sons are like birds, flying upwards over the mountain
☾
When I remember who you are, the person that comes to mind is a teenage boy who spends his days in contentment, never one to long for more. Your mother teaches you how to be simple, and light of use. Selfishness was never your vice as a child, taught in the love that you adore those around you with. The happiness that encourages you into the next morning is your privilege: the ability to read and write, something that doesn't come easily for someone at your level of existence.
That though, is nowhere near close to who you are now, but you'll never leave my memory as that.
Every story should start at the beginning, correct? Well, you are the last of your line, the final son to gain the family name! Your mother, and you both are only children, even you are a surprise to those aware of your conception. She'd been fading into her older years, working away her youth and life through servitude to a family with a different kind of luck. You could've never imagined the surprise among her peers as she announced your brewing existence. A mare as far as your mother was sure to have difficulty in her pregnancy, not to mention labor, and for what you would know as the only time, you are dreaded.
You come into this world the same way you live it: easily, taking your time but nonetheless, arriving without a stitch. She loves you from the second you take your first breath.
Literacy is not something you are assured either, living within a comfortable country estate as an intended servant boy doesn't require one to be able to read. Instead, they teach you to need less, to be seen and not heard, to look clean and presentable while carrying basic manners, and most importantly, obedience. Luxury comes through one of your mother's friends, an indentured servant siding as tutor, who cares enough to gift you with what they can for your first birthday.
It comes to be your downfall, but you love it still. The opportunity is all you need, a grip, and a foothold to climb the social ladder a bit higher.
You don't remember the day they came for you, or at least you don't try to. It sits in the back of your mind like the biggest mistake of your life, watching your mother cry as you slowly figure out the seriousness of escaping ignorance. By not wishing to be lesser, you are carried to a higher form of being below the higher class. The soldiers sweep you away as if you are theirs to take, and you guess that you are, everyone has a purpose. Your purpose doesn't reside with the ones you love though, and it breaks your heart.
Soldierhood comes to you in the same way a fish takes to land. You flounder, and flail, you wield any weapon with clumsiness that can't be ignored, but an able body will not be wasted. To your home, you're nothing more than replicable, slowly but surely becoming a pawn wishing to be disposed of from superiors. In which they do try, placing you on scouting duties that required patrols into the wilds, outside of the walls you'd learned safety behind.
Patrols become your escape with time. The partners that they place you with, - to die with, out there, - eventually become the only friends you're able to make. Outcasted by your tasks in a militaristic state, you aren't exactly favoured. You treat each other with kindness, you're the only ones to mourn each other's deaths should one of you pass. You trudge through misery together, in wasteful hopes of something better.
You go until you break. For the life of you, you cannot remember what the final act was that caused you to flee at last, to risk your life just to be able to feel value in yourself again, and while it breaks your heart entirely to abandon any hopes of running away to your likely dying mother, you know you have to. You barely remember the names, and faces of those who take you away, smuggled inside of the cargo of a trading ship. You only remember the feeling of knowing that it's over when your hooves touch solid earth again, somewhere else, somewhere you don't even know the name of.