Ni'Srilan: The Desert: to anyone; --

“They tried and failed, all of them?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They tried and died.”

The stallion is young as he moves through the shifting sands of his homeland.

He is a child as he brushes his lips to the sand, almost tasting their salty familiarity in his lips; the sand is cool, for it is night and it sparks and runs into hesitant shards of glass as he moves.

Like his brother, he has mastered heat over flames and other flamboyant accountrements that follow from fire. He isn’t one given to glaring displays; it bores him and it annoys him.

He is ancient as he rides the dunes with listless aplomb, throwing the forelock away from his eyes as he stares into the depths of a land he thinks of as his and knows as no one’s.

He is silent as the portly dunes give way to oases, sprinkled over the desert’s desolate face like tiny green scabs and cold as he hides behind the shimmering softness of the element that leeches from him, sucks him dry slowly and surely.

Fire was bred into him, inextricably, Andürien’s fire. But it is not his element and has never been.

The stallion is tall and lanky and moves as if he is in a perpetual fall, almost as if stumbling upon his own limbs in a way that – paradoxically – is oddly graceful and precise in a world that cares little for grace or precision. But he does not care for grace, or even for the rhythm of his hoofbeats; he thinks of the sky as he moves, of the sand and the dunes and home and father and gone, gone, gone.

The child of Brishen, born of Wyvern, finds his place in the solitary valley between two cresting sand banks where he lies nearly invisible, and waits.

leto
of sandworms and fire;