Blackbeak Bluff didn't they tell you, you'd leave and never come back

"It's good to be home," he breathed, reverting momentarily to the tongue he was more comfortable with. He hoped that someday in his future, he would fit in better with the Dragedakru by mastering their language, but for now, it was still a stretch for him to find the right words. Sometimes his tenses got mixed up. It was challenging, and it was sometimes nice to slip into something a little more comfortable. The common tongue came naturally for him. There was no thought required.

As his eyes skipped over Tux's golden markings, he let his ears lay back comfortably and basked for a moment in the comfort of a friend at his side. He surveyed the charged sky for a moment while collecting his thoughts for Tux's question. It was tempting to lie and pretend he had seen more than he had, but he knew Heda would refute any claim he made about participating in the war, so he chose to be honest... mostly.

"We won," he said with a triumphant smirk, "there were..." Frowning, he slipped back to common: "casualties on both sides. I saw a guy bleeding from his throat." That wasn't true at all but no one could prove it. "I mostly trained," he went on, "with the other Goufas and Etoille." Come to think of it, Tux was about the same size as Ephraim's adoptive father. Maybe sometime they could spar. He'd been working on a way to best a large opponent like Etoille, but they'd departed before he ever achieved victory, and he had suspected Etoille was going a bit easy on him anyway.

"I'm Skayona now," he announced, unable to hide the spark of pride in his voice, but he didn't dwell on the subject. He would have loved to talk endlessly about the things he'd learned with Trigeda's naturalists, but there were other things to talk about. Like, "what happened while we were gone?"