He’d found kind and regular company outside the boundaries of his home for once, which he settled into quite nicely as soon as the conversation started moving well enough for him to ease into their voices and outside of the small box he usually kept himself in. He smiles in return to the softer one of Adele, her words pleasing to him in ways that he slowly was beginning to understand after so many months fretting over why Kahlua made him feel like he was going to explode and float away all at the same time. It was a simple thing, really, one that made him feel quite foolish now that he had realized what it was – these girls were pretty, and they said such pretty things.

It was easy for a young man to get quite lost when being complemented by such a woman as this, and even though the conversation was interesting and held his attention well enough, he couldn’t help but have a bit more notice for the audaciously crafted mare. She was not the simple, tasteful beauty of Kahlua, one that spoke of stars and misty, moonlit nights and a heritage true and resilient; Adele was wild, an ember in the heart of Nieque, her splendid array of magical elements blending with the placid features of the equine in such a way that Dragomir felt an inclination to say she was tied more closely to the old magic that had created their species than his teacher.

Her mane flickers and twists, always moving, a driving force that sought to change everything for no reason other than the thrill, and yet she was bound to the earth and kept a bonded born of the same powers that drove her unique, pyrotechnic hair and fed the odd colors into her pelt. She was fascinating, almost as much as the dragon twins were, and to those two he felt great gratitude that he did not stare at Adele as he had sweet Semira and proud Amaris.

The games of the dragon, at least, game him a good reason to watch her while pretending to observe the jut of flame breaking from the playful white’s maw, or her delighted prance upon the mare’s crimson back. A smile lingers on his lips, friendly and humored and entirely true in its presence, ears angled forward to listen to Adele’s further explanation of the dragon’s role in an equines life, the enthusiastic outburst of Marco drawing his eyes and face back to the stallion with a laugh loitering on the edges of his lips, hardly restrained.

He’d been much younger than Marco when that same light of pride had first burned in his eyes, so young he couldn’t even remember exactly when it had been; all he knew is that one day, he’d asked about Nidhoggr and Israfel, and his mother had told him all that she could share about the gifts that their God had blessed them with, the blessed bond between a mortal and a wyvern. His father, too, had instilled a great pride in the boy’s heart for the people he had been born from, and so it was endlessly amusing to him to watch it happening in one so aged as Marco.

Dragomir could tell him many more stories of the first horses, watch as the fires grew and grew until they consumed the smaller man’s soul as they had his own. Surely, he has learned to keep the blazes in place, at least better than he had known in the first place, relying on his own actions and hoping for a world where others could come to appreciate their origins as he did, and hold them sacred.

While it made him sad to think that these laws made many he had met smutty marks of failure (the dragon girls, and what of Roskuld, and Ranjiri?), it was all he had to hold together the person he was in light of who his new friends wanted him to be. Even if it meant that, one day, the magical encounters he’d experienced with them all would never happen again to a soul born in later years, their existence bred out of history, he knew it was the better way for the world to be. The Gods had not meant for the species to mingle as they did – why else separate each from the other to begin with?

If only he knew who Roskuld was, his convictions might be shaken so heavily he cannot recover. But these are lessons for later days, and so he is still stubbornly foolish and proud of a God left dead in a land He had failed.

"If you’re lucky, yes," he says, a tinge of the usual worry he feels when thinking about such things leaking into his tones, "not every equine gets to bond. Fate must chose you, first, as it chose Adele to find Vera."

It’s a common fear, for Dragomir, that he will die never knowing the love of a dragon.

@[Adele] @[Marco]


Dragomir</style>
where light shines, shadows will stretch</style>