to wander back into the present. Time changes, fairies wreak havoc in the land of his birth - going wild like the gods and mages that had spawned since the first footfall of Banat Er Rih on Desert soil. They spin magic tight into the bodies of horsekind, make it both less and more than it's raw natured self. They weave it into the bone and sinew of those that claim Beqanna still as their home - and when at last the world seems it's quietest, the Buzzard of the Sunrise wakes again at last.

His golden eye blinks open, wide with a pupil yet spread so broad as to make the iris seem to strain to glitter out around the sides. Then, with a snap that a watcher could have sworn to hear, it is pin-tight and his first great breath gasps those mighty lungs full and his ribs strain to contain it. His first bellow is of pain and wheezes more like a bray than a neigh. His muscles scream as he does, waking to the verve of fiery life once more filling their every tributary and waking every cell. He scrabbles against worn stone, hooves lacking purchase and legs lacking the strength they would soon regain.

His foreleg is bent, forehead rested on its rounded, knobbed, self. He groans and tries once more, making it upright but still stumbling as he makes it free of the cave mouth and into the blinding, brilliant, noon sun. His copper and ivory breast stands out, catching the sun and throwing it back as the whole rest of his black figure tries to soak it up, eat it down into darkness. He looks, stares, blinks - still uncomprehending of the ages that have passed him, of the disasters that had seen fit to leave him whole despite his escape inward -- and that is when he seems to still. The same stillness he had once lain in, a seeking stillness one usually sees in prey or in the shock of witnessing some horror.

Then there is a screech - one that the whole world could hear - and Judas’s head snaps around to see the great bird stooping down at his head with open talons and a wild spark of rage in his eyes. "EIR!" He shouts, still hoarse, still more of a bray than a neigh. "I SHOULD HAVE YOUR HIDE STRIPPED BY ONE OF THE MONSTERS THAT THIS PLACE HAS WHELPED IN YOUR ABSENCE, FOOL." The shriek is no less feral, even as the great bird lands on a bough and plucks its talons across the bark enough to chip the tender body beneath free of it’s armor. "Why are you so--- how long has it been?" The expression of sudden realization, of dawning awareness, soothes some of Eir’s savagery against nature.

"Your children’s’ children’s children are gone, Judas. You have outlived your own line. " The bird trills bitterly and with no small dose of venom.

He sinks into the truth that Eir exposes, feeling the dark waters of guilt, regret, and loneliness slowly rising like a pool filling with misty rains. Little things over eons that he not only missed but lost out on-- big things that he clearly must have missed with how the world around him already seemed changed and reshaped. He is feeling very much the reality settling into his bones, a great weight becoming another part of him like how his state of being is being shaped by the new air, the magic-depleted air of this new world.

Eir looks not at all like he regrets his contribution, a creature of honesty as he normally was. He feels badly for those Judas had left behind, those Judas made him leave behind. He could appear, but in a place like that cave, he could only go so far in a straight direction. In that state of inward wandering, Eir was at the end of his leash within the immediate vicinity of the cave.

The duo do not even realize that Myrna is there until her brilliant form catches some of the light and Eir turns his eyes towards her, bobbing his head in a clear avian brand search for the flash he had seen. Judas looks up, notices, only because Eir has quieted when normally there would have been plenty more admonishing. His eyes then catch the same flash of near-white that snaps his head around as it had done for Eir when he’d stooped on his lifelong partner.

For a moment, Eir grows large - impossibly large, near to an albatross, wings poised and arched in readiness… neither beast she approached believed the innocence of appearance or the purity of outward trappings. Judas flicks his black ears into his thick mane nostrils flared as his heart races against the fear building that he’d again slept too near to some haunt of Carnage’s and he’d finally crossed that demon’s path once more after eons of keeping his distance. The relief on his face upon seeing her is blatant; he had always been of the opinion Carnage was too vain or proud to veil his image as anyone else, although he had never had proof of this belief.

He looks on her, this new mare, with relief and yet a mild bit of awkwardness - having long been in only his own and Eir’s company. She has horns like he recalled of Moriarty, only white and glowing in many rainbows of colors overlaying white. Her mane, it seems, travels the whole length of her spine with little flowers strewn through it as if she had just rolled in a spring meadow-- she speaks and his attention is captured. "So are you twins, or is one of you copying the other?" She asks, and he feels the compulsion to answer for no reason other than she was more beautiful than any creature he’d seen in so long.

