It had originally been just a sliver, just a crack, of jasper stone, wedged into a crevice on a ledge long disused by kings and queens of cycles past. Behind the curtain of the falls, a few feet above the stone floor and lagoon's surface, that ever-so-familiar ledge with claw marks and stains, now hosted a newcomer.

The jasper shard had grown and fused with the wall of the ledge until it sat like a slumbering egg, nested in the back of this hidden 'den'. There, inside, something even more familiar had grown, perhaps influenced by the memories left in the stone here. The memory of a lion, a leopard, a bear and a bird.

One of the four, reborn in a way, though perhaps momentarily stuck. Hind legs pushed and shifted and he turned and twisted in his shelled in prison, but to no avail. Short legs were too weak. Perhaps a new tactic. He rammed his head back and to his delight and shock, heard the splintering of stone, felt the rush of fresh air across his ear tips, where the fluids of his 'egg' had drained away from. Another one. Horns met eggshell, both made of jasper with bands of orange and gold, and suddenly he was spilling out across the floor- or the floor of the ledge at least-ejected into the world around him, its surrounding chorus loud and roaring from the falls only a few feet away. Golden eyes, darker perhaps than his previous apparent incarnation, took in Pisces cave for the first time, from the ledge of an old dead king, in a kingdom lost to the ages.

The first thing he noted was how dark it was. Unsettlingly dark, even. The cub remained sprawled where he had landed, struggling to comprehend everything that was so new around him... and so loud!

_{@Quintus @Kielo}