[open] do you feel like a young god?

[Illae]

She was coiled muscle beside him, ready to run, ready to flee. She had not meant to startle him, only to warn. She waited for him to gather himself, her body a breath away from trembling as the cold wind swirled around them both, a foretelling chill that had nothing to do with a cold and impending wintery night. She searched his face, her brown eyes wildly dark with a terrible and cinching fear. She watched him, and hoped soon she would find that recognition of her fear reflected in his face.

But at first he did nothing, said nothing. The stillness and the silence between them stretching. She could feel and hear the quickening lub dub of her heartbeat, she was certain he must hear it too. His quiet stare became unnerving, and for a moment she wondered if she had reached him too late, if he were already lost. Soon enough the moment became a moment too long, and she decided that she could not stay, would not. She turned to leave, the steep shadows of the fields fringed trees beckoning to her like fingers. But then she felt a rush of warm air seep into the pale fur on her neck, and she turned back to face him. She found the worry in his eyes, that recognition, and he had found his voice.

“I know.” She acknowledges softly. She knows the lost are not expected to know where to go, she can remember. But she also knew now what she did not know then, she knew of a place. He would not have to call it home, he could find himself there, she would show him her tree. Just don’t stay here, come away from here… “Come with me,” she says, her fear still very real. And she inched away from him and made once again towards the tree line. Except now it was no longer just her and he, but another. And her gaze fell upon the stallion, far older than them both, and bearing wings as Ruan had once done. She eyed him uncertainly and wondered if he too shared her leader’s largeness of heart and penchant for fiercely protecting all that was his. She hoped so, perhaps began to feel so.

‘There are many places here to go,' he says to them. And though she knew he must speak true, she did not know of those places, only hers. Her home and her family now, though none by blood. “But my place is a safe place.” She whispered to them both, her quiet voice shaky as she looked back not at them, but past them, her eyes cast on some place far off and not at all here. Taiga, she had been gone too long.