ORIGIN

Pride listened, turning his head toward Khloros, his ears swept toward him and eyes bright. He did as the horse suggested, but pre-emptively--opening his mind to the horse for a passive, receiving link.

What he saw surprised him.

Khloros was his old, diseased self, in these memories--skeletal, emaciated, his hide hanging wet and rotten from nothing but bone. Sickly ghostlight eyes burned in Cetus' mist, and he saw a white tiger cub with him. And then flashes of a fox, and a white dragon, and a black dragon; fire boiling through Polaris, and that startled the stag. He blinked, the imagery stark in his mind, and surprising--the dragon was massive. That must be the Raheerah I have heard about, he realized, in wonder. Fear, in Khloros' mind, at the mention of lost magic; confusion, helplessness, and Pride was briefly ashamed to "overhear" this. He'd been looking for Khloros' imagery, as the horse had suggested, not seeking out his more private emotions. Then there was the white creature, and Pride went still. He'd seen flashes before, particularly through Mercurius, but this was--sharp, with clarity, and flooded with echoes of emotion. Gentleness, gratitude, bewilderment. Pride wasn't sure which were Khloros' reactions, and which the horse attributed to the creature. It was indeed centaur-like, though with features he'd never seen before, pristine and pale. He heard its echoing words, soft in a white space; he saw Astraea, features twisted in rage, as Khloros spoke of the other stag.

Pride blinked.

"I can see something of your memories," he murmured, nodding to the others as he stepped forward. He used his rack of silvery antlers to lift the vines gently, where he could, aiding Mercurius in clearing a path without damaging the plant-life wall. "I have never seen Astraea before--he looks surprisingly like me, but brown, and rather fierce."

But still but a stag, and easily thrown into the air, should he attack us here. Though I hope it does not come to that.

As Pride stepped aside, his rack hopefully making room for the others to pass beneath, he spoke toward Mercurius. "You have already seen into his mind, yes? If so I think I can try to show Ayr--if she wishes--and then I can, as you suggest, consult the Children of Rot while he rests here. If you wish to rest with him? It is a good idea, to ask first." His voice was softly warm; Mercurius' ideas were always wise, he found, and this one was no exception. Too, the lion's kindly hospitality often reminded Pride that not all the caves were so cold and cutthroat as the -berries--as he himself could be, by necessity.

It was a good reminder, a kind reminder--and Ayr seemed to blend right into Mercy's world, pristine and gently white.

Like that thing in the horse's memories, he mused.

Khloros felt the light touch of Pride's mind, the distant echo of his thoughts whispering into his own without intent. The stag wasn't trying to hide his presence, and Khloros had somewhat invited it, and so he showed the images more freely.

When the way was opened, he pushed carefully through--and paused to look around.

This place...

Emotion welled up in him merely at the sight of Mercurius' garden. Small baubles, a carpet of moss and ferns, shielding walls of foliage bobbing gently... dew beading the grass blades, the whole place glowing with soft shafts of light. It was beautiful, but more than that, it was tended, loved: a safe haven, apart from the violence and cold, unforgiving hatred that Khloros perceived the caves to be.

Quiet, he stepped forward, hesitating. For a moment he felt that this must be a sacred place, a place that he should not be--and then he remembered that he was not him anymore, no longer dripping with illness and death. He was... alive, perhaps for the first time ever, and he quietly paced forward and folded himself into the moss.

Only now did he truly appreciate how exhausted he was--in this sanctuary, a safe place where he could rest.

He turned liquid brown eyes to Ayr. "I would like a little to eat, or drink, if it isn't too much trouble-... but it doesn't need to be much. I think more than that I'll need to rest. Everything is--stampeding in my head," he went on wearily, the humor of before now gone. He then turned to Mercurius. "This is a beautiful place. I knew one like it in Orion, once--many cycles ago," he went on. It'd been a grove he'd never touched, never desecrated--and he had no idea that that, too, had been Mercurius' work, albeit when the lion had been but a cub.

He had a vague memory of Vazi, though, nonetheless, remembering that the stag had frequented the place, and that after his fall, the grove had begun to fade with time. And he remembered, briefly, his confrontation with him--all a veil to remove one of the abused children from his dubious "care." That poor, terrified child. I would think that all stags were monsters, but this one, at least, seems reasonable--even kind.

Shifting these thoughts away, he continued, to Mercurius: "Thank you for inviting me to your home--for showing me so much kindness. Is there any way that I might repay you?"

Flickering, faint memories of Louie, again; of betrayal.

It was strange that he had never known anyone like this, before, aside perhaps from Booker--and he held a distant fear for them, as though they might meet a similar fate.

Silence fell--perhaps thoughtful silence--and so Pride turned to Khloros.

"Come, rest; I will find you water," he said quietly. He could discuss the rest with Mercy and Ayr once the horse was asleep.

Quietly he led him away, to a bed of moss upon which Pride had himself often slept, and there he helped the horse to settle in.