Towering grey walls, looming towers, the din of constant crowding in narrow streets… there wasn’t a lot that Brody remembered from his youth, but he would never forget the *stench* of a city rotting from the inside. *Royal* they called him, a prince, and the word meant nothing to a foal who had only ever known the winding halls of the palace, never understood his station.

His parents’ faces were blurred, and when he reached back in his memory he’d been an only child, looked after by maidens hired to keep him out of trouble- not that they ever lasted long. It was years ago now that it had happened, that one incident that irreparably altered his fate.

”Don’t go too far, Bruv!” Called the farmhand near the forest’s edge, an older stallion who had tolerated the youth’s chaotic escapades more than the academics or the cooks or anyone else employed on their vast grounds- so vast it cast a shadow over the rest of the city. “You know yer ‘ma ain’t gonna be happy if she finds you near the labyrinth”

As if he cared what she thought; the worst he would get is a slap on the wrist, a chastising from the newer maids left to take the brunt of his attitude by the more experienced in their hazing. “She’ll never know if you don’t tell her, old man!” He quipped back, laughing as he cantered past the treeline. “I’ll be home for supper!” Whatever the old codger said in reply, he hadn’t heard.He hovered around them a lot; those dark broken stone stairs that lead into the dungeon depths, some cosmic pull urging him to descend. He’d been warned though, after the day he’d seen an entire patrol of guards leave, and only one come back, hide littered with bloody gashes, the empty socket of his eye- but he tried not to think about that.

That particular day though, when he reached the familiar clearing, perfectly round as if the foliage was kept at bay by some strange magic, a melody floated out from the abyss. It was slow and tinkling, like a rusted music box struggling to get to the end of its turning. It was so strange… he stared down the steps, knowing full well that this was nothing to trifle with, something he could come back to another day when there wasn’t an obvious lure beckoning him.

Only… the next moment he was blinking his eyes open as if waking from a long meandering dream, the flicker of ancient still-burning torches against slick mossy stone greeting him. He stood in front of an enormous carving; intricate and impossible to take in all at once. There was a swarm of coursers with some strange humanoid atop most of them, great beasts breathing what looked like flames, currents of energy from robed figures and a great sun above, eclipsed. There was more, but the young courser was more concerned with where the fuck he was.

In the dungeons was the obvious answer, but how? WHY? Panic seized him first, but then a slow wash of relief when he realized that itch in the back of his brain was no longer there. It was soothed into a gentle tugging instead, a pull toward the hall behind him; onward.

And so he’d gone, and kept going, and when one day years later he finally found another exit… it was to a land that wasn’t his own. No forest, no farmhand, only a vast dried field as far as the eye could see. So he descended again, sating that primal urge, that instinct built into him by creatures long since passed. There he’d remained, trying not to forget, but finding his memories more distant each passing year. Maybe one day he’d find them again, his family, but would they even recognize him?

It hardly mattered until then, and so he kept onward.