Every time his knuckles hit the punching bag, it creaked. A few days ago, the filling had come loose, and he hadn't have had the nerve to fix it just yet. So, with each hit, a bit of feather and wool spilled onto his floor. It looked funny. If he'd color the stuff red and pink, mix in a bit brown, he could imagine he would really beat somebody up, make their organs spill all over his floor. He would have to clean that up, whenever someone entered. No use getting everybody freaked out over the possibility that he might hide an actual body inside his punching bag.

Would he do that? Had he done that before? Surely not.

A polite knock at the door let him stop; fists raised, he made a sharp flicking motion with his head to remove his hair from his eyes. He sniffed. Not Ilandi. That was unexpected. Whenever it had knocked on that door in the last few days, it had been them. The human had started to behave more like Kirdain than themselves recently. For years, Renor had been amazed how two people could grow up so close to each other yet so different. That had changed, now, that Ilandi's mind had turned into a beehive.

"Come in", he said. The second he said it, he became aware of the room. His room. His messy, filthy room. He had tried to tidy it up a bit but his thoughts had hopped and jumped, like they always did, and he had let it go. He hissed silently. Nothing to be done about that, now. Blocking the door would be rude. Besides, he was training. It was okay to be messy during training, right?

Tegilbor's head appeared in the open door. He did not enter, nor commented on the mess. With an unsettling straight face, he took in the books on the floor, the dirty bedding in Ilya's part of the room, the scent, that no doubt hit him. While Renor thought he could give him credit for the attempts — his clothes were gathered in one large pile, rather than spread out on the floor, new bedding was placed on his bed — he was also thankful for the displayed lack of interest.

"Andrush Vandrainor would like to see you in their office", he said at least.

'Oh damn, what did we do?'

"When?", Renor asked, trying to not let himself get distracted by Ilya.

"As soon as possible."

"Alright. Tell them, I'll be there in…" He needed to wash himself and he was not sure about the state Ilya was in.

'Hey! I'm clean! You smell like a child thrown in a pig's pen.'

'Thanks.'

"Ten minutes?", Tegilbor asked. He had lived among Vandrainor long enough, to tell when there was another conversation going on that separated them from their initial train of thoughts.

"Yes", Renor said. "Ten minutes will work just fine."

Tegilbor nodded. "Ten minutes, then." He closed the door.

Renor let out a huge sigh. What could Telassi want? In the last ten years, he had been summoned like this only three times: Firstly, when they asked him to come back to the Stables. This had been a big, dramatic summoning. Involving two Vandrainor showing up on his doorstep in Taruf, where he had spent the better part of the last two hundred years, formally asking him to accept a scrying message from the Andrush Vandrainor, and the request to the leader of the city, to let him go in their good graces. A spectacle nobody had needed. Telassi could have just used a mirror, and let him handle the rest.

Second time, only a couple of years later, they had sent out a servant who found him in the dining hall, betting on the strength of the next herd, and asked him to come to their offices immediately. He, a bit ashamed of his bets, had been talked into teaching again in almost no time. The next year had been the third time. Like today, Tegilbor had knocked on his door, and Telassi had asked him if he could imagine training Kirdain. If he would vouch for him. And now this.

Hopefully, Kirdain wasn't in trouble. Whatever was going on, Renor didn't like it, and he had that distinct feeling, Kirdain was involved in it. Not again, please, he thought, while searching for a towel.

'Kirdain's not our responsibility anymore. Besides, Atela'll keep him safe.'

Renor didn't answer. He knew full well that Ilya didn't even manage to convince himself with that.

He found a dry towel in the pile of clothing he had arranged and pulled it out.

The Vandrainor quarters had no private showers. He had no idea why that was but he hated it. Over the decades, however, the showers had become more private. When he had been younger, there had been sometimes over two hundred Vandrainor at once in the Great Stable. Nowadays, seventy were much. All in all, there might be a little more than one hundred and fifty of them left on the continent. Maybe ten or twelve on the islands. And each season, the numbers grew fewer. It was a depressing thought.

