[private] it's all gone with the wind

[Pteron]

and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
----------------tell me: who do i run to?

When she mentions monsters, her voice quieting to keep it from the boy, Pteron replies, his voice lowered to be hardly audible above the waves. “There have always been monsters here.” The boy looks old enough to know about monsters, but Pteron understands more than most the desire to keep one’s children safe. He had come to Ischia as much for the peace as for his love of the tropics. Here, with Aquaria, Aegean, and all of his children and even grandchildren, he has felt safer and more content than ever in his life. He has had time to spend with his family and need to waste any of it with the trivialities of governing.

The coming of an eclipse threatens that, but the threat is not yet great enough for Pteron to truly feel fear. Not even with Lilliana’s worry and the visions of her unusual friend. Concern, yes, but he had been truthful in her earlier reply. There are creatures with shiny black armor, fire breathing dragons, and Taiga itself is known for the shadow creaturess that are not really shadows lurking between its misty trees, children of brether. There were monsters with the ability to shapeshift and crush their son’s throat between vise-like claws and wrap tentacles so tightly around a body there’s no hope for escape.

Pteron has face monsters before, and he is still standing.

“There’s a whale skull a little ways down the beach,” Pteron says, and this time his voice is loud enough for the chestnut colt to hear them. Then, more quietly, he adds, “You’ve a dragon as your king in the north, surely he can light a blaze large enough to give you light if what your friend saw truly comes to be.” That the first beacon will be lit in Nerine he can’t know, though later, when he sees it, he will wonder if perhaps Lilliana had been the one to light it.

@[lilliana]

-- pteron --