» Lost & Found

WAKER

This new world is empty.

You've flown recklessly across its skies, underneath a scorching sun. You've careened into its deepest, darkest shadows. You've nearly drowned yourself in its seas. You've screamed into the nights and days alike, until your voice is nothing but a croak.

You've cried and cried and cried, lonely and desolate and desperate, but nothing has answered your pleas. You've barely met anyone, and in your reckless search for a way home, you've lost most of those you met, anyway. They're gone, somewhere in this vast, violent world, and you have little hope of finding them. There's just too many places to look, and not enough of you.

The raw, bleeding wound in your heart has even begun to scab.

Or you're just bleeding out.

But as the days pass, from cold, harsh blizzards to scorching heat, you're grateful you didn't even have a winter coat to shed. You fly and you fly and you fly, letting the chilly heights of the sky cool you, always looking, and never seeing. You've covered every inch of this fucked-up place—with the new scars to prove it—yet you can't describe what it looks like. It's just not home and there doesn't seem to be any way out of it. Once, you flew south across the sea for as long as you could, and you've learned the hard way that you can fly far.

There was only the unending sea. Hour upon hour. In the end, you let your aching wings fold, and fell into it. Miraculously, it carried you back to shore, and after that, some of your desperation stilled.

Or it was your hope that died.

It was tempting to stop flying. To stop looking. Your frantic flights became fewer, and while your body might be grateful for the respite, it came at a price: you, ever cheerful, ever curious and bright, became listless and apathetic. Your spirit curled up and withered away. You began to become the ghost Taivas had saved you from becoming.

"Will you come?"

Startled, you throw yourself away from the creek you'd been drinking from, sunshine flashing in the water droplets—a couple of steps away you freeze, legs splayed, head high, nostrils flared. Your heart, previously so dead and tired, is thudding painfully in your chest.

You're not used to having anybody's thoughts but your own in your head. You're not afraid to admit it: you're startled, and frightened, and in your hopelessness, the voice is impossible to resist. It seems to radiate everything you have lost.

You take off at a run, spreading your wings and leaping into the sky. The strange land—you're still not quite used to seeing it—flashes by beneath you, and you know yourself well enough to admit something: you're hoping that you're not the only to be called by the strange presence. You're hoping that Taivas will be there. You're hoping to be proved wrong, that you're not the only goddamn sod still around in this awful place.

You nearly drop out of the sky when you catch sight of the gathering, without even having noticed Taivas. You can't properly put words on it, but what you're seeing—it's like a wound in the world itself, an ugly impossibility, something so dark and so vile that you're wondering if your senses have tricked you. Surely that, monstrous and shifting and crudely put together with ridged scars, is not..? Its blood, hissing as it touches the earth, smells foul.

But, as you right yourself from your shock, you remind yourself that those who came shrieking in the night, burning down your safe, peaceful world for nothing (that you knew, at least) were not monsters; they were horses, just like everyone else. Just like.. you.

Slowly, you spiral from the merciless sky. The thing is even more disconcerting up close; instinctively, you touch the place in your soul where your magic resides, wondering if the broken monster falls within the jurisdiction of things mortal and fixable, but you don't quite dare to try. Instead, you swallow, and stand next to Taivas, wondering why such a hellish creature had been capable of calling them with such a gentle voice.