It didn’t smell right. His last memory of the lagoon had taken place alongside his father, when the season was ripe with women in heat and the promise of conflict was high. He remembers the way this place stank then, of old, molded things that had long since been washed away with the turn of the season. The spring had been generous, and it seemed the lagoon had flourished, finding that the new season had brought in new greenery and vegetation.

It still didn’t smell right. There was an odd sweetness in the air, the sort of sweetness that would have been violently removed during his father’s reign here- the sort of sweetness that made Stratton uncomfortable.

Standing at the edge of the Lagoon, he looks inwards. Seeing the familiar vines that twisted down from the trees was comforting, and the occasional pockets of murky water are a reminder of what the Lagoon had been during Thane’s unfortunate rule. Still, he stood there scanning his surroundings, watching how the trees grew healthy and the way the sunlight still managed to poke through the dense canopy of the trees. It should have enlightened him to know what sort of state his old home was in, and that it had survived the passage of winter, but he had not returned for the sake of old times.

Instead, he was here to make sure that the grullo beast had disappeared. Thane had done his job well of teaching Stratton the scornful ways of adulthood, and the boy moved forwards with his golden ears pressed back against his pale mane. The golden boy doesn’t press forwards aggressively, but he finds a purpose to his pace and enters the Lagoon, still apprehensive of the strange sweetness in the air. It smelt light and new, and it didn’t match the sort of dank odor that he had come to associate with the lagoon. Once in the trees, he doesn’t go too far, finding a familiar pool of algae-green water and stands there, taking a peek down at his older face before searching the trees once more, this time looking for a sign of life.