The Academy: under a blue corn moon;

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Sir Francis Bacon
“The land calls to you.”
“It hasn’t.”
“But it will.”

Until then, her patience had thinned as had the leaves on the branches of the trees. She had paced the breadth of the forest and walked in the mountain’s shadow, and felt no call from the land of teaching and truths. But her mother had said… yes, she had - to be patient, to be still, and she could not. Her limbs curled beneath her in strides of restlessness, and still no call to be heard or felt deep in the blood - no ancient stir of consciousness to touch against her own, and she had sighed, passing through the stands of oak and fir.

When the mist first began to crawl through the trees, she took little notice of it until she felt the coolness travel up her blue limbs and she shivered - the call had come, and she flung her head in the direction of the land of teaching and truths. The time had come, and she felt a wild joy spring up in her as though some aspect of her - related to the wild hares - had risen to the surface, and she cast a joyous glance to the forest before her stride became quick and bounding.

Perhaps she had known, the moment she set foot upon that earth, that the painted stallion was to be her teacher and had been the one to call her through the mist. Her blue face broke into a smile (and the features, bore strong resemblance to her mother’s own - harshly beautiful and feral), as she answered him. “Well enough, thank you. What of your self?” The cant of her head suggested that she found no fault in his thinking and had perhaps, kept herself away longer than was necessary to ensure that the plague could not be passed in her travels from the mountains to here.

“Understandable, I could not bear it if I had been the cause of another’s sickness. It was bad enough to have to suffer through it, unknowing of where the fault lay - if it was mine or another’s, or all of ours, that had caused the plague to befall us but it has passed now and I am thankful for that.” and for the return of my only friend, from his sojourn by the sea, she thinks to herself, secretly pleased and happy that Kivioq is home again. “No, I have not and perhaps he is no longer with us? For now, I will concentrate my efforts upon your teachings until something can be learned of my other teacher’s whereabouts.”

Her face is lost to thought, careful and considering, and oddly distant as her gaze is, the eyes wide and unseeing. What more is there to learn that she had not learned at her mother’s knee? Something - a noise, small but consequential in that it broke her from the ice of her thoughts and made her cast her eyes to his wizened face. Her voice poured out of her, huskily so - like smoke from dying coals, and there was a raw earnestness to it. “To be honest - I don’t know.”