Hello. I get it if no one's there, this isn't the most popular fandom. So Rikash is my favorite character in The Immortals series, and I teared up when he died. I was never into Daine/Numair but I totally dug Daine/Rikash, even though no one else did and it would never work. But this isn't about Daine. This is just an idea I needed to type so it wasn't echoing around my head for the rest of my life.

Rikash was feeling angry. Babysitting duty! How dare they subjugate a stormwing lord to this? He didn't care if they'd freed him from the Divine Realms, he wasn't going to sit around watching human children all day.

Who would pick a stormwing anyway? Children always hated him. They complained about the smell, cut their fingers on his feathers. Children were something precious to Stormwings- something they could rarely have. Stormwing nestlings were few and far between, and often went motherless. Of course, it wasn't as if they had the best of childhoods. It's hard to raise chicks when you could scar them for life as easily as touch them. So Rikash did his best to avoid the human ones.

"Who are you?" Rikash looked down. It was the little girl. He hadn't expected her to see him.

"Rikash. A stormwing." He gave her a menacing glare, but she wasn't daunted.

"I'm Maura. Did my sister send you?"

Rikash sniffed. "No human sends a stormwing anywhere." Conveniently ignoring just how heavily he'd been advised to watch Maura by his superiors.

Maura shrugged. "Yolane would disagree, probably. Her and Tristan, think they've got the world at their fingers. And I doubt you really want to be here." Rikash was surprised, both by the girl's cynical view of her sister and by her reference to the mage instead of Yolane's husband. The two were having an affair, but he wouldn't have thought a 9 year old would know that.

"I am supposed to be here."

She nodded. "It's okay. I understand. No one wants to talk to me. Not when Yolane, my beautiful, all-wonderful sister, is around." There was a hint of bitterness to her voice. Rikash absolutely did not feel sorry for her.

"All humans look the same with the flesh ripped off their faces," he said. He had a vague idea that you were not supposed to say things like that to human children, but then, he didn't care. "We all have our problems."

"But you can go places," Maura said. "You can always leave. Me, I'm going to be here until I'm of age." Yes, definitely bitter.

"At least you are not an abomination, little one." Well, he was bitter as well. "There is no place to go when you are shot at like vermin."

Her voice softened. "You aren't an abomination. You're exactly as your supposed to be. " She gave a small smile. "Cook says that Gainel made immortals from dreams," she said, a dreamy look in her eyes.

He snorted. "From nightmares. To scare away the warmongers."

She shrugged. "Well at least you can fly."

He ruffled his wings, and paused. A thought crossed his mind. "You could fly as well."

Her eyes widened. "What?"

"If you didn't mind the smell, my flock could take you. In a sling."

"Flying?"

Rikash smirked. "What else?" His voice was no longer so venomous.

Maura smiled, a look of childish joy on her face. "Yeah. I'd like that."