The Academy: when the earth was young;

Many dark and sleepless nights have I been a companion for owls.
Briefly, the seeds of dreams and dandelions floated through her mind and she had to smile again at the Sight afforded her. “Children are certainly a joy,” she says fondly, reminiscing of days her daughter tried to burn the tails of bunnies or singed the grass as she ran across the land, entirely too akin to wildfire. Then - a shadow that touches her face as she thinks of what lies within herself that hardly shows though like the moon, she is bound to grow. But she brightens and touches his shoulder in shared happiness. “What did your daughter do this morning that has you smiling bright enough to rival the sun?”

She stands gentle and small beneath his regard - patient too. His thought about paints tracing the fractures and fissures of color that spread wild and joyous across their bodies causes her to smile. She wonders - briefly - if he has ever tried to find the moon’s shapes in the dapples of a gray or found constellations of star in a roan’s pattern. (Dimly - distantly - they swerve and flow, a river of flesh and she is caught in amongst them - running, snorting, plunging -- the wild horses fall.) She goes back to touching the patterns of paint on his flesh and listening as he tells of his time there - it has been a long time for him. She nearly sighs - he must be used to the disappearances and the disappointment that follows; she hopes she can change that for him and tells him in the language of her breath and quiet lips as they trail across his fur that she’ll be here for him.

“I miss her too and her birds.” she echoes a little forlornly. “Ianthe - for the flower?” she smiles at him before grasping an upright strand of mane and tugging on it fondly. His thought - suddenly voiced - gives her pause and she regards him strangely for a moment. “Where you here before then? In the Element?”

Earth II; Apprentice