I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness,
nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory
Something always draws them home.
He crosses the mountains in panther form, wide paws and lithe tail making the cliffs more manageable than slippery hooves on rock. But he sheds the short tawny coat of his big cat form as he enters the Field, because it wouldn’t do to get attacked here by some newcomer that has no idea of the true nature of so many of Beqanna’s residents. Not that his natural form is any better – tawny fur becomes a dappled buckskin which is fine enough, but the young stallion’s points are purple, and his eyes a shade of green uncommon in the natural equine.
Still, less startling to the restless natives than a mountain lion.
Ryan doesn’t return to Hyaline, the Kingdom he had once chosen for himself as a foal. Perhaps he would, eventually, but he has no real desire to face down any familiar – and potentially disappointed – faces right away. Who knows if Hyaline even exists in the form it did when he left?
The Kingdom his mother talks about all the time is gone forever, after all, the whims of their strange deities sweeping it away, and perhaps the Kingdoms of his childhood are gone in the same fashion as what should have been his birthright. Life would have been so easy, the boy is quite sure, if he had been born a prince of the Dazzling Waterfalls as Nairne so often insisted he would have been.
But he doesn’t even have the memories of the place she always longed for – only his own imaginings from her many stories. He’s returned her to her own mother outworld, where she and grandmother can reminisce about their lost home until they pass on, and then probably even in the next world knowing his matriarchal relatives. Nothing will ever be as important to them as their lost home – not even Ryan. But the outworld is not his home, and so to home he has returned.
The buckskin-and-purple stallion nearly walks into the mare, because he isn’t paying attention. Stuttering to a halt he plants all four feet, blinking a moment, and then clears his throat and tries to sound apologetic. Whatever that is supposed to sound like. “Uh…sorry. Wasn’t watching where I was going.” A strained smile, one that doesn’t yet reach his eyes. “I’m Ryan. Are you here looking for a home, or offering one?” He knows the Field, the place people go to find homes, but it never even occurs to him that she might be new to Beqanna entirely.
Ryan
( I love only that which they defend. )