His eyelids fluttered down and he listened, to the mountain that groaned before him and the wind that whispered through the grass, and to the voice of a long-lost friend, lower and less refined than he recalled. Ikari opened his eyes and twisted an ear toward the mare who had manifested beside him. When she named him, he tipped his whitened muzzle down in a slow nod. So. The Revolutionary would not be there to greet him. He released a deep exhale and examined her daughter.

She was slender and similar in color to his own skin. The dying sun —Peace to all who sleep, he prayed— made her look darker than she probably was, and accentuated the black points of her body. His eyes skimmed her and noted the refined structure of her thin legs and slender body and he thought, Yes, I see Corinth there.

Ikari’s gaze met hers as she spoke again, and he uttered a small snort of amusement. “Your mother,” was all he said, but his low tone spoke volumes. Corinth could not be confined to a single sentence; anything he said in response to her daughter would not do her justice. He let the subtle cadence of his voice emphasize his words.

They were joined by another. Ikari lifted his head to look toward the new arrival and he did not recognize the golden mare who addressed him. “I am he,” the shire replied. “Have you come from there?” He assumed she had been a resident of the land after he had left. He did not know her, but perhaps Kisei had made it back to the Lost Islands and achieved the fame he had always craved. “I am looking for someone,” he told them both.

Banyuu. The soldier who kept shields about her as high as walls and shut everyone out, too afraid to open up when pain lurked in every new horse to enter her life. The mare who’d left him a message in the sand, one he’d committed to memory but had not thought of for years until—

Grief was an ever-present shadow over the stallion, but he would not bow to it. “I believe she goes by the name Confederate, in these lands.”

---

Ikari; Stallion; Sixteen; Shire; 18 hh; Mahogany bay; Once of the Forest; Uforia's
The children;
Zara;
Melody, Thorn [x Telyn];
Prizm, Carila, Qandor, Revelation [x Caustic];
Rivendell [x Severell];
Dearborn [x Dro];
Kisei, Valiant [x Shinkara];
River [x Brooke];
Daire [x Vhessiu]