Username: QueenOfWyrms
Lion name: Oberon
Lion gender: male
Pride: PoBPride status: Nadiri Batling
Prompt: Oberron had once been a very successful figure. As a three-terms-and-counting Councillor of Nadir‘s largest city, he never had to worry for funds, food, or work. His only concern was convincing the other Councillors in favor of what he thought best for the city. At that time, he thought nothing of even the next town over, much less Hireath or Petrichor, wholly separate bodies. His life, he had thought, was perfect.
However, being a Councillor meant there were also plenty of lions looking to stick their hands into his vote or his money purse, using whatever means they felt they could achieve it. Now, he had no wife and had sired no children and had no plans to do so, visiting his nieces and nephews was enough for him. And yet one day, just before re-election, a lioness he had once courted in his youth proclaimed that he had fathered her son and abandoned them. She was of high standing among the population, and the anger her words caused drove him out of the city, savings in paw and a notice of closure for his home.
He wandered the landscape, holing up in caves that dotted the surface of Nadir each night and surviving off what prey he could find and the streams of ambrosia which flowed across the land.
When he had wandered for almost a full three Cycles around Petrichor, he stumbled upon the Chiropterans. They took him in, told him their stories, and made him one of their own- literally. He discovered Flittermaus, their precious crystalline leader and long distant matriarch of all who live on Nadir. He learned the story of her and her sisters, and for the first time in his life he took interest in something larger than himself, his family, and his town. He began to care about their sister moon, Hireath, and about Petrichor, the planet below which Nadir ever circled. He learned astrology, the study of the stars, and geology, the study of the land. He threw himself into these sciences for which he has never cared, an ache, a longing he‘d never noticed before grew inside his chest as he watched and studied the universe around him. What would it be like to stand on Petrichor, with its green and bright blue hues? To watch the land fill with the colors of fire for three cycles after every nine cycles? To drink that almost mythical clear water? What would it be like on that red surface of Hireath? Would it be dry and dusty? Questions abounded and he wished, deep down in his core, to leave behind and seek out these unknown worlds, their lands and cultures, their people.
And yet, he never could have possibly imagined that when he finally would stand on the surface of Petrichor, it would be in anguish, in fright, and in despair, arriving with all his Chiropteran brethren without hope of ever returning home.
[490 words]
Sooooo sorry This is Late!!
