rade

He had been dormant for too long, and when Rade returned, he found the remnants of his kingdom scattered across the snow, and the fragile shell of his dreams crushed into the hard, frozen soil.

It was nothing to the ruin he had seen elsewhere; the foundations of the isles, it seemed, were beginning to crumble. On Tinuvel, only the mournful wailing of the wind had greeted the roan stallion - with the white filly at his hip, Rade had scoured the snow for sight or scent of Dögun, but the self-proclaimed Pony King had abandoned his home in the Inlet. He paid me in false coin, and then fled, the Lagoon's leader realized through the dim red haze of his anger. The colt Dögun had traded for Sigrun had proven more useless than the mare herself; though Bastian might have become their strongest soldier, the willful colt refused to fight. Should Dögun ever return, he will pay thrice the cost of this betrayal in blood.

From the Inlet, father and daughter traveled overland, skirting around the mountains and crossing the empty expanse of the Bay. Soljor, too, had owed the Lagoon a debt - two of his own sons to be delivered to the bachelors' care. The rusty-gold stallion was not surprised by the painted male's disappearance. Soljor had been a brother of the Lagoon before stealing one of their trinkets and spiriting her away to this land, and yet Felony had offered him a fair trade - and forgiveness. This second deception stood to prove that leniency was interpreted as weakness by their enemies.

The Lagoon would not make that mistake again.

After Soljor's absence had been confirmed, Rade and his white shadow returned to the sea, striking out for the distant shore of Atlantis. For the palomino roan, his return to the tropical climate was like a waking dream - one that could not decide whether or not it was a nightmare. It was bearable in the Ridge, where he had rarely ventured - but Paradise.. Memories flooded Rade's mind with every familiar landmark he passed, until the presence of the filly at his side seemed more a fantasy than the ghosts who followed them. Here was the sandbar where he had once stood with Conquistador, two brothers whose love for one another had defied the boundaries of their different worlds.

Further down was the span of beach where Debonaire had fallen, his life's blood staining the bone-white sands. Both body and blood had been washed away by the sea, leaving nothing to mark his father's passing but the roan stallion's scars - the visible ruin of his tattered right ear, and the hidden hole buried deep in his chest. They slept beneath the open sky that night, and Rade dreamed of a skinny boy whose ribs formed dunes in his sandy coat, and a stallion whose coat combined shadows and light.

They did not linger long.

The Lagoon's leader might have continued on to Salem, but the weight of Rade's regrets threatened to bury him, and suddenly he longed for the suffocating silence of the Lagoon. For the solace of its shadows, and the warmth of his brother at his side. For home. Herding his youthful charge back into the sea, the bachelor stallion swam back to the Crossing. Winter howled around the pair as they followed its rocky shore toward home, but Rade embraced the icy fingers of the wind eagerly, relishing the numbness that spread across his golden skin, and then beneath it.

It was better to feel nothing at all.

stallion / ten / palomino roan / arab mix / 15.1 hh