<html> <body> Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats by Charles Matthias and Ryx Pars I: Disipicio (d) Evening came and its arrival whisked away the warmth of the day. By nightfall the air had turned brisk and colder than usual for the season. The workers all retired to their homes and the Matthias family sought the comfort of their beds. Charlie enjoyed the solace of one of the towers. He savored the curl of the cold wind around his large ears and over the bridge of his snout bringing with it the scent of honeysuckle and pine. Overhead the stars were even brighter than what he was used to seeing in Metamor, with the milky band and the numerous constellations vibrant without any clouds to hide them. The dark line of the forest and the mountains flanked him on all sides and in that darkness he felt the first real moment of peace since they'd abandoned the hunt. He rested his forearms on the stone crenelation and leaned forward enough to peer down the side of the tower and across the growing town around his sire's fort. He idly wondered how large the town would grow in the next few years when he heard a familiar sharp rap of hooves slowly ascending stairs behind him. He cocked his head to the side and smiled at the long-eared horse as he emerged through the narrow hole in the floor. Not everything in the fort was sized for rats, but the tower stairs seemed to be one of them. Bryn looked cramped even standing on the tower next to him. “I see you managed the stairs.” “Stone ladder, you mean?” Bryn laughed and leaned against the wall across from Charlie, propping one broad hoof against the wall opposite to brace himself. He glanced down at his brightly polished hoof. “Rats can scamper any and everywhere, you've got bloody claws. It wasn't easy with hooves.” He shook his head with humorous sigh and draped his hands over the crenelation behind him; he was tall enough that he surpassed it by head and shoulders. “What are you doing up here anyway?” Charlie smiled at his friend before glancing out between the stone uprights. “Solitude,” he answered. “It's the only quiet place here,” Charlie waved his hand out to take in the keep and bailey below with a twitch of his whiskers. “I'm not going right back down those stairs if that's what you're asking.” Charlie chuckled and shifted about so he was half-facing the horse. In the darkness he could only see the white tunic and riding breeches so that he seemed almost a ghost against the gray tower wall. “Nae, I wouldn't. What did you think of the defenses?” A long equine snout bobbed toward the outer wall. “Once they finish those walls this fort will be very well-defended. It's going to take another few years though. They should be done long before Sir Dupré at least.” “Easily.” He had something more to add, but the words slipped from his mind. He sighed and swung his snout to gaze across the Narrows. Bryn's voice was soft but insistent. “What's bothering you? Don't you like visiting your birth family?” “This isn't home.” “No, but they love you here. You love them.” “Aye.” He both felt irritation and a sigh escaping him. “I do.” He turned about to lean his back against the stone still warm from the day's sun. “But I'm not... one of them.” Charlie could feel the calm regard of the would-be stallion lord's gaze upon him in the dark. “So?” Charlie turned his head slightly to gaze across the rooftops below. “This is not my home.” He shrugged. “Charles is my sire, but he's not my father, and Kimberly.” He broke off with a sigh and ran his fingertips along the fresh-hewn roughness of the crenel stone. “Kimberly has this haunted look whenever she sees me; almost pity! Of me, the only one in the family with a nobleman's title!” He wished for a moment he had one of his sire's fancy chew sticks to crunch on. “And I don't even know why.” He turned his gaze toward the quiet black form clad in moon-glowing white standing across from him. “Seventeen years, and I don't even yet know why.” “That you're not their son, but someone else's?” Bryn hazarded with friendly, gentle curiosity. “Aye,” Charlie sighed and looked down at his hands. Rat hands, long and nimble with pronounced knuckles and even more pronounced claws, trimmed and polished even as they were. “My father says it's because I can do what they cannot, but it seems a lazy mollification.” “Yet you can, you do. For my father, your father, Charlie, and so many others, even as young as you are.” Bryn snorted in the dark, a streamer of moonlit white wafting up from the shadowed profile of his regal head. “They place more weight of responsibility on your shoulders than they do mine, with each passing day.” “Have they so many that one is not missed?” Charlie asked with a pang. As much as he found the hullabaloo of his presence confounding and no little uncomfortable, he also wanted to be a part of it. No high placed lordling's son, but a man of his own flesh and blood family, to have never known the noblesse oblige that came with his name. One of Bryn's white clad arms swept across the buildings below their lofty perch, “They miss you Charlie. They always have, and your visits delight them.” “As would your visit, or you father's, Bryn. A vassal to his liege.” “They don't look upon you so shallowly as that, Charlie,” Bryn scolded gently. In the darkness he could see the equine's long ears drop against the side of his neck. “They truly think you as part of their family, they accept you as family. Only your name is not theirs. Nothing else between you and they is different than you and your father.” “Oh?” Charlie challenged with a throaty churr. “Did you taste the wine, Bryn? Lorland vintage, twelve years, considered the best of the duchy! But what of it, compared to the Farlon red we had at the Duke's table not four days past? Or the day before?” His fingers curled into fists. “They brought out their best, because I was here, not you. It's not what they drink from one day to the next; it's brought out for special occasions. To impress me. It makes me feel less like I belong here than ever.” “Perhaps it was something that they simply had to do, for whatever reason. For you, for your father, for themselves? You know it's not uncommon to foster one's family out to far flung reaches of the kingdom, to preserve some vestige of the line should plague or other calamity befall it. Your mighty family would have more need to do that than mine. Whatever their reasons, it was long ago, and the reasons are their own.” Bryn rested his arms across the stone and looked up to the stars, his eyes tracking a flickering slash that raced across the sky before winking out somewhere unfathomable. “Kimberly is still wrought about whatever choice that took you, her eldest, from her. As does your sire. More so he than she, methinks.” “Yet, here they are, together united as a whole. Aside from those taken by sickness, none have been lost to them. Save me.” Charlie turned to lean into the gap between the crenels and gaze down at the quiet dwellings of the inner fort below. “I am alone.” Bryn snorted softly, quietly. A shift of cloth and clop of hoof heralded his motion and Charlie did not move away when the heavy, thick fingered hand of his friend rested upon his shoulder. “You're not alone, Charlie. You have your sister. You have your mother, your father; me.” He offered reassuringly. “Even my father, who dotes on you as a somewhat elder son than I, if somewhat removed. He respects you, and seeks your counsel.” Charlie twitch an ear back. “Because I have insight he cannot gain elsewhere.” “Beyond that too, Charlie. He... respects your wisdom, moreso than that of your father or I, who are both of us brash and quick to act. While we act, you watch, gauge, and find other ways. Where I would need pick and labor to dent a mountain, you merely nudge a pebble and it crumbles before you.” Charlie snorted a laugh at the odd metaphor. “I'm no mage.” He wiggled his fingers into the night. “I cannot even call forth so much as a witchlight, no matter how much the elders have tried to teach. Master Murikeer says that all can do it, and even Baroness Kimberly can dandy about witchlights without half a thought, but me – sputtering sparks unfit to call even a candle.” He slapped the cooling stone and sighed. “I... Bryn, I'd just like some silence.” With a nod Bryn withdrew his hand and stepped back. “Very well. Do you mind the company?” “No.” He took a deep breath and shivered as a cold breeze dipped across his tail. He tried to smile at his friend. “Thank you.” Together they stood in silence, regarding the stars and black silhouettes of the mountains. Somewhere far to the south, a mere shimmer above the trees that stood proud and tall in the valley, the lights of Metamor Keep's watchtowers shone steady and unblinking against the black shadows of the mountains. All was quiet apart from the sigh of the wing, the cry of birds and the bay of distant wolves to serenade them. ---------- May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love, Charles Matthias </body> </html>