Ni'Srilan: The Desert: desert-flower, bring me home

He doesn’t know exactly where he’ll find her, or even if he will. But his flames curl and consume and now, it’s not for blood but for love- for the cooling touch of his desert-flower, which has been absent for so long.

He’d gone to Andarin with his mother because he wanted to stay with her, and his brother. Anatole returned to the Element with an inch or two of his thick skin missing; family was much more important to him now than it ever had been in the past. He was fiercely protective of a brother he once loathed to claim as his own, and his aversion to his mother’s ever-watchful eyes had slackened. He was softer, warmer somehow and perhaps that is what instilled the slow, trickling fear in him that she would not want him back.

The thought of her made him ache and smile all at once. Was she much changed? Did she understand why he left, after he’d done what he’d done? Anatole and Nyota had pieced together their story of that night, but the buckskin had eagerly and irreversibly blocked most of the memories out of his mind. Like father, like son, his guilt had rapidly consumed him. He’d gone to Saphira, she’d cut the shard from him and he thought it would be enough. He thought it would be enough to get rid of the guilt; alas, it never would be.

And perhaps he shouldn’t have left – perhaps that wasn’t the way to rid himself of the horrible memories and the guilty conscience. But he returned unburdened and free and that was they only thing he’d wanted since Betrayal had first ensnared him in his watery prison.

Somehow, he thought she would understand. And somehow, he knew that even if she didn’t, he would love her endlessly.

The desert was cool and inviting in the winter and he remembered at once why he loved it so. The belly crawlers darted around his ankles, fleeing at the sound of his feet and the touch of his hungry flame. He left divots in the ground where his hooves kissed the earth, but they disappeared almost instantly as the chilly wind rolled over them.

This is how he continued for some time then, until their paths eventually crossed, somewhere deep in the desert.