Andarin: The Mountains: oceantree; --

Original drawing by ceara @ deviantArt; extra manipulations by Lore

Where indeed? Where had he been? In the skies, for sure, drifting into nothingness, fading away. He was never meant to exist. He was never meant to live in the world of flesh. He, after all, is/was the wind, part of it, one of it, a sleeper mind in a sleeper plane. That’s what he is. That’s where he was.

But they knew that part of him that was flesh and bone, fur and arrogance and perhaps a dash of crazy and they hurt when he wasn’t there to help them, love them. He made them love him; he made them want him. That was his purpose, wasn’t it, to be loved when Wyvern’s loneliness made him into flesh?

Ah, but he had a convoluted past that wasn’t all so past, and he knew it.

Thus, staring into the eyes of Fury – his daughter’s rage made flesh – he doesn’t flinch; he just stares back, because he knows he deserves it. He knows also that it’s perhaps unfair that nothing could really break him now – he could always fade into nothingness, unbraid into the wind. It was easy, so easy. The first sign that someday, he would whisper away and never remember his physical, flesh form.

“You can hurt me if you like,” he says simply; he will welcome it, he knows. He always does.

But she doesn’t, fading back into the paint darling he knows well, the filly he’d taken for his because she was alone and frightened in a land that wasn’t hers.

But she was his and she’d always be. That’s how things are.

And she cries, and as she cries he just holds her close, caressing her as he did when she was younger; he’s hardly any consolation – he’s still a terrible father – but he can at least hold onto her and let her cry to her heart’s content. Maybe it will help; maybe it won’t. “Of course I am,” he chuckles against her mane – it’s nice, being here. “I’m a grandfather. Next you know, I will be white all over.”

Cue dramatic shudder.

Of course, he doesn’t age – he’s wind – but that’s part of the fun.

“Feeling better?”

*

And the best and the worst of this is
That neither is most to blame,
If you have forgotten my kisses
And I have forgotten your name.