[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.