I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness,
nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory
She hadn’t been able to find his father. Oh, they had looked; Nairne had kept them patiently waiting, wandering the Meadow and the Forest for these past six months, but to Ryan that seems already like forever, and he is tired of looking. Tired of the look in his mother’s eyes, the one that says she needs to find Woolf for some reason; some reason like she isn’t planning to stay. The boy knows she doesn’t want to leave him, but she doesn’t want to take him out of Beqanna when she goes, either. Something about how she isn’t sure she will make it all the way back to their family, and she doesn’t want him to be alone somewhere.
As if he wouldn’t be just as alone, here.
But anyway, he has decided that it is time to find a place to live. Nairne is happy to live in the Meadow, to keep looking for Woolf, but the boy has talked to the other kids in the Playground and he knows that people have actual homes, and that if Mother is going to leave him here alone, he’d be better off in a herd or Kingdom than by himself. It’s a lonely thing even the two of them, and he cannot imagine being completely solitary. Grass grows deeper and greener beneath his feet and he looks around, eyes widening at the sight of the crystal clear water that spreads before him. The mountains were hard work, and he had spent most of the climbing time as a panther, but now he is horse again, and his born-color of gold framed in purple.
It’s beautiful here, and Ryan breathes deep of the scent of the summer’s last flowers, eyes widening as he steps closer to the water, looking into the depths and seeing the rocks so deep at the bottom. He wonders if anyone lives here.
Ryan
( I love only that which they defend. )