Skipping waves - Brennen, any

[Kybeth]

Well, it is certainly clear, that some time has passed since he last changed.

The young sand-coloured horse is stiff and hardly remembers how to walk; it's a good thing that meerkats can run on all fours also, but he misses his hands. Badly. So with a distorted face he ploughs through the sandbank and the water to cross - he almost figures that at this low tide it would be quicker if he ran as a meerkat, but he then wonders if perhaps he'd drown by the time he nears the island, so he had decided to shift.

Which still means that he walks awkwardly in the sand, looking down where he places the hooves carefully, and takes all of low tide to reach the tropical islands, water already on the rise again.

What a good idea that was, he snorts.

His tail is funny, too. Instead of the stiff thing that helps him keep balance, there's mostly hair, and only so many movements he can make with it. Looking back, he tests moving it, swinging the long, bleached hairs about until he's satisfied that he won't have anything else to do with it. He also shakes his head; a forelock is actually pretty annoying. But he supposes that since horses don't eat the bugs, the hairs function well enough. For now.

He desperately wants to shift back, but he holds it in - he needs his horse-voice for a whinny. He hasn't practised in a long time, and if it means that he sounds weird, well, why would he care anyway? He's come to see what his father is doing these days, not to make a good impression on the rest of the world.

@[Brennen] sorry, slightly lousy starter

[Brennen]

hold me in this wild, wild world
'cause in your warmth I forget how cold it can be

Many of them do not understand.


They don’t understand how he can love them, all of them, and welcome them home (wherever home is) with open arms, but yet be largely unconcerned when they’re off doing whatever else they do. There are exceptions, of course, children he worries about more than others, but Kybeth had always been a perfectly reasonable child who had grown into an adventurous adult. He’s surprised, but pleased, to feel the boy’s signature ping against his watery alarm systems today.


The bay stallion changes course, trotting with long strides down paths that are dappled from the sun’s long journey down through the palm fronds. In the end, they reach the shore at about the same time, the bay stallion emerging from the foliage just in time to hear the boy’s curious whinny. Brennen responds, voice low and unchanged from the passing of time. “Kybeth.” Brennen crosses the sand and reaches out to run his nose down his son’s neck, inhaling his familiar scent and briefly remembering a before, when Kybeth was a baby-fluffy and gangly as the two newborns still ensconced deep in Ischia with his mate.


“Welcome home,” he says it with a half-smile on his face, but a true one; “What have you been up to?”

hold me in this wild, wild world
and in your heat I feel how cold it can get

BRENNEN

@[Kybeth] sorry this took so long :/

[Kybeth]

Ky is not, maybe, as serious as his parents, but he’s close enough, and so he blinks as his father a bit when he appears on the beach, and cocks his head with an amused smile. He’d already jnown he was coming, it seems.

”Hi dad.” He inhales the man’s scent, which is only a vague memory up until that point, but gets renewed now all the same and gets recognized instantly. He is welcomed home, and, the chestnut roan looks at the place estimatingly. It might be home to his father, and with time, maybe this will be home for him, too. He’s not sure yet. ”...kicking up some dirt here and there.” In the literal sense. But he’s not sure if his shifting capabilities are known to his father yet (not sure if maybe his mother talked to him much, when he was out playing in the meadow or the playground, or later when he had already left her side). He shakes a foreleg, it’s itchy, this salt water drying up. And he’s not entirely sure he is used to an equine body again.

”There’s nothing noteworthy, I am afraid. But I figured a visit was overdue, so...” the boy trails there, and shrugs. So here he is. Now what? He hasn’t thought this entirely through, maybe.

Kybeth

@[Brennen]