[private] you could be the one that I keep

[Tarian]

The first time a change like this came into Tarian's life (something cataclysmic, something catastrophic), he hadn't even been aware of it. His brother had lured him out to the Common Lands and Tarian had followed his twin because Liam lacked the common sense of his elder sibling. What Tarian had considered his responsibility had shifted to something else entirely by the time that they had been reunited with their parents and grandmothers and a few remaining members of the vanished kingdom. It had been whisked away by a magical fog, a stirring that shifted and altered the land so much that when they followed the trails they knew by heart back to their home, it had only led them in circles and then back to where they had started.

The second a change like this had come, it had been in Liridon. Tarian had already lost his birthright, left behind his family, so that when that change came, the gray warrior had nothing left to lose. His world changed had again and it altered him little.

This time - the third time that a change like this has come into his life - he has more to loose than he ever has before. The Earth beneath his hooves had shuddered and groaned and then finally, began to break apart in a way that he had never seen in all the worlds he's lived in. The former Champion did his best to tell the horses fleeing Loess to run, to give directions out of the Southern Kingdom. Had he still been a soldier, he would have stayed until the last moments, waiting for the panicked stragglers.

But this time (selfishly), he doesn't. There had been no time to wait and he just went, racing and rushing to find Altissima and their children. He had found her, but there had been no sign of their son and daughter. They had to go, or they would have been lost as well. He had known that, something leftover from his past life knew to push away the shock and overwhelming sensation of crippling fear until the danger had passed, and he had known that they had to keep moving.

Tarian still can't quite begin to believe it; that this morning before his patrol, they had been in Loess. That they had all been together.

"We'll find them," he says hoarsely, coming to stand beside the blue-sheened pegasus. Her wings are gone, but Tarian sweeps his nearest one lightly against her bare side. Are you alright? he wants to say, but given their circumstances, it seems like such an impossible question to ask. They had just lost their home, the place where they had begun to build a life together and all of that was now beneath the churning sea. "Do you know what direction they went?" he broaches instead, "Were they together?"

@Altissima