Clutch and Kin

I rarely thought of my clutchmates, my brother and sister, before leaving the roost. Now that I am on my own Walk, I find myself thinking of them more and more.
 
Tembre was the best at thinta among the fledgelings growing up. As my interests became more scholastic as time went on, I had thought we would grow apart, yet Tembre always seemed to make a point of keeping us close. It was he that looked out for my martial skills, and often sparred with me to keep my instincts and physical health from dulling. Without him to drag me out of my studies into whichever pickup match of thinta was happening, I doubt I would have the constitution to carry on. I think some of my nature rubbed off on Tembre, though, as he began to wonder about the Raptoran: Whatever became of the larger community our flock broke away from, and what the landscape of our people as a whole was. Maybe these questions had always concerned him, and he kept them close. Whatever the case, his was the first of us to begin his Walk of the Four Winds, and his path took him west, to the lands of our predecessors.
 
Glith took early to the wind-shapers, the druids of our flock. Star Chief Astel liked to remark to me that we were two drops of Tuilviel's blood: I took up study of Tuilviel Glithien the Goddess, the Divinity, while Glith was inclined to Her domains of wind and nature. She spent every moment she was allowed by our small circle helping with menial tasks or sitting in on their meditations. Sometimes she even joined me on my errands fetching pigments and herbs for Astel. Often I would try to engage her on my burgeoning theological interest to gauge her engagement, but it was soon clear she had more of a mind for the spirituality and mysticism of the natural world, rather than the gods that ruled it. I still found an occasional overlap of the two callings on which we could exchange words over, though, and I think of her to remind myself that the world is a real place, in spite of whatever the answers to the larger questions may be. Her Walk began shortly before mine, when, in a very unorthodox manner, she announced to our elders and Chiefs that she would leave to follow the game trails southward. They accepted this with little trepidation, saying it was about time for her Walk in any case, and she left the next full moon to follow an ethereal call out in the wilds.