[open] Two's too many; (Set, Any)

[Eyas]

I've got you deep in the heart of me

-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-

Leaning against the braided trunk of a crepe myrtle, her one wing propped up comfortably, Eyas blinked through the drooping green branches and considered the horrible betrayal she’d committed. Narcisus had looked at her so sweetly in that last minute she’d been afraid her plan would fall apart, and she wouldn’t leave him in the Den after all. Something in his face and the air surrounding him… From the moment he was born Eyas could hardly look away, much less be apart from him. Just hearing him breath was intoxicating; in the beginning she lost sleep to hours spent nuzzling his skin. She thought she would die without him.

That’s why she had to get rid of the foal. Narcisus. Her first (and perhaps only) son. It became clear to Eyas after a while that her unhealthy dependency on the colt stemmed from something less sweet and more… sinister; namely his innate magic. Narcisus had been born perfectly healthy for a pegasus foal, all four legs and both sets of eyes and ears, but when he gained his confidence enough to wander away from Eyas, she experienced emotional shifts. Violent emotional shifts, swinging from adoration to antipathy the farther away he got.

She recognized the same shift now, even though a short while ago she’d left her firstborn behind to the wolves of fate.

The new mother no longer felt guilty about leaving her vulnerable offspring behind. Narcisus was a mental leech. He sucked away Eyas’ despair and self-loathing, all the pain of her decision to abandon a personal quest that’d been the entire focus of her life right up until he’d given her morning sickness, and replaced them with a desire only to please him and love him while being disgustingly happy the entire time. In truth, Narcisus was an annoyingly naughty child. He destroyed fragile things and loved nothing more than getting his way, which he got every time he so much as touched his dam.

Eyas blinked away the thought, banishing it. Outside of her leafy cover it began to rain, soft pitter-patters of noise that shook the gold-green canopy, and the winged mare sighed before pushing off her tree trunk. No sense in mulling over her choice: it was made. What was done, was done for the best. Now she was free to return home to Island Resort where she belonged. A morose smile softened her face; she would leave after the rainfall, after she’d checked in with the threads of vision left behind in Loess to make sure things were as quiet as when she’d snuck away many months ago.

EYAS

@[Set], or anyone who wants a thread

[Set]

Salomea still slumbers, the rise and fall of her ribcage steady and even. She has once again come to accept her purpose in life; though he is not so sure she will feel the same way once he fetches Niklas back to him. His gaze shifts to the smaller impression in the grass off to the side of Salomea, no doubt where Dretch had slept– for some hours, at least. There is no sight of the impish filly now, but when he taps into the minds of those eyes tasked to watch over her, he grins at the pictures. The child is off in the tangled center of the peninsula, barrel-deep in a badger’s den, her short tail swishing furiously at her dark hindquarters waving in the air. Fearless in the face of the creature’s obvious upset over her abrupt invasion, she giggles and pauses only to blow her forelock out of her face before redoubling her scrambling, sweating, and squeezing. With a low chuckle, he soothes the cornered animal’s mind and leaves the shifter child and the (now) calm badger to their day.

He has already searched the River, and some parts of the Forest. Each foray had been relatively unsuccessful, turning up ornery, mad-at-the-world mares. His bright eyes dance with laughter as he stretches long and low before sprinting down the black-sand beach. Or maybe it was just him?

The faeries had imbued him with the ability to shift first, but he had been unable to regulate it at first. It had taken time to learn to control it, even after he had won his magic, but now he knows it intimately and there will be a time that he forgets that he was ever without it. The wings that sprout from his shoulders and lift him into the sky are rawboned and feathered, the shiny black of a raven’s head. Winter leaches south and the air is cold and frost forms and clings to the ends of his hair, catching bits of morning sun as he falls back over his shoulder and drops several feet to a warmer altitude.

When he drops back to earth, it’s on to a goat path that tracks its way down the last several hundred yards of Pangea’s southern mountain. Arcing his wings back and toughening up his skin, he sits down on his haunches and slides down the rock-strewn, winding path. His chest rumbles with laughter, as if his many years of living his life have not dampened the lightheartedness of his youth. Sweat and grime streak his white-patched hide. The gray skies begin to unburden themselves but even that cannot dampen his mood. He jogs south, letting the rain cool his heated muscles, his wings slowly disappearing off his back in a trail of feathers. Once they’re gone, he begins to teleport in small, darting bursts, searching for his wayward son in the shadows of the Meadow. When he’s suddenly nearly touching noses with a familiar scowling (she may not even be scowling, but he imagines she is) face, he wastes no time and chucks her underneath the chin with an accompanying impish grin before shifting to the edge of the tree canopy above them.

“I see you finally found something to eat,” he tells her, pointedly eyeing her barrel with a shameless grin.

@[Eyas]

[Eyas]

I've got you deep in the heart of me

-So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me-

She wasn’t frowning, thank you very much… but Eyas could understand how a morose smile on her could seem like a borderline scowl. Or perhaps Set’s age was getting to him regardless of his denial and childish antics, and his eyesight was going. Either way, Eyas jerked her head up in surprise at his arrival only to give him a sarcastic, feminine laugh a few seconds later when he ascended to the branches hanging above her. The instant their skin connected, she knew who he was.

After all, Set was one of the very few stallions (let alone horses) who’d ever shared a brief, magical connection with Eyas. She quieted, and the grin on her face grew wider. Thinking of it that way - the moment by the River years ago, where he’d shifted from his handsome otter form into the patched magician and bit her hair - made her grin wider. Some “magical connection” alright. Nonetheless, Eyas was surprised to see a horse she considered a mentor of sorts; inwardly she tried not to dwell too long on the delight simmering just underneath that surprise. Not when a dark conflict was still fresh in her mind.

“You never told me what that ‘black mist’ inside of my soul was,” she answered him with a conundrum that sounded like criticism,“But I figured it out anyway.”

Flexing her wings closed, Eyas strode out from underneath the myrtle tree and let the drooping boughs trail over her ears as she went. Everywhere the world was glistening, soaked in droplets of glassy water, and though the rain had dulled to a stop Eyas was quickly drenched from chest-to-hoof. She paused, looking back to where the crepe myrtle stood almost alone - away from the forest not far off - and said,

“I found plenty.” Without pausing to sound disturbed, or anything less than neutral.

“What have you found? Since we last parted…” she asked curiously of the animal-god, considering the option of staying in the Meadow a bit longer if Set was willing to humor her attempt at ‘normal’ conversation. She was trying, daily, to find that niche of space where her personality could fit perfectly in any given company, and ‘normal’ conversation was what the others did, correct? Eyas waited, knowing that normality was so far outside of their realm it was laughable, and did her best not to look sarcastic.

EYAS

@[Set]