[private] but its wonderful to see that it never phased you

[Tarian]

Tarian slows his pace when the young mare sighs, glancing over to make sure that the reason she had done so was not because of him. He does not amble and when the gray pegasus moves, it is always with a destination in mind. While is his mind is bleary from lack of sleep, his focus on finding @[Cheri] a place to rest is not.

And he looks down to the other Loessian to make sure that he has not winded her out.

But the girl surprises him and the Champion resumes his pace, a little more attentive to the appaloosa in stride as well as thought. Cheri offers Tarian a history lesson about the land of her birth and he listens, recognizing one of the first names she had begun with. It was common knowledge that Lepis had once ruled the Northern forest but it marveled Tarian a little as he recalled the former Loessian Queen. He had joked once with Lepis about Taiga being no more than a backwater bog and here he was now, strolling with a Taigan youth that might be a relation of his.

The mention of her grandmother - the one she had spoken of in the past sense - draws Tarian somberly back from those thoughts.

"Did you know the Comtesse was once Queen of Loess?" he parlays back to his young companion. Perhaps she did. Given the way that she had recited her Taigan history, she seemed an astute pupil. He doubted that her curiosity would have stopped at the Northern border. "If what I've heard is true, she ruled it not once but twice." Tarian continues, looking ahead to the proud rock formation coming into view. The first time he had learned, had been as a child not yet old enough to stand. The second had been alongside her husband, the man that Tarian would remember as the one burned alongside her.

He considers telling her more (and will happily do so, if she asked); that it had been the Queen who had intercepted him on a patrol, that she had spoken to him once about an Empire and the thought still kindles in his mind. But she asks for his own story and as he leads her through a narrow split in the canyon, Tarian finds himself unsure of how to tell it. Things were so different outside Beqanna, sometimes even the language spoken. "I'm not sure how it would translate here," the pegasus stallion tells her truthfully, "the closest name for it would be Paradise."

It's been over a decade since he has spoken his father's tongue and all those years rest heavy on his as the silence momentarily fills their journey.

@Cheri

[Cheri]

The light that meets the dark

For all her common knowledge of the redwoods, Cheri is not nearly as learned as she would like. In fact, her eagerness to be a scholar hadn’t actually been her first choice of future occupation when she’d been a young thing, off tromping around the jurassic ferns with Mem or Rey alongside her. Cheri had dreamed of adventure and wonder beyond what the eyes could see, mythical and magical places like the ones Lilli painted for her with tapered memories, scenes of rivers as wide as lakes and mountain paths too icy and too steep for travel.

On the eastern shore of Taiga’s river, where Hyaline’s far-off purple mountain peaks gleamed like crystal spires among the clouds, Cheri would gather stones and play heroes and monsters by herself or with her half-sister when she could manage to wrangle the elder girl into her games. There, she would make the stories come to life and picture herself as the hero in every dark scenario, fighting for justice and traveling the lands.

But little foals grow up, and heroes (more often than not) found themselves out to be the ones in need the most when times got tough. If she had known the story of Queen Lepis the way Tarian now recalled, Cheri would most likely have applied the two scenarios to one another. As it so happens she does not, and she only shakes her head with a silent no in answer to his information.

“I always pictured her a cavalier type.” Cheri murmured thoughtfully. In her teachings, there was never any effort made to hide the fact that Lepis had forced her way into Taiga - which Cheri interpreted as villainous - but in truth her reign had been mostly uneventful, as had her son’s. Now that she thought about it, perhaps there had been some mention of her ties to a southern King in Cheri’s lessons … But the mare can hardly remember them now, anyways. Only the facts remain.

In the present Cheri was much too occupied navigating the tight ravine Tarian had led them through. She chose her steps carefully, tucked her wings even tighter to her sides and tried not to feel claustrophobic from the narrow space. This pathway seemed perfectly indicative of Loess as a whole: deceiving to the eyes. Just when Cheri thought she’d seen it all, when her view narrowed and felt like it was reaching an end, the bottleneck widened to reveal a whole new perspective.

“Paraíso.” She surprised herself by talking aloud, her thoughts flowing naturally off her tongue. Cheri had meant to keep the word to herself, but something about the way Tarian was speaking (and then having actually said it) prompted a sudden recall of the way Lilliana used to roll her tongue and accentuate the foreign name.

