Sending lost and alone standing offers - any.

[magnus]

you and I both know that the house is haunted
and you and I both know that the ghost is me

What had started as such a casual meeting is now burdened with weight, buoyant with joy. Magnus is both elated and horrifically sad—what had been stolen from him in those years under the saltwater?—but he voices none of it, instead, holding his son close to him, the stallion who looks so like him and yet has all the memories of Joelle. “Fiero,” he whispers, closing his eyes and breathing in deeply, wondering at the cruel beauty that had ripped his family apart and then fed him back small pieces again.

“I-I didn’t think you were still around,” his voice is soft, meant for the two of them and yet shared for the group—for what did Magnus have to hide? “When I came back,” his voice breaks here, the remembrance of crawling from the ocean, spitting up death onto the sand, enough to shake his core, “I thought my family had all long left these lands.” Joelle was gone—that he knew. Joelle did not return with him from beneath the water to the land; his life still lacked her and yet was colored with new faces, new memories.

His breath shudders from his lungs, “If I had known, I would have come for you.”
He would have moved mountains. Burned kingdoms. Done anything to find him.

But his attention is drawn back to the younger male, the third buckskin to complete the trio, and his gold-flecked eyes burn with curiosity. “Trystane,” he echoes the word, tasting the name—wishing that it struck the same chord in him that it clearly struck in his son. For a moment, he is quiet, holding the other’s gaze, studying him in the silence. But, despite the knowledge that he has never seen him (something he has had to learn in the past months, his memories often coming back piecemeal and shattered), he knows that there is something connecting them—a thread bound irrevocably between them. “I am glad to meet you.”

MAGNUS

once general. once lord. once king.