[open] Of all the strange things

[Uconn]

He has nightmares often of the day everything changed. It’s still fresh and raw in his young mind, the fear and trepidation that had swamped his senses and controlled his body in those long hours of the reckoning is something that he cannot outrun. He has tried many times to go home, to the man-kingdom that his father had ruled not so long ago, and yet the mist remains impenetrable. Beqanna has not yet forgiven the transgressions of a few power thirsty individuals, and so the heart of her remains closed and out of reach. He feels an emptiness now, one that he’d tasted before, when his mother had left him on the day of his birth, but it has evolved into a pestering ache that nags and claws with no hint of healing. Beqanna was mother to them all, she was the only mother he had ever known. Her rejection was a hard pill to swallow. He had, for his entire youth, enjoyed a close-knit family. The brotherhood had raised him, nurtured him, and developed him into a man. Someone who kept his word at all costs, and who would fight for those he gave his loyalty to. He felt lost without them, lonely and without purpose. He felt as though he’d been thrown into a dark pit, with no walls to cling to, no ladder to climb out. There was no one, and nothing for him to grab as an anchor, and it’s this that pulls him to the Field, in search of something. To live alone for an eternity was to choose a life of cowardice and misery. He stands quietly, waiting for what he knows is the recruiting process. He pulled his wings tight to his painted frame, blocking out the cold that he did not feel. His coat was thick, and he was almost too warm as he stood in the ever crowded recesses of the Field. The masses had always made him uneasy. He liked familiarity, and the newness of everything set him on edge, though he was trying to suppress it. There was nothing for him to do, but to wait. Dynamics in Beqanna had always been complex and turbulent, there was no telling how they would be as the world tried to stitch itself back together.

[Longear]

Leveled and then built up around old bones. ‘Start anew,’ She had commanded. Demanded, from Her precipice – Her throne of dust and stone. She had been raised to honor the all-Mother. She had been raised to glory in the Goddess and in Her works – Her sows and Her harvests; springs and falls – and so the parting of her two souls from one another had been a painful one. A quiet… senselessly quiet division by force. 

Longear had never known such silence, such single-mindedness.
Such loneliness. It had been... maddening. 
The birth of her girls had softened it some.
(‘I’ll come for you. Just a little longer, now.’)

And so she had. So she had been summoned. So she had made that pilgrimage of loss once more.
And when she looked skyward, a sensation, like an electric shock, raised the hairs on her nose. Traveled fast and furious between her ears and stole down the ridges of her spine. She had felt this before.

This was the fusion. The sewing. The soldering.

She is whole.

She enters the Field by passages accessible only to her. Her, and a kingdom of smaller things, in cautious, loping steps. (‘Careful,’ the rabbit whispers, as is her way.) “I know,” she mutters back, in that tiny voice that had been sparked alive when the two of them had finally settled into each other’s bones. She stands on her hind legs and looks around, then drops again and takes a few more steps. She repeats these motions until she is assured of her safe surroundings, then sits to examine the crowd. It is almost never something big that draws her to someone. It is usually something unremarkable or sometimes, it seems, nothing at all.

Perhaps, she is drawn to his unease. Same calls to same. In another time – another iteration of this living landscape – they may have never crossed paths. At least not like this. He would, perhaps, be happy in his kingdom of ice and snow. Perhaps, she in her country of jaguars and rubber trees. So much had rattled the bones of that contentment. Of Home, that ever-changing and fleet-footed thing.

She approaches him as she is – a rabbit, small and wilder because of her wintered coat – and then in the blink of an eye, she is the small, round and fuzzy pony that is the more relatable shape for these kinds of things. Though, ever here she retains the cottontail, sitting flat and calm. “Hello,” her smile is the warm one inherited from her mother, as is the quiet, curious nature of her bright, golden-brown eyes. “My name is Longear, from Tephra.” Home. Home.

That capricious, wonderful wild-goose chase.

[Uconn]

Being in this place felt wrong. It felt like a betrayal to a home he’d always loved, but had never been an important part of. Being here made his skin crawl and his fur stand on end. He found himself pawing, the disturbance and war with himself manifesting into a physical need to do something, even if it were only to paw at the muddied snow beneath him. Thick dark locks bounced in time with his strikes as he dug away, the ache in his shoulder doing little to soothe the restlessness he felt from his own presence. He disliked the feeling of eyes on him, the scrutiny gnawing at him like rats against a knothole. It is this heightened sense of unease and awareness that alerts him he is not alone, though the rabbit that approaches him is unassuming at first. It causes him to pause, and simply watch, to try and catch hold of a moment of peace. Rabbits do seem to have a bit of whimsy to them, and even he is not immune from simply enjoying watching. The watching quickly turns to curiosity  as it becomes clear she approaches him with purpose. Her small nose ever twitching, but not straying far from his direction. He is lost in the curiosity of the moment, completely entranced when she is suddenly no longer a rabbit. The restlessness vanishes, replaced entirely with surprise. He gapes at her for a long moment, eyes wide. This had always been a land of magic, and her transformation should surprise him as little as his own wings, and yet he’d never actually seen anyone shift forms before. He’s amazed to say the least. ”I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare.” he finally managed. She introduced herself as Longear of the Tephra, and he nods. ”I’m Uconn, I was of the Tundra.” he replies quietly. He’s still not figure out these new Kingdoms, they are not yet places in Uconn’s mind, but rather just words with no worth. Perhaps in time this would change, or perhaps he would never reconcile such a harsh change.