It might have been more so if he had more active memories of these times. But thankfully, he hadn't. He knew of feasts with thousands of raised cups, loud voices singing songs of days long gone, council meetings with fifty elders frowning at him, or the little Nighttear at his side. Hallways, so crowded it was hard to come from one place to another, and long, long queues in front of the showers, minutes after sunrise.

He always found it baffling, how he mourned these memories without really missing them. The feeling of anxiety, the annoyance, the pure stress these times must have been — all of that was gone. But so were the goosebumps, the songs, the excitement. Whenever he thought about it, he was thankful for the memories he had left. For all the life he could remember, he had known Telassi. A young child, tiny for their eleven years. And strange. Strange not only, because they were human and he was not but also a stranger among their own kind, perhaps more so.

He treasured all the memories he had of them. Young, old, wise, dumb. Few things meant more to him than Telassi, and with all he knew about magic, about spell casting, he was grateful that the memories he had given up didn't take that away from him.

It was easier to not marvel about the echo his voice had in the corridor now, to not appreciate the fact that he seldom needed to wait for a shower, to not remember the songs they sometimes sang in the dining hall. He could enjoy the quiet in the library without remembering how noisy it had been in there at other times. All of that was easier than giving up on the person that was family without a shadow of a doubt.

Washed and dried, dressed in fresh clothes and spotless armor — conjuring was a great thing — he made his way to the Andrush Vandrainor's office. He was pretty sure it had taken him twelve minutes, not ten but that was the price you had to pay for being clean. Besides, Tegilbor would have needed some time to go back here, so he might be just on time. His tail whisked without a care in the world, with every step he took. But a close observer could have spotted the tension in his face.

Tegilbor looked up from a tiny, tiny scroll he was writing something on with a comically large quill. His desk was — like always — filled with all sorts of scrolls, paper, parchment. Everything a person could write on was placed on the workspace with a system of order only the dwarf would ever understand.

"You look good, Renor." The dwarf had apparently decided to ignore his bare feet. And the missing claw on one of them.

"Thanks." One hundred years of service or not, Tegilbor still made him uneasy with his weird lilac eyes that shimmered just a touch too brightly in the light.

The Great Stable was built with a lot of light for these eyes to shimmer in. All the ground-leveled halls, corridors, offices — all the rooms that were meant to be used regularly by the Vandrainor — were built with at least one wall open to the outside for horses to leave and enter at their leisure.

This was an architectural compromise: When both halves of a Vandrainor were close, they felt safer, they were stronger and generally more useful because they weren't busy searching for contact with the other half all the time. But horses, for all their intelligence, were still animals and communicated a lot of things through their excrements. And no one wanted these in the hallways, or offices, or libraries, or anywhere for that matter.

So they always had the possibility to just leave, when a need — be it physical or psychological — rose.

Ilya waited next to Tegilbor's desk, chuckle in his eyes. To Renor's surprise, Ilya was indeed clean. His fur coat was bay roan and evenly roan on head and points. He was neither small nor large, with 1,60m. But his broad muscles and heavy frame made him look taller. His tail was bay and black, his mane only bay. His eyes, which right now chuckled at him, were brown. He was not an elegant horse. Not pretty, lean, and beautiful — not the type of horse most artists would draw when depicting a Vandrainor.

But in Renor's eyes, he was perfect. He fitted him, and that was the important part.

Tegilbor got up from his desk, and knocked loudly, three times, on Telassi's office.

It was a formal gesture, and it told Renor once again, what nature this meeting would have. When Renor had returned, they had worked out a system to make clear between them, what kind of a meeting would take place inside. Because being the boss's best friend did not always make everything easier.

Renor straightened his back, pressed his hand against Ilya's cheek, and got his guard up.