Air in motion. Earth gently pounded underfoot. The night raced by, a greyish blur lit by shadowed sources of light, pulled in and brightened by animal eyes.

The beast ran across the fields, pushing the world out from behind him with grippping toes, propelling himself forward. He had never really seen the humans run, but he somehow knew they didn't run like this. It seemed like mere minutes before the surroundings were remote, but it had likely been more. Time moved so much faster here.

Somewhere behind him he had left his clothes. Somewhere not long after that he had left the sound of crashing steps, brushing grasses, and kept only a whisper of breath, and the low rhythm of fleeting touches against the earth, gently catching and slowing its upward swells, as if it were the reflection of a falling child, and then lifting it back down again, keeping it aloft in flight. In the blur of the surroundings, in the spaces of doubt created by motion, he could turn, with his mind, the branches into shoots, the leaves into tall reeds, the trees to bamboo... he could see the Rheari.

The faster he called the spinning earth to whirr by him, the more he numbed his sight and skin and ears with speed, the more easy it became to fill in the canvas with the brushstrokes of memory. All about him, somehow moving with him, almost dragged into a current by his fury, was the larger ocean, the one he had first seen here in Blythe so seemingly long ago. And now he hoped it was the same water that washed through all of the Ni, though the Rheari, carried by the wind spirits in their wanderings. Because if it was then he could breathe it and be at home; he could fill his mind with it and let it turn the space streaking by him into his plains, his mountains, his sky and his wind.

He came upon a meadow and smoothly raced to a stop. The world stood, defined, around him. He fell to his knees.

It was time to listen. One wind, he told himself, there is one wind.

His mind was littered with images. He saw a mysterious land of castles and war. Images of portrait cards and swords and lost souls. Images of love. He saw himself in it, cast into frozen stains of color somewhere, gently held in human hands. He saw his frame walking alien places, facing demons, surrounded my burning machines and twisting lands. He couldn't clear his mind of it.

And then he heard, or maybe found, the voice.

"Shenrakari... You are more..."

It spoke and whispered gently to him, close enough to his ear for him to feel the tingles of its kiss throughout his thick, cold skin. The voice wasn't his mother's.

It was Nari's.

His eyes wavered the night with sudden tears, turning trees into dark meandering streams, and the ground beneath him to a cool glow. He pushed his tail hard against the ground, laying it low and long behind him. He caught the breeze with the tips of his ears, and in the mane down his back, and felt the cold earth press against his hard body. He let the images come as they would, so that he could as easily let them go. And when they had all finally gone, there was just wind. Just wind.

...and he.