Mature Content Warning

The frail sprite is blissfully oblivious to the tragedy of the scene he enters. True to his blood, Zephyr is swept up in the current of his own crisis: change. For so long the pallid youth has been his own world, his own god, the only whim he must abide; he is everything — and all at once, he is nothing. Gravity grips the newborn like a vice, fragile body struggling to adjust to its newfound independence, and for many moments the world is deathly still. He is deathly still, tethered tenuously to the world and fading with each suffocating moment until —
Until the world changes again; a flash of movement and the frigid embrace of ice. The cold only grips him a moment — and then there is touch, warmth, movement. The sprite stirs faintly, pale forelimbs trembling imperceptibly. Inwardly the pale boy scorns the disturbance with what dim consciousness he possesses, affronted as the world demonstrates immediately its dominance over him, reminding him that he is no longer his own. He is small, he is weak, he is powerless; finally, he wails, limbs wheeling feebly for a beat. The vast, fathomless force seems to accept this, and again the world changes: flight, and then — something warm, something familiar. He shifts only slightly, a little uncomfortable lodged between his siblings who had been so closely pressed together. There is perhaps some prodding to be felt by both Polaris and Helios as he nestles between them, yet his movements are feeble, even compared to his delicate siblings. His first battle against the world has exhausted the energy from him, and the newborn drifts into uneasy slumber with the bitter taste of his first defeat thick on his tongue; it will not be the last.