'Do not leave Eridanus' had long ago slid from the wood foal's mind. Wicker was here, instead, after a long stint spent prancing around Pisces, and an even longer one spent squinting up at Orion's questionable 'stars.'

Now he was cavorting around this tunnel, excitedly clambering over bits of old armor and leaping among metal scraps as he examined it all. "What are you?" he asked a shield.

It didn't answer him.

Nothing had, yet. The fish in Pisces had ignored him, the bacteria he sensed all over remained silent, and all this metal, and the jewels and leather pieces left here and there, refused to answer. And all of that despite the fact that his magic told him it all held life, at least a little; less here, though, in the dusty heat. But it all stayed quiet nonetheless. That all sort of sucked, really, because Wicker was bored and wanted to talk to someone.

He stretched his neck down, nosing with his skull-like face at a scrap of old and rusted steel, then sneezed; this stuff was dusty! He pawed at it, instead, wincing a little when part of it crumbled to red-colored sand.

"Sorry," he told the metal, and looked up and around. This stuff looked neat, but he had no idea what it was for and it could only keep his attention for so long.

"Hello?" he called, at last, and started further up the tunnel. "Is anybody there?"

Wicker wasn't all that vigilant a wanderer--being young, inexperienced, he was more likely to put himself in danger than anything.

Yet the clatter was hard to miss, and he spun with a sudden spark of fear in his chest, uncertainty driving him then to stillness. One hind hoof slowly lowered itself down as he stared off down the tunnel, his mind conjuring up half-formed images of shadowy monsters that might be lurking there.

He reached out with his magic again to try and see what might be there, hesitating, his ears spinning this way and that--and when nothing immediately came again (and when his magic gave him nothing, for the first time in his young life), he called out in a quietly uncertain voice.

"Hello?"

The rasp in it was pronounced, made all the more noticeable by his fear. He wasn't sure whether he should run for it (and the realization that the sound had come from between him and safety was frightening), or assure whoever it was that he was friendly, or promise certain death or something if he were attacked.

"M-my dad's a Champion," he settled on, a clearly frightened warning with a waver in every word. He didn't even know what it meant--only that one father had assured him that he was, indeed, a Champion of something-or-other and that made him strong.

Then Wicker took another step back, stumbled on a twisted length of metal and fell directly onto his own rump, hocks tucked beneath him. This kicked up a cloud of dust, and he sneezed.

So much for first impressions.

He was still trying to puzzle out what a 'dragon' was (his mind correctly conjuring up the images of scales and an immense body and wings and fire) when he heard laughter at his fall.

Wicker'd never been laughed at before, and even though Spark probably wasn't trying to be mean, he felt... bad. Uncomfortable. He didn't know enough to put the word "embarrassed" to it--partly because his poor little brain was still trying to think of what a "dragon" was.

"Hey," he protested weakly, his ears flattening with shame, as he came upright. But his curiosity, and his awe, won out. "...He's a dragon?" he asked, and the fact he was impressed showed clearly in his voice.

Only belatedly did he really look at the stranger, examining the pale fur, the shining golden bits. Spark looked... majestic to Wicker, sort of, if a little ungainly in a childlike sort've way. "What are you?" he countered, curious. Half-dragon and half--what? "I'm a horse," he added, proudly.

Which was, of course, wildly untrue. But his fathers had shrugged off the question of his species, noting only (and with intense confusion on both their parts) that Wicker looked "like a horse," so he'd assumed that's what he was. "My Dad was a Champion," he sort of accidentally repeated, in explanation, "and my other dad's a tree. Um. A Creation," he tried (and mostly failed) to clarify.

He'd been told that an Overseer'd made his tree-dad, but he didn't know what most of that meant. It'd gone in one freshly-hatched ear and out the other. "Oh, I'm Wicker," he offered. And realizing this might be mistaken for a 'what' and not a 'who,' he added, "That's my name. -What's yours?"

He hesitated for a moment--there was some sense that maybe not all his questions had been answered, but he didn't yet have the short-term memory to really remember what it was he'd asked to begin with. "Spark?" he echoed, trying to think of what the word meant. It conjured up ideas of brief pain and bright light, but he didn't quite know why. The golden splashes across the other child's coat, though, sort of worked for it.

"My other dad!" he agreed, and then peered at Spark. "Oh! Did you come from a rock?" Suddenly Wicker sounded simply excited, equally unconcerned with this new companion's closer proximity. "Dad--uh, Shango-Dad--said one dad has to make the stone come alive and then my other dad--he gave the stone? But Dad--Shango-Dad--said he made just stones come alive, before! Like, he just found them. I have sisters... somewhere," he went on, and glanced around as if they might appear then and there.

"I think he just finds the stones," he added, in a sort of hushed, awed confession. As he spoke he leaned down, nudging aside a bit of scrap metal and then some more, as if looking for a stone himself. "He said when we die we leave stones behind. So they could be anywhere! ...Even here."

He didn't really think to ask Spark much more of themselves--where they came from, what sorts of things they liked or disliked. That might come with time, but right now he was thinking of adventure. Oh, and the important part--"Do you want to be friends?"

Wicker peered for a moment. One of his questions had gone unanswered, and curiosity still burned at him; but was there a reason Spark hadn't answered? Maybe it's something sad? his mind hazarded, unsure. Unfortunately, Wicker wasn't able to drop it so easily. At length, he simply blurted it again: "Did you come from a rock?" Because the alternatives--that Spark had come from something else--were captivating.

What if Spark had come from... from water, or air, or--anything that wasn't rock?! What if there were whole ways of getting born that Wicker didn't know about?

He waited a beat, then turned, pawing his wood-like hooves at the scraps in the tunnel. And at last he began wondering about Spark's personal life. "Do you live near here?" he asked, his rasping voice holding the squeak of youthful excitement.

Even as he asked, he was going about searching through the rubble, with eyes as well as magic. He doubted there'd be anything alive in here, but it didn't hurt to check.

But he found that everything was sort of the same all over, here. "I have magic!" he offered suddenly, poking at an old shield with his 'nose.' "But I don't--I can't find anything alive with it. That's what it does, it finds live stuff," he went on, cheerfully babbling. "Have you got magic-?"

He glanced back at Spark, curious. So far as Wicker knew, there were only two or three kinds of magic in the world. He wondered which the dragon-bug-creature had! "What do you think this thing is, anyway?" and he kicked at the shield in puzzlement.