Ni'Srilan: The Desert: did you get the popcorn? Dude, get the popcorn.

The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Once upon a time, his brother Corrigan died.

That same night, Alerion was conceived: the affirmation of life over death, as to speak.

And that, as they say, was that.

It wasn’t, however, his sire-dam’s fire that burnt through his veins. It was Andürien’s, the fire preserved in her relic, that mated with his father’s own and made him: the fire that never burned in flames, but only as a diffuse light and heat from somewhere inside him.

The day he was born, the hounds attacked Ni’Srilan.

Talk about momentous.

“Bro,” he comments, “don’t frighten the newb.”

Alerion is a bit like Baraqel; the most obvious similarity is of course the fire (though his, as aforementioned, is rather shy and not prone to burning things at random) and that little spark nestled snugly inside his nerves, just waiting to surge; they were both children of legends (though in his case, a shadow and an oracle rather than two golds). There are other similarities, as well, but those, in Alerion, tend to be subtler; his father was a spy, after all.

There are dissimilarities as well, such as the limp he has had since the day he was born. Not that he notices; the pain is familiar and a permanent fixture in his life. Thus, he cried a river, built a bridge, got over it and probably burned it behind him too.

But those are details.

“I’d say lost,” he hums nonetheless, “not a bet, mind. He doesn’t look like a betting type.”

Ah, the wisdom of adolescent males.

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of eros and of dust