"When he appeared out of me, my breast was colored as his was." It was an oversimplification, spoken in a hushed voice, eyes locked on her and unmoving - his face shorn of any emotion save surprise. Some surprise of seeing so wildly traited a creature and the rest, some from the fact he’d bother to inform a stranger of what it was that’d made them… him… no, them. He looks to Eir, realizing that the bird was not his phantom form and had invited comment. It was rare for Eir to idly travel in his solid form; he must have been so angry to have done otherwise.

"Who are you, Miss..." he begins, still sounding a bit softened by distracted surprise, but voice deep enough to sound a rumble, "I have been sleeping… for a very long time. The whole world feels different, changed..."

He had always been a simple sort, inclined to hermitage anywhere he could be fairly sure that he might not run into the infamous giver of his ability and soul-fragment Eir. It makes him less causal when something as grandiose and empowered by stuff [that in his time was yet the stuff of myth most of the time] as she was. She is striking on even a bodily scale - isabella palomino if she weren’t entirely white. Her mane is beautiful, her poise unrumpled by stumbling across a stranger in the forest.

He stops, suddenly recognizing from whence he’d spilled out onto the soil again. He can feel it more readily, the dust and dirt and leaf death that was coloring him now something closer to swamp muck than black-- his belly and chest were cleaner, the places that had not been a seat for dust and grime to settle most like his truer self. "My name is Myrna." She seems interested, the way her eyes scan him in small inches and sweeps now and then, but not in a way that inclines him to rudeness or silence. "It is good to meet you, Myrna. I am Judas, usually of the Neutral Meadow but I did spend some time at the helm of Dangerous Island and Wildflower Plateau."

Of course, he naturally inclined his head, respect and politeness always the best means of remaining out in the world unmolested by troublemakers. There are few who cared to meddle with those without true power - and he was inclined to believe things like that rarely changed, if ever.

"This is an old world. My mother said hundreds of years. I live in a place called the Gates. I hear it is like Heaven’s Gates, but those lands were swallowed long before I was born and rose again." He actually perks his head at the initial belief that she was of Heaven’s Gates - looking hopeful until she confessed that the old Gates he had known was not to be the one he ventured out to find again. His ears, so newly perked, settle back again into his mane and his golden eyes drop from her beautiful self for the first time since she’d arrived. "Eir, you did not tell me that even the oldest of the kingdoms would have fallen." The great eagle shrinks, settles its feathers and looks at the stallion with a little hardness but more pity now than before. "You left for too long, nothing may be as it was any longer… Perhaps even Carnage himself was swallowed up and you can at least wander at your own leisure."

"Do not speak that name." She slice of golden stallion eyes to the bird and the birds quick posture adjustment spoke volumes enough to need no deeper explanation. Instead, he slowly turns his attention back to the mare who had found him so new from his emergence, eyes softening in steps as he was allowed to again admire her beauty. "I am sorry for my tone, it is a name that wholly incenses me. He is the reason for the ‘twins’ we would appear to be." He shook himself, then, as the dirty sensation rises again and he realized what he must look like to this shining being before him.

"I am… not familiar with this world if even the Heaven’s Gates has been erased from it. Do you know where I might wash the eons of sleep from myself?"

"The Meadow is still here," the mare interjects with a soft smile, and the delight in his face - of finding solid ground in his apparently vast time-slip, is not hidden even a bit. That had been as good as his longest standing home and it felt suddenly less like he had walked out into an alien planet to know that there might yet be pieces that he could recognize. His eyes spark with a bit more life, as if he were waking up more and more as he steadied himself in the present. He looks on her, then, in a more steady and meaningful way.

She is beautiful, but also frightening in a way that originated with his own early life. Magic had always been wild in his day, unpredictable and a lot of the times nasty. Beauty did not guarantee safety, or kindness, but as she does not attack him or do unnatural things to harm or bewitch him, he rather hates that Eir brings up the old demon of Beqanna. He snaps at his soul-fragment and friend, Eir looking a bit abashed when the mare’s eyes turn to him and he is found out - just the same as Judas is found out. "He remains."

The words stab him in the gut, the flinch not unlike a pinch-tight girth being yanked up too snugly. He kicks a hindleg at his belly, ears out to the sides in clear discomfort… and yet somehow it too felt right and home to have that monster always at the edges of his awareness. He does not take peace in it, as he had with the Meadow, but he does indeed feel more on-the-earth. "The river that runs through those hills is shallow and warm this time of year."

The appreciation, and a bit of embarrassment, dawns on his face at the directions, "I very much appreciate the directions, as well as the up-to-dates. I almost thought that I were not even awake when we first saw you. There was nothing… like you, when I last took a turn about the place." He starts in the direction her nose had pointed, not sure if she would accompany him for the river’s rinsing refreshment - but not opposed to speaking to someone that had so much to tell him of the most recent histories.