Tears streamed down Riza’s face as she ran. She willed herself on, to follow the voice in her dreams. She ran and ran, the forest becoming thicker, wilder, darker.
Riza had been having dreaming of a voice for many nights. She never could quite grasp the words, but she somehow knew it was beckoning her, and she knew even more that it was real. That someone outside was trying to call to her. She just felt it in her heart. She had to find it. She would go insane trying to ignore it.

Suddenly, the forest ended. Riza skidded to a halt then gazed upon the seemingly endless clearing in front of her. In the distance, she could see snow-capped mountains. She had never seen them before, only hearing of them from her mate.
Tears started to well up in the doe-kirin’s eyes again. She squeezed them shut, cutting off the water from spilling over. She then gazed back longingly back to where she had come from.
“Ferin, I swear I’ll be back soon!” she thought, hoping he could somehow hear, and leapt forth into the world.



She ran tirelessly, impossibly, day and night. Riza never even stopped to look at a landscape she only dreamed of. Rabbits scattered in her wake, birds cried, water splashed. She stopped for nothing, no one, until, one day, her trance was broken by the strangest creature she had ever seen.
An old, short, human man stood some distance away from her. He seemed to have been walking in her direction, with a bag of rice slung over his shoulder, but now he was looking up towards her. A look of sheer terror filled his black, almond-shaped eyes. Riza stood very still and straight, not daring to move.

After a few split seconds, the man dropped his sac of the rice, the grain spilling out behind him. He attempted the scramble backwards, but he only fell on the spilt rice. He quickly got up, turned around, and ran, screaming, “Kirin! Kirin!”

Riza didn’t move until the man was out of sight. She slowly relaxed, but she was baffled. What just happened? Why was that human so frightened? She sighed sadly and looked around for the first time since she started her journey.

“This world truly is amazing…” she thought to herself. The land was so diverse. Some of it reached for the skies, some of it had more trees than imaginable, and some of it had nothing at all but the thinnest carpet of grass.

But before she could really take it all in, Riza felt it again. The pull. It felt like a string attached to her heart was pulling her forward. It felt like if she didn’t follow, her heart would rip right out.

Instead of blindly following the pull, she looked to the horizon. A bamboo forest lay in the distance, a river flowing into it. She gathered herself and cantered toward it, just as clueless as to what was waiting for her as when she started.



When Riza entered the forest, it was like a reverse as when she left her home forest. She couldn’t quite put words to it, but this forest somehow felt separate from that huge world like her home. When she stopped to look back, there was just bamboo. She couldn’t tell where she had come from, except for the flowing river.

Riza’s mind was too full to worry about being lost. She continued to follow the river’s flow, but not as desperately as before. She was close.

Soon enough, the river opened into a small lake, the bamboo lining and completely packing its shore. Riza stopped to gaze around for a clue to tell her which way to go and saw a stone shrine on an island in the lake’s center. Stepping stones made a path from the shore close to the river’s mouth to the island.

This was it. Riza’s heart raced as she could barely keep control of herself as she leapt on the stones, skipping several with each bound. She poured every ounce of strength into the last leap to the island.
She managed to land directly in front of the shrine, its gray, arching mass rising a few feet over her.

Inside, a statue of a dragon was mounted on a pedestal, freshly burning incense filling little cups on either side. If Riza had known any better, she would have thought the dragon statue to be very odd looking, with a somewhat short body and decorative wings adorning its front legs. Its pose was also strange. Instead of having a definitive leftward, rightward, or centered direction, the dragon was sitting, curled like a cat and looking out towards the river’s mouth.

The pull had completely subsided, and now all Riza could feel was a painful silence that ached to be filled.

“He-Hello?” she whispered, looking around in every direction, “Is anyone there?”

There was no reply.

Just as loss began to settle onto her heart, a rumbling shook the entire forest. The lake began to swish with waves, the trees shook like snake rattles, and dust and dirt fell off the shrine. Riza fixed her attention to the shrine, ready to bound into the water if need be.

