Time is at once fleeting and so, so slow.
He has lived entire lifetimes now, some years seemingly longer than the others. All of the years bind together like uneven chapters in the greater story of his life. Some of them are fat and slow like a river thirsting for rain. Others are as quick and tumultuous as the surf on the shore. Sometimes, it is for the best that they pass so swiftly. Sometimes, he wishes he could hold onto time a bit longer, rather than have it slip away like sand in his grasp. Time is irrelevant and also all he has, all he owns.
These years have passed almost unnoticed.
As he stands facing the storm-grey ocean, Walter wonders why. But as one frothy wave evens out and cycles into the next, it is an answer he comes to immediately. He has built a home for himself here on the easternmost corner of the kingdom. It is rocky and wild and dips dangerously into the sea. Few venture this far away from the protected, populated heart of Nerine, so few have even noticed him here. The few that have don’t seem threatened enough to shoo off the gangly gold stallion (who has been mistaken for a mare enough times for it to not be coincidence, much to his chagrin). He walks the same stretch of beach every day, enough to leave gouging ruts in the sand. He flies up to the tops of the cliffs and looks out over the endless water, finds peace in the monotony of his hours.
These are the years of isolation, but not without cause.
He feels like an oathkeeper the way he waits for her. It is the most important task he’s ever assigned himself, the only promise he’s ever kept. It is impossible to be a seed planted in sand and expected to grow (to not fly on the next breeze to more suitable soil). But wait he does, grow he does. Here, he grows roots when he thought he might never.
Bright gold is the beacon that draws him like a ship (to ruin?) Walter glides over the ocean carried on wings she re-gifted him. The salt breeze is no longer alien but welcome when it lifts his mane and stings his tongue. It tastes bitter, like all the words he might have said before he became an anchor. Now, there is only the sweetness of relief, of knowing he did the right thing for the first time in all those years. He waited and she returned. She came back to him, and he would not leave her again.
The beach is giving under his feet when he lands. He pulls his swan wings in tight against his yellow sides and moves quickly towards the telling hint of gold he’d seen before. She is the same but different, with twin gold antlers instead of bands in her ears. He sees her first, but as she turns, her brow unknots. Walter leaves his name hanging in the air as he moves in close to her because it doesn’t need answering. His chest collides with hers and he presses his muzzle into the hair at her neck and inhales deeply. The long-missed but never forgotten smell of her drowns his old trepidations. He has grown. “Djinni,” he mumbles into her mane before pulling back, a smile flickering on his lips. “Welcome home.”
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long