rhonen
molten eyes and a smile made for war
As the tension rises between them, his swirling fury and stress causing her to step back, stiffen herself, and start to catch fire again, despite her soothing words, he knows that as the adult he will have to diffuse the building storm. It isn’t his first instinct – his first instinct has always been to burn brighter, even as a child – but his mother had spent many hours teaching him to control his temper and those more sudden impulses. She’d done it with a teasing voice and a smile, a laugh, always in control; but underneath it all Rhonen had known that she must have had a temper of her own, as a youth, to understand him so well.
So he takes a deep breath, and another, and forces himself to relax. Starting at the top of his head, the tips of his ears, the chestnut boy imagines his beloved waterfall as if it cascades down from the high cliffs and streams down, carrying the fury away in the crystalline blue waters, the cool healing touch leaving calm in their wake. A mental exercise that makes him long for the Falls, now gone forever, but an effective one.
When he opens his eyes again, not remembering closing them, he offers Jinju a sympathetic look, a half-smirk that passes for a smile on his face nowadays. “I am quite sure it was not wrong of you to find a family, no matter what the fae think,” he says firmly, and when the mention of the fae threatens to bring the anger back he lets it wash away again and gladly accepts the change of subject they have embarked on.
After all, if she had seen Conquest, she would have known. It’s not like you could miss him, or his companions War, Famine, and Death.
“I never visited the Jungle, but I heard it was quite a thing to behold,” Rhonen says about homes, pondering the places in the old Beqanna he had gone. “I was a Falls child myself,” he says, and wistfulness softens even his hardest feature, leaving him looking perhaps once more the young man he truly is. “I’ve accepted an invitation to go to Sylva, where I heard some of my former Kingdom-mates may have settled, but it’s not the same. There isn’t a waterfall anyplace in this new world they have created for us to rival the one I grew up under.”
