He didn’t intend to stay long. Some years ago, he had left the lagoon behind him, along with the snarling, bitter face of his father that had disapproved of everything Stratton had done since he was dropped upon Thane’s doorstep like an unwanted orphan.

As a boy he had travelled far and wide, seeing the world throughout the seasons and traversing the seas that lay between the lands. He had been enthralled to find that there had been a great, large world beyond the little string of islands upon which he had been raised, and even gladder still to see that he was free to come and go as he pleased. Of course, it would have come as a double-edged blessing if he had heard word of his father’s death. Such news would have pushed him a little further from the hemisphere that held the lagoon, and it would have saddened him greatly.

Instead, now, it seemed he had decided to return to his roots, if only temporarily, in hopes of finding his sister and mother, as well as ensuring that the grullo beast had disappeared for once and for all.

Of course, while he gazed into the murky surface of the water that lay before him, he did in fact see an older, more refined face that did not look to be descended from his father. Stratton had been certain that he and Bane looked more like their mother than anything, and he was still just as certain that he would not find the grullo hiding somewhere in the depths of the lagoon that didn’t smell quite right.

He isn’t looking at his face long before he is interrupted by a voice that travels slowly past him, belonging to a slowly carousing stallion. The other male receives a flick of the ear- a bad habit that the golden stallion had learnt as a child from his father while they prowled the lagoon. “I’m more likely to find something interesting in this puddle than this stale lagoon.” He commented on the smell, like there were too many women and children for this to be considered the same place that he had grown up in. It wasn’t an all together terrible smell that hung in the air around him, but it was different and it was wrong, and it was likely to keep the golden stallion at a distance until he figured out just what was wrong.