The dragon’s eyes began to glow a deep, beautiful green. Before Riza could even react, the statue leapt into the sky. It grew huge and colorful as it took flight, spiraling up until its entire body had cleared the top of the shrine. On the last spiral it looked down on her, its impressive set of antlers tilted towards her.

Riza cowered in fear and dared not look into the creature’s eyes. She waited for her doom, but none came. Only a voice spoke, light, yet powerful, “Is that… You? Yes… It must be. The resemblance is amazing.”

Riza looked slowly up from her cringing posture. “Wh-Who are y-you?” She could barely bring the words to her mouth, and they squeaked out when she did.

The dragon threw his head back and laughed a literally roaring laughter that sent Riza back into a cringe, “Dear child!” the dragon called triumphantly, “I am your father!”

Riza snapped herself at attention. She looked directly into the dragon’s eyes now, realization hitting her, she said “You… Called me here.”

The dragon smiled warmly at her. “Yes, child, I did. I wanted to see you and hear about your life. It’s only natural that a father would want to know such things.” He said the last sentence with a touch of irony, knowing he wasn’t a father in the literal sense.

Riza slumped to the ground, her eyes still caught in the dragon’s. This was going to be a long day.



The two creatures sat curled in front of each other, silence now emphasizing the distance between them.

The dragon swept it away and said slowly, “It seems… That you know not everything about yourself. There is no need to worry about dying to leave your mate for eternity.”

Riza picked up her ears and tilted her head. The dragon smiled, pleased with his daughter’s beauty. “Quite frankly, since you are a part of me, and since I am practically immortal, you are also not very mortal. You can choose to live as long as you please, or rather, as long as I please. I did intend for you to remain in that wonderful forest for longer than a mortal life, after all.” He then changed his warm smile into a sterner expression, “However, it’s nowhere near impossible for you not be killed in some accident, so don’t get the wrong idea. You cannot simply be remade, either. Your Twin Gods work in ways I barely grasp, and even if they did allow me another child, they probably would not make the same thing twice.”

Riza rolled her eyes and laughed, having long become comfortable speaking with her father-dragon, “I’ve been worrying myself sick about my mortality for this long, and now you expect me to just run home and act like a fool?”

The dragon laughed loudly, “Fair enough! It’s settled, then. You must return home immediately. It was selfish of me to drag you so far from your home.”

Before Riza could even rise to her hooves, the dragon once again leapt into the air, snatched her up in his front claws and took off into the sky. He flew on some invisible force, his wings seeming to serve no purpose.

Up and up he spiraled, until finally the pair were above the clouds. He then straightened out his body, flowing like a ribbon through the air.

After almost a whole day of flying over the amazing world, the dragon landed in front of a seemingly endless forest. He set Riza down gently on all fours, but he remained in the air.

“This is as far as I can take you,” he said, sadness creeping into his voice, “I am glad to have finally met you, my daughter, and sad that we must part, but your happiness is more important. Go to your home, your friends and family. They must miss you terribly.”

The dragon fluidly turned around and once more shot into the sky, but not in the spiral Riza had become accustomed to, but like a dart shooting for the almost setting sun. As she watched him go, what seemed to be raindrops fell on her face. After a puzzled moment, she realized they were the dragon’s tears.

“Goodbye… Father,” she whispered as she looked to him one last time before he disappeared into the distance.



Riza could barely contain her joy as she found herself in a familiar part of the forest. She quickly found the ruins where Ferin often could be found. Sure enough, there he was, sitting in his usual spot. He twitched his ears towards the sound of her hooves then looked to her.

A warm, endlessly joyous and peaceful smile was all Riza needed to see before tears began to fall. She embraced Ferin passionately as he almost lost his balance. Why was she being so dramatic? He chuckled and licked her cheek.

“Ferin, my love,” Riza said after a few sobs, “I have so much to tell you.”