01-17-2022, 08:45 PM
I am Heaven sent, don't you dare forget
It had started as a faint rumbling. A twitch beneath his hooves. He had been standing among the burnt remains of his fire garden in the Pampas. He had been thinking of the jaguar mare erupting in flames, the glittering cold silence that lingered in the Prince’s eyes, the stories Aela had told him, the curiosity on where his friend Sickle had gone and the starry girl he often met in the midnight hours in the common lands. Most of all, he was trying to shake the old familiar feeling of rejection. When he had found Firion in the woods and had tried his best to make a connection with the stallion he now knew in his heart and soul was his sire, he had known he was grieving. He knew it had nothing to do with him but he was still young, still inexperienced with the wide range of emotions and how they yield action and reactions. The bite was sharp and stinging no matter how soft the inhaled breath or the strangled words “I’m not good company today” and the intensity of his gaze had made him pull back, had made him chew his lower lip as he brought his muzzle to his chest and simply nodded and let him go. Firion hadn’t been cold or cruel to him and yet… all the confidence that Aela had helped build in him had crumpled as the flames sputtered along his backside.
In the end he had felt fear instead of fire (the double sided sword of his name) and he had backed down away from it. It hadn’t mattered who it belonged to, the Father or the Son. He had caved to it all the same.
Aela could read him like a book and so he tried to not think of it, coming to his withered patch of flowers with the intent of acting like everything was fine. That she hadn’t been right.
And then the earth began to shake and split beneath him, the terrible sensation of falling forever, salt water in his lungs, and then nothing but blackness.
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It had been weeks since he had woken up on the smooth glistening glass beach. Having never been to Icicle Isle, he had no idea that was where he had washed up. His body was bruised and battered but otherwise whole. Exhaustion seeped through his bones and left him barely able to muster weak flames along his spine. He would have laid on that beach forever if it hadn’t been for the cold. It was only luck and pure survival instincts that dragged him to a cave nearby, decorated with all sorts of oddities but warm with the faded scent of two mares. There was no sign of its inhabitants but it was warmer here, with a soft place to lay and some stale food nearby. It was enough for now. As his limbs grew less stiff and he was able to finally spark a small fire with what little energy was left, the events of what had happened finally began to come back to him.
The Pampas had split and he had fallen…. Into the sea? His brain couldn’t really wrap around it. What did it mean? That fear began to wrap itself around his young heart and shortly after followed Terror, creeping slowly through the threads of his soul summoning bond and curling around his neck. Where was Aela? Where was the Prince? His friends, were they ok? Sickle….. Liesma.. His heart stuttered when he thought of her and her stars falling into an abyss.
He could have sat with Terror forever, could have broken beneath the wait of worry and what-ifs until he had wasted away. Hunger pains, sharp and impatient, carved at his belly and saved him in the end from the soul that found him so vulnerable. It stayed with him, the weak boy who could not muster the energy to banish it, but it did not consume him. There was a streak of resilience within the boy, one that had kept him from folding in the Den. Something that Terror still couldn't reach.
That had been the first few days after the fall of the South. Now he was starting to feel better, enough that Terror was forced to release some of its grip but Fyr was still unable to shake it entirely. He stuck close to the cave near the burnt beach (burnt by what, he imagines, something terrible like him?), wondering where he was and where everyone else could be. When he wasn't foraging for food, he created a forage of flames, creating more smooth colorful pebbles out of grains of sand to add to the jagged sea of glass simply because he knew when Aela found him she would be disappointed if he hadn’t been practicing. He had only just reentered the cave for the night, had only just fanned fire out of nothing to flicker soothingly before him and keep him warm, when a sound at the mouth of the cavern made him spin around. Fear and fire flickering in his feral eyes as flames sputtered to life along his back.
fyr
@Nashua @Any