[open] don't get cut on my edges

[Amet]

don't get cut on my edges ─
I'm the king of everything and oh my tongue is a weapon

Even after all this time, it calls to him.

Years have come and gone, and yet ─ he can smell the sweet perfume of the wisteria, feel the sweeping boughs of his favorite tree as they brush against his dragonhide back, hear the gentle rhythm of the crystalline lake as its barely-there tide laps against weather-worn pebbles and warm, dark sediment. Hyaline had always been home, no matter the other places he had seen and slept. No matter how many years he had spent following footsteps when he should have been leading. No matter the memories he had made.

It was always Hyaline.

Despite the chill of the winter, his first hoofsteps across the invisible threshold into the sanctuary feel so surreal, as if trapped in a dream, all wispy and bright. His molten amber eyes drink in the familiar downtrodden pathway and his nostrils flare to inhale as much of Hyaline's woodsy scent as physically possible, until his lungs threaten to burst and his chest screeches with hot flames. Familiarity with the scenery aside, it feels... different. It still grasps him like home, still comforts him as he enters just as a sanctuary should, but when he finally pushes through these two feelings, he knows what it is that's missing ─ @[Solace].

His fluttering nostrils catch her scent on the gentle squall that coaxes him further into the sanctum, but it's not as prevalent as it once had been. Amet hadn't expected the daughter of Tangerine and Warrick, so uncertain and yet so full of unbridled potential on the day he had departed, to remain at the helm of his sanctuary home for all this time, but he would have loved to see how she had grown into her crown after the years  he had spent away.

A melancholic twinge grips his chest momentarily, worried that the young light-bringer mare had left the world of Beqanna entirely. He can only purse his lips and hope to the contrary, until which point he has crested one of Hyaline's bordering foothills and a view of the lake, so serene and still, opens up for him like the embrace of an old friend. His favorite wisteria tree still sits at her water's edge, once dead and once revived by Kolera's hand.

"Hyaline, how I've missed you," Amet whispers to himself as his hooves carry him confidently down the hill and through the forest pathway, heading in the direction of the crystalline lake but in no hurry to get there as his amber eyes work their hardest to linger on everything familiar about Hyaline that comes rushing back to him.

- Amet -

[Open! ♥]

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