@[Tarian]

[Tarian]

In the wilds of Liridon - after Tarian had given nearly a decade of service to the Guard, after watching it rise and then fall - the gray heard rumors of a Mystic living along the coast. A Shaman, they said, who could divine futures from the patterns that the stars blazed across the sky and from the etchings that the tides left behind in the sand. It hadn't been those claims that had caught the former Commander's attention; it had been the murmurs that the priest who lived in the nocturnal grove wore a feather in his mane.

Probably nothing, Tarian had dismissed the thought at first.

But eventually, the pegasus made his way towards the shore that the stories had come from. His instincts had been right because he had found Jay, practicing his strange sort of magic that revolved around nature (though his Uncle had once told him that they were one and the same) and so while Tarian took the time to put together the fallen pieces of one life to build the next, he watched and studied the bay stallion. He listened as horses traveled from far and wide to seek his counsel. And one night, Tarian had asked Jay, Why here? For all your knowledge, why not use it to find home?

Jay had smiled and said, All rivers run to the sea, Tarian. He hadn't understood what he meant at the time; in truth, he still doesn't really understand it now. But what the older stallion had tried to explain was that all paths eventually cross. The rivers ran down from the mountains, to the shore and then somehow - perhaps by magic - became absorbed into rain clouds that pour down into the plains and the mountains, completing a cycle that many weren't aware of.

A web of ties that were so intrinsically woven together - that continued to twine in a way that Tarian can't imagine.

What he does imagine are a few wandering thoughts about what it might have been like to have a family of his own; what it might have been like to raise a child and see them grow, thrive into a bright blossom like Cheri. When his young companion admits she always thought the former Queen a cavalier sort, Tarian smiles when he glances behind him. Perhaps it wasn't far from the truth but the pegasus had been intercepted by Lepis when he first landed in Loess. "She was out doing border patrols when I first met her," the older brute shares with the young mare. "I mistook her for a sentry." He nearly laughs at the memory but it had been one of the reasons that Tarian became so fond of the dun woman. Despite her high rank, she wasn't above doing what was needed for Loess.

It was something that Tarian - who has spent nearly his entire life in some sort of service - had appreciated; could still appreciate, even though the woman was long gone.

"But it was Queen Lepis who crowned our current one," the Champion continues on, unsure of Cheri's knowledge of Loessian history. It's as far as he goes, though, because that is all Tarian knows. Loess didn't have a dynastic bloodline tied to its throne and the pale pegasus hadn't been able to keep track of the way it zig-zagged. The Endless Night had come and there had been other, more pressing matters to deal with.

As they slip through the narrow ravine and towards the spot that he intends to share with Cheri, the light nearly blinds him but the hazy shadows give shape to a copse of small trees and some cacti that could offer shade from the hottest parts of the day. Below the ridge, Cheri would find one of the Loessian lakes. These are the things that the winged horse is thinking of, focusing on the land that is before him and not the one that is behind him.

Paraiso, she chimes like a song. He stops with his wings tightening around his sides because she says it like he heard his mother say it a thousand times. He hears Kalina's lilt, Malachi's rumbling pride in the word. So there was a coincidence between the Northern leaders calling themselves Guardians and the mention of Lilliana; it stirs in his blood and it leaves the usually assured Tarian feeling unsettled. When he looks at Cheri again, it is with new eyes as he places on her a branch of their family tree.

Part of him had always thought the line would die out. Jay hadn't taken a mate and had sired no children. Brielle and Aislynn had vanished with Paraiso. His father and mother had died before any of their children could fledge into adulthood; a lesson from a blood feud that went back generations and had been responsible for the death of so many. He had always thought that if he had no children, had no mate then if he was eventually hunted down as his parents had been, the only casualty would be him (so why is he thinking of Altissima?) and that his brothers and sisters might think the same.

"You know of it," he finally says, a voice caught in the current of changing emotions. All rivers flow to the ocean, Jay had once told him. Paraiso was gone and yet here was a trace of it in the shared blood that flowed through their veins. "I was supposed to be its next Guardian," Tarian explains and then finds that he needs to move. His mind is too full for him to stand still. "But that was before...," he drifts off. He's long forgiven Liam. They had been so young then and it is the nature of children to roam and wander. That it just happened to be the day that Paraiso shielded itself behind a wall of Magic had been an unfortunate incident. "Before it was gone."

He shakes his head slightly, banishing the melancholy thoughts from his mind.

"Are there more like you, Cheri?" Tarian asks (though the thinks the gleaming black-and-green mare is certainly a category all her own). Was she any only child? Or did she have brothers and sisters? And what of her father? The gray finds himself curious about the life that she left behind, wondering if their might be more answers for him to find there.