Meadow

There was no bend of his eye as the colt went dismissed, lent not a glimpse nor twist of the ear. Children, even colts, were better beneath the mothers and out of the affairs of adults. Nurturing was something greatly lacked in Magdalena, an unkind poison that bled into the veins of her children.

Briefly, a thought flickered to Liliya and her daughter, his niece Leonid. It was an alien thing to beholden, a strange twist in what he always thought fate divined for those cast off from Magdalena. Thinking of Array and Lyov, Nicholas always thought life would have been kinder if his mother had only stayed, had only worked to provide them a better future than the embittered chapters of his youth; a folly of a softheart to mind such sorrows. But, it would be a greater folly for any unsupervised colt to expect kindness from strangers. No, even before the colt could muster a reply, Nicholas was quick to set himself upon the reunion at hand.

"I suspect so is Lyov, I've only seen him a few times after my mother spat me out in Tinuvel." The days had gone too quickly. But it seemed the likely truth both his parents were gone into the beyond, reunited in some manner of kindness never afforded to their children. All of it, as he suspected, gone.

"All empires must see their end, I suppose." he paused, struck by the queerness of Anawar's question. Would he? He frowned, subtly bent by memory's torment and the ghosts of yesteryear. Wuold he? Could he? The snow, the false generosity of a home always curbed beneath frost and rime. It beat in his heart, it thumped in his veins and at the hollowness of his soul. Tinuvel. Home. Cheekily, smug, enlivened by the boldness of the suggestion ignited a boastful wager. "If you find yourself a place there, you can count on having a brother in arms to help keep wolves at bay."