Just know this too shall pass - any

[Falk]

THE STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW

It took a half second longer than it would most others for his eyes to finally drift to the Mountain, squinting against the blind of nascent light haloing its spiny ridge. “Hm,” he huffs, sweeping deep into his memory for all the maps he might have drawn out—uncouth and jumbled though they would be, from a baby’s whimsical mind—to set straight what peak this is.

He has crested Beqanna mountains before, side-by-side with mother or some powerful bird of prey he had followed from the seaside, his flight being the only place where his clumsiness has never seem to slow him up. Those ice-capped (probably the Tundra’s vast, rugged range) and dry, but this one comes to him like a stranger and disorients.

This looks the same—this grass, those trees that hem all manner of kind and unkind flirtations in; the river that babbles through it, overflowing with spring runoff. 

But, doesn’t every meadow look the same, really? To him, perhaps, whose eye is not keen to this cluster of flowers or this moss-clothed rock. Besides, it has been so very long, and could he truly say he had ever paid attention to anything much beyond the tidal pools (rich with all manner of curious creatures) and sea-soaked rocks he had spent some heady, childhood days scaling?; the friends he had made there, all a-whirl in his brain, stuck in a warm, fuzzy place he can revisit when the wanderlust finds him lonely

(He had been sweet then. And happy. Really happy. He is not sure what he is now.)

He had flown too high and too absentmindedly to notice that the Cove was gone—exercised by an irate goddess from the ocean’s lips; its inhabitants unceremoniously flung into briny throat, for all he knows. The Tundra was thawed and reconstituted; the Jungle was felled; the Chamber was razed. Beqanna had been wholly fractured and reset, a new reality that those who had never up and left had come to make peace with long ago.

The Beach is still there, though. Mother’s body will not be. 
It will be long gone by now.

She chases away his perplexity; her voice, like a songbird, cuts through the haze and commands his eyes back from that austere stone shrine. “Oh,” he turns his body to face her square-on, tucking his wings up against his side and away from the mud. “Hi.” His voice is low and rough, so like that of the father he does not know. She is so much brighter that he is; so much more intricate, spotted and patterned with stripes. She sings rather than rumbles, like something hard and rocky. “Falk. I’m Falk, I’m sorry, you surprised me a bit, I was thinking...” his own confusion pressing through.

More importantly, she smiles, and it lights up her face.
He smiles back, though it looks as if must break some ice formed over winter’s chill.

FALK, SON OF POLLOCK AND SYNTYCHE