Everything was so much wetter than he expected. Ivo wasn't quite sure what to make of all of it. His mother did not talk about the Bay, and only rarely of the Cove, but he'd once convinced Amalia to tell him everything she'd seen when she'd lived here, and never once had she mentioned that everything was damp. Even the air he breathed in felt wet somehow, as if someone had condensed the rain into a breathable mist and forced it into his lungs.

It was a suitable enough excuse to take his gaze off of his mother, to let her believe that he was occupied by the rain rather than by the anxiety he could feel radiating from her like a toxic cloud. It kept putting him on edge, and he kept having to settle himself, to remind himself that they were - supposedly - safe here.

He wasn't so sure, but she believed it, and he trusted in her.

Ivo knew the abridged reason they were here. The sanitized, child-proofed, pamphlet-sized version his mother had told him. The one where whole novels' worth of context had been scrubbed out, leaving behind empty voids into which he could only suppose the true reasons. He understood that his mother had ruled here years ago, and that she had been taken away by Rafe in the Badlands in retribution for some undisclosed incident. And that in the process of trying to go home, his mother had been claimed by Nyimara. From there, things were murky, and not even Amalia's perspective could help him unwind the half-truths and omissions of what had gone on.

All he knew for certain was that this - whatever or whoever this was - was important to her. And therefore important to him.

---

Kohelet could feel her son's eyes on her as they waited, and did her best not to show the trepidation she was feeling. She had not told Ivo much of his father, lest it kindle in him some desperate yearning to know his father and provide a thread on which Nyimara could snag her claws. She wasn't sure how well that had worked, considering she could not hide the way saying his name made her heart clench, or the way she sometimes grew wistful for the time they'd shared. Even when she'd spoken to Sigurdr, and momentarily envisioned a future free of the ghosts of her past, she'd known that a part of her would always belong to the Bay, and to Fell.

No matter how hard she kept trying to run away from it, the truth was plain. Her fate was irrevocably intertwined with his.

---

Ivo watches his mother turn toward a signal he cannot hear, some minute change in their surroundings that he is not yet astute enough to sense, and he follows the direction of her gaze as a massive stallion of pitch black draws to a sudden, shocked halt. For a yearling, Ivo is not small, already fifteen hands and some change himself - a leggy caricature of his mother, only in solid black - but this stallion makes him feel smaller still. He is wild in a way that Ivo is not accustomed to, less vicious, more feral. It intrigues him, but also puts him on edge and he steps forward as if to block his mother, fuzzy ears pinning back against his slender nape in warning.

He softens only fractionally when her teeth gently pluck at his shoulder in reprimand and he blows out a long dragon-like breath before shifting his gaze to watch her walk forward - her steps somehow both confident and shaky. Ivo follows (only somewhat begrudgingly) with his tail making quick, uneasy flicks at his hindquarters as he does.

---

"Fell." She murmurs, intending it as a greeting, although it comes out more like a statement. An acknowledgement of not just who he was, but who he was to her. Of the truth she couldn't hide from, no matter how hard she kept trying. The distance between them is not so large, but it feels like it takes forever for her to finally cross it, to stand before him.

"Fell," she tries again, bobbing her head toward the boy at her side, who - despite his outwardly unfriendly demeanor - is just as nervous as she is, his intelligent golden eyes wide with anxiety, his lips set in a determined frown. "This is our son, Ivo." She can feel the boy's gaze go to her in surprise as the info is departed, but his attention is drawn inexorably back to his father.

There is so much more that should be said and so many more questions that she needs to answer. It would be so easy to pretend that this was nothing more than a father meeting his son for the first time, but none of them were stupid. She knew Fell had questions, and that she owed him answers to those questions. "Nyimara disappeared, so I claimed the Desert." She could have held it. Could have chosen to rule. But she had never craved power for the sake of power, only the power that came with sharing the weight of the world with someone that she loved, of knowing that she was their helpmate, their right-hand, their partner. "I left it to Asmodeus to come..." She stumbles, uncertain now of whether the home she's about to speak of is here in the Bay, or in the Cove. "To come home."

mare - mutt - black tobiano - 16.1h - solomon x sicily