I'M WAITING IN THE DARK FOR MIRACLES, BUT MIRACLES DON'T HAPPEN HERE.
There was a small part of me that hoped that I was mistaking and this stallion wasn't my father, but rather someone that looked like him and sounded like him. The very second I saw his eyes and those markings on his face I knew that it had to be him. No one else I had ever met in my life had eyes that looked like those, or markings shaped like that.
Then he said my name.
I couldn't help it. I physically recoiled, my mind unable to fully comprehend and believe that my father was really standing there in front of me. Alive. I could only keep remembering how I stood there watching his body fall from the sky when he tried to escape the Basin. I watched him take his last breath. I watched the God of the Earth claim his spirit. I watched his funeral. I mourned him for months.
And here he was.
I caught myself shuffling backwards, maintaining the distance between us when he began to move forward. I forced myself to stop out of fear of him taking my apprehension as rejection and leaving before I could fully process what it was I was seeing and experiencing.
"The Rift grants life." He said, but I didn't believe it. How could I when I had watched so many die before being forced here? Despite all the death I had seen and every negative thing I felt for the Rift part of me still wanted to believe it was true, because if it was then that meant Rhoa and Gaucho and Hototo could also be here.
"What about Rhoa? And Gaucho? And Hototo?" I asked, because he had to know. He'd been dead with them. "Are they here, too? How long have you been here?"