Desreal: for hypatia.

He came, much to his own surprise, because she needed him.

Stelios – fiercely independent, intermittently brave and cowardly, and always rather childish – had never imagined he would find himself disposed to the white Queen of the desert, a lover-friend of his hated father’s. Nonetheless, the silver-eyed stallion arrived when she called for him. Her voice sounded like Marvin’s in the final hour, a lone, straining note wavering above the tops of the trees. The black swan had perished as the old King died; Stelios wondered if, although she still moved and spoke with relative ease, some of Hypatia had died, as well. He could not have known the exact relationship she had with his father, and he did not think he had a real desire to. Still, he guessed the vile, atrocious lies that may once have passed over his father’s tongue to woo her, and, now that his father had perished, felt somehow responsible.

“Hypatia,” he answered quietly, stepping with unnatural fluidity into the clearing where she awaited him. He regarded her quietly and with little intention other than to discover the level of her distress; he found, quite quickly, that it was exceedingly high. As he watched, she became a pillar of water and flame. Both elements reacted vehemently to her emotion, flickering or pouring over her shoulders. It was a strange combination, Stelios noted passively; he wondered if the clashing elements spoke anything about their wielder.

He shook his head and in one great, fluid motion covered the distance between them. Gently, the tip of his dark horn caught her tears and froze them. He watched them fall solidly to the ground, the ice shattering as it crashed against the small rocks of the forest. “I did what no one else had the heart to do,” Stelios told her softly. Years later, he would reflect on the irony of this; only Stelios, blasphemed colt of the mountains, who had suffered the greatest betrayals by the old King, had the heart and nerve to slay him. Somehow, it was the erasing of some final debt that would have rested otherwise eternal. Only through death could the two stallions resolve their sins.

“And what would you have done?” He spoke in a lulling, gentle murmur that drew a few of the forest’s creatures away from their dens to listen. A crowd had gathered fully by the time his dark muzzle reached the ashen knots of her mane, and he began to groom them gently away. “You would not have given him your relic. I don’t think anyone here believed he would do any good with that; and what would you have done with the shard?”

He did not say, in the moments where they wove their griefs together, that that was the same question he had just recently asked himself.