A ring of metal gleams on the floor between two women, but he is far too preoccupied with simply drinking in what he is seeing to focus too heavily on the object that would have otherwise drawn more interest than two women along the borders of his home.

Had the women been anything at all like other females he had come to know well by appearance.

Honestly, he shouldn’t be surprised- he has met Semira, seen the great golden form of Mirage, and witnessed a wall being born out of empty air. He has even met his inner demons, those writhing snakes his father implanted into his genetics, and he knows better than to rush in full of bravado upon these two ornate and exotic women. He is fairly sure by their smells that they do not belong here, though he would prefer to say that they didn’t simply because of their alien appearances – the one literally had antennae, it would seem, her pelt splotched with black like the lacing of a butterfly’s wing, and her horn was seemingly cracked in half and mutilated by an odd branch of lightning.

The other he could make much more sense of, but he still found her to be wrong.

He came upon them as the dark, winged woman pulled away from the other’s neck, a gleaming gold feather seemingly freshly pulled from the appendage of flight (judging by the gap in the longest ones) nestled into the jutting locks of the peculiar butterfly woman. He watched silently, hoping that they wouldn’t notice his eyes burning into them, defining each with words dipped into a black poison that had upheld the life and ritual of his parent’s land. Hybrid of the mutant species, he declared for the gold and black damsel, and of the other… she was merely a mutant of her own. Her beauty was not captured as pristinely as the hybrid, nor that of Semira; while he found her to be nice in the face and with quite the rear end on her, he couldn’t truly be moved by her appearance in any direction other than how strange she was.

Either way, he owed it to those within the forest to intrude upon this rather touching situation, albeit that the intruders were both grotesquely wrong to the boy and that… something else seemed off about what, at first glances, was a meeting of two friends.

Something about the gleam in the butterfly woman’s eyes set him to thinking about his sleep deprived philosopher’s discussion with the Glazier, Kahlua.

Thankfully, Dragomir is too young to piece this puzzle together that quickly.

"Ladies," his deep voice rumbles across the distance between them as his large frame fills in the void his greeting left behind it, "is it customary in Helovia to exchange gifts on a stranger’s doorstep?"

His body and voice convey all the confidence in the world, a complete oneness with the universe and all that lies within it.

Inside, he wants to chase them out like he did the black mare. He wants to feel that rush of adrenaline again, the smell of fear thick as rain in the air. And he has a good reason to hunt these ones, really he does; it's all for his honor in this instance, though beneath the lure of battle lies a repeated message.

"The creators of this land do not take kindly to racism."

Dragomir</style>
falling asleep in chalk outlines -falling asleep inside the chapel</style>