anyone;

[Rhonen]

He returns to Beqanna unsuccessful.

Firstly, he still carries the dreaded heavy feeling in his chest, the simmering power of destruction and slow death. Rhonen had encountered no cure for it, no strange magician to take it away, no other land where he could bury the seal and leave it to rot. It is his cross to carry and having accepted that he will bear the burden forever, he took to mastery of it instead. The fire-colored boy no longer fears unleashing his power on accident in his waking moments, though no amount of practice has vanquished the ever-present nightmares.

Secondly, despite years of purposeful searching, he had not found his family. Wherever Natilyn and Mikhael and Aubri have gone, they are beyond his reach. Not dead; Rhonen believes that he would know, were his twin dead, but after this long and lonely journey he has accepted that he cannot go back to the time before. His dreamlike childhood, those few months before he was separated from them: those days are gone. If he wants a family, he will have to find a way to make one here.

Someday, perhaps his family will return to the shores they once called home. If they do, he wants to have something to show for himself. He supposes he should start with his daughter, though he does not expect her to forgive him for being an absent parent. Youth is no excuse for being an absentee father, but it might offer some measure of absolution for the boy who had not been ready to be a father, had still been alternatively mourning and cursing his own missing paternal unit.

The thing about absolution is, it only works when the recipient is willing to be absolved, and Rhonen hates himself too much for that.

So he doesn't go directly to the last place he knew Karaugh and Kolera to be, but instead wanders aimlessly into the Field, admiring the crunch of leaves and drying grasses underfoot and safe in the knowledge that the natural passing of the seasons has caused their demise, and not some monster from his nightmares. It is here that he sees a flash of chestnut, and his heart leaps in his chest for the barest of moments before hope is dashed up the hard stone cliffs of reality. His subconscious would ever have seen Aubri if he wasn't thinking about Aubri, but a second glance tells him that the skin-and-bones mare rising from the leaves is way to old to be his sister, and the extra White besides does not belong to his solid-colored twin.

But something draws him closer, his approach heralded by the destruction of fragile dead leaves underhoof, and the young stallion frowns at the niggling familiarity. He doesn't understand until his eyes rove from the body to the uniquely eyeless face, and even then this important to underscore the difference between understanding and recognition. He knows her, though she has certainly grown from the filly who stars in his memories, but he does not understand how a girl once a solid couple of years younger than he can look so starved and so sick.

"Atrani?" he asks it like a question as he comes closer and closer, but he is already sure. How many flaxen-haired, white-spotted, eyeless chestnut girls can Beqanna hold, after all? "It's been a while, Rhonen has to force the chuckle, but he hopes that without seeing his face she won't know, "Do you remember me?"