Waking with the dawn has become my habit. Daddy says its good I am predictable, but I think Papa would prefer I slept a little longer, snuggled in with my slower-to-rise sibling. I wait very patiently, planning our grand adventure for at least sixteen years before I felt Aureus stirring beside me and Daddy is finally ready to begin our explortation.
Everything here is wonderful: the plants, the birds, the weird smooth places where the ground is nothing but flat stone.
Even these three strangers are wonderful, though I have found Daddy's side at the sound of their voices. Instinct puts me there, but I am craning my neck wide, trying to spot them as we go closer. Could these be the family that Papa and Daddy had spoken of, I wonder? Are they aunts and uncles? Or, I think with a delighted wicker at seeing two girls are no more than a summer older than Ree and I, could they be cousins?! And that one there, with the cloud sparkle wings, he looks no bigger than me!
I leap ahead of Daddy, lowering my head and shaking it a little in greeting, the way I might if the amethyst buds of my antlers were grown and I bumped them against another pair. For now it just looks like a silly thing a child might do, and precedes a more normal greeting where I look from one strange face to the other. The colt is dark, with white patches like both my fathers, and the pegasus girl shares them as well. The brown girl has spots on her legs and is covered in scales just like the lizard that Aureus have found earlier on our walk.
"Are you part lizard?" I ask curiously. Remembering at the very last moment that I should also be polite, I add: "Please".
A S E N A
i’d rather run the other way
than stay and see the smoke and who’s still standing when it clears