09-12-2017, 05:31 PM
if there's a light at the end, it's just the sun in your eyes
Amet wouldn't know what to do with himself if he didn't have others to care for or look after. Even before he had been a year old, the gangly light bay colt had watched after his mother's well-being while they traveled from one civilization to the next. He'd never known his father, nor had she ever mentioned him (she had met with him one other time, when Iset and Sakir had been conceived, but even then she had snuck away into the darkness without Amet), so it had just been the two of them until Shalla's pregnancy had forced her to find a more permanent home. When mother and son settled into the Dunes with an invitation from Him, it was only a short while before Shalla had traded Amet's autonomy and welfare in exchange for the throne beside the Dunes' King.
He had been vicious and mean-tempered. Hehad pushed Shalla away until the love in her eyes for her son was gone, replaced by indifference. And then the twins... Iset and Sakir, the keepers of Amet's heart, born into the trauma and pain with never a chance to experience anything better. The young boy had cared for them, too, when their mother wouldn't. Iset hadn't ever been accepting of his help; she'd preferred to fight with any sort of authority, including His, and now her scars still serve as painful memories of the past. Amet had been closer to Sakir, the compassionate boy that kept he and Iset from fighting with each other when the real priority was survival.
When the two-year-old had escaped from the Dunes in the middle of the night, he hadn't been prepared to care for the twins on his own when he wasn't even sure he could maintain his own safety. He had abandoned them (You need to forgive that boy, Tang had told him), and that had been the only time in his young life that he hadn't had anyone to care for but himself. Iset had followed Amet weeks later and Sakir had followed Iset, bringing their familiar dynamic to Beqanna and leaving the Dunes behind. The young King hadn't ever considered claiming a territory or caring for a herd, but sometime between then and now he had realized that being a caretaker comes naturally to him.
"And why would anyone want to attack you?" he asks Ciri sadly, answering her question with his own as he thinks of the story the soothsayer had spun for him the night before. The Underneath had sounded awfully terrifying and the tale had made his heart ache for the two women, and for the others who had succumbed to its terrors. Never once did he doubt or question what the red wytch had said - Beqanna is, above all else, a place of great mystery, and Amet is simply glad that the wounded Ciri had found her way to him and Hyaline. "It was a child's game," he says finally of the dangerous transgression, "they wanted to stir up some trouble, and it ended up out of hand."
He tries not to think of Iset or the shame in her young eyes when she'd come to him and confessed her involvement; he tries not to think of the harsh things he'd said to her, or the way they'd driven his sister from Hyaline. A frown beleaguers the stallion's usually happy-go-lucky expression as the pair moves slowly from the warm waters and back to the shore, where Ciri rests her smoky black frame once again. The Dragon King takes a quick moment to be sure that she's found a dry, grassy spot to rest, as opposed to the damp area upon which he had first discovered her before pushing the driftwood and its muddy paste gingerly closer to her.
Ciri whispers his name, drawing another small smile across the gilded stallion's face. His amber gaze meets her silver one and he nods almost hesitantly before beginning his work with the paste on her wounds. "Tell me what you'd like to know. I promise to be mostly truthful," he adds with renewed playfulness in his voice.
Amet
@[Ciri]