[Tiphon]

BUT HOW COULD YOU KNOW THE SWEETEST SUFFERING
OF MOVING ON

It isn’t often that he ventures from the solitude of Ischia. The waves lull him into a serenity he never wants to escape, the tropical breeze cradling him with a warm, lover’s breath. There are often days where he rests on the sandy beach and drinks in the sunlight while his eyes stare across the inlet and digest each speck of land, the sandbars, the mainland. It’s a paradise there that he hardly strays from, but he forces himself to the mainland on this day. The estrogen is running high, outnumbering him, and although he laughs at the matter he also wants to resolve it.

He has taken to underneath an oak tree for the past while. The touch of winter is still upon them, but his coat lacks the density that most mainlanders possess; there is no need for it in Ischia. His wings – so small in comparison to what he had been born with – are tightly coiled at his sides and shift only when a breeze sweeps across him. From afar he observes as horses resume normal activity as to prior to this reckoning. There are those that are homeless and those who are pursuing greater numbers in their herd, much like himself. Calculating and patient Tiphon bides his time until a particular pair grabs his attention.

”I’m Tiphon,” he’s direct but certainly not unkind. There’s a brightness in his gilded eyes that isn’t commonly found as he glances from the mare to the stallion. Seeing the female shift wrenches his heart in so many ways. There is a want to shift, to fade into the world as he had so many times before. There is a lust for his own magic to return to his blood and soul, but he still lacks it all. The residue of Beqanna’s thievery is his porcelain white and gold coat, but he lacks his aura, his prowess, his majestic wings. He is mortal now, reduced to nothing compared to what he once was. To visit the Mountain would be to tease himself and play as a reminder of what was. He doesn’t realize – doesn’t know – that the Mountain has lately let its magic leak into those suffering souls who have begged for its return.

He assumes this is it, that this is his end and that he will die a mortal and not the guardian he was born to be.

Alas, he retracts from his humbled thoughts to gaze upon them and hear the name of one land: Tephra. Not having explored the mainland, he grabs for information hungrily. ”And I’m from Ischia, a tropical island to the north.” Home, that’s what it is now. It’s paradise, it’s refuge, it’s family. A smile slowly creeps along his lips as he amiably adds, ”I hope you’ve both fared well in these bitter winter months.” Because there is hardly a winter in Ischia.

TIPHON

STARLACE AND INFECTION

[Longear]

She spends enough time in the cold to let her coat grow.

Her mother taught her – (taught Viera and Trystane; was taught herself by the venerable once-lady, Elladora, whom had taken her rightful place in the soil many years ago) – to love every season equally. The bitterness and the headiness; sweet winds carrying honeysuckle and clover, and the desolation of winter.

Desolation, her mother would chide, is a poor way to describe winter.
Restful. Quiet. Waiting and expectant. They would leave the understory, humming with bug songs and howler monkeys, and head down to the temperate places between home and abroad, to study the changing colours and the animals gathering their stockpiles. Watch as the ground hardened beneath their feet, as that earthen womb closed herself off.

For a time.
Waiting.

So though she had been reared in the jungle, and now called the large, wild continent – thoroughly heated by a volcano at it’s heart – home, she is unreasonably fuzzy beside Tiphon. That, mother would say, is nature. That is winter. She examines him with the same calm, inquisitive eye, always dancing on the edge of overly-probing, and witnesses the passing of his thoughts like a cloud in front of a star.

What was left behind?
But she does not ask.

It is still so raw.

“Uconn,” she echoes, nodding to him and then Tiphon, “you are not the first to stare.

Tiphon. It is a pleasure to meet you both. I, too, have the advantage of warmth year round,” advantage it is. She hadn’t needed to drag her daughters through ice and snow, and that was a blessing by the Mother, though when they were strong enough she had brought them swimming across the divide between home and the mainland and let them draw spirals in the new snow and showed them the places where animals were holed up for the season. 

“It can make the extra coat I still manage to grow a tad uncomfortable.”

She glances back to Uconn with an almost condoling eye, “I’m afraid neither are much like your Tundra. I suppose I’m lucky, Tephra has hints of the jungle I am used to…” Remade and refashioned. Sometimes she thinks she can smell the faint blushes of orchid and python skin in the soil that nurtures Tephra’s sub tropical trees. “It is hot… humid, thanks to our lovely volcano. Tephra was a sort of organized effort by remnants of the Chamber, Gates Valley and Tundra. But, really, she is her own thing, now.”

In her short life, the waterlocked country has seen many peaks and valleys; many changes.

Change is nature’s way, mother would say. Change and adaptation.