All his attempts to ease her pain only seemed to agitate it, turning what had been quiet tears into an endless, tumultuous river of sobs. Each wracking noise that broke from her lips drew a twinge from her heart, a mental curse or call to the Gods for having misguided him so despairingly as they had in this instance. His simple touch of comfort bloomed into many, dozens of hovering attempts to repeat the gesture, recalled at the last instant for fear that he might aggravate the sobbing worse with the touch as he had before, his chest tightening with anxiety that he had botched the conversation this badly.

Until she starts speaking, so softly at first that he has to lean in slightly to hear her, ears cupped and poised to catch each self condemning word that came from her lips.

His frown deepens, expands, grows more troubled with each tumbling word, his heart twisted in the midst of the gears of her sorrow and the terror he had watched ravage the land. It was not her fault, but how could he explain that? Even as her words tumbled from her frantically emotional lips he could hear the reasons that excused her of guilt lining that which she framed herself with, and he’d seen enough of the demons to know that they were ravenous and without the normal mental capacity of the living.

Poor Ranjiri, young and afraid as he had been the months following the disaster in the Grove, but it lightens the weight of the situation to know that he could be here for her, even he had been forced to learn how to accept what had come to pass on his own.

"If you are weak, then so are all the others who fell to the sickness," he says, evenly despite how uncomfortable and frazzled he feels while consoling a depressed preteen, struggling with his mind and body which hint that maybe he should quietly step back out of the situation while he still can, "the weakest of them your family, who have not come to find their spiritually wounded daughter, to tell her that she is still loved, leaving her to cry in a meadow all alone. I find none of those who became sick weak in the least, however." He pauses for a split second, snorting into the air with agitation as she rounds out his argument; "It befell too many of us too quickly for them to believe it was truly you who attacked them or that there was a defense you might have applied against the plague, and if they are too daft to know better… well. You’re better off with no family at all if they so quickly discard their faith in you."

Even for all the shortcomings of his father and the naïve, gentle guidance of his mother, he believed with all of his heart that true family did not so quickly adopt hate in the place of love when so much logic deduced that the member in question had done no wrong. His hoof stamps beneath him in his stress and angst, becoming more and more riled the longer he wonders how long it is Ranjiri has wandered and cried, broken and alone, while her family sits safe somewhere.

All the girl wants is to know that they still want her. It’s sickening to him, to think that she’s been left to her own means for so long that she’s breaking down so completely in front of a mostly strange stallion in a wild land rather than before those she feels she has wronged in her home. He’s getting madder and madder as the silence stretches until…

”What did you do?”

His rage instantly is doused in ice, his heart locking up and his features turning towards her with such trepidation lining his face as he tries to find where to begin, lowering the volume of his voice in hopes that only Ranjiri might hear them. "I almost killed a woman, with someone else," he says, the words like dry cotton stuck to his throat and tongue, a swooning rush of blood pressing into every nook and cranny of his brain, "I had a reason at the time. It seems stupid now. She had wings and had been spying; I was afraid she would tell someone what she had heard and I was so young and lonely, new to Helovia and my herd in the Edge. I thought… I thought the man there with me might have been my friend."

"He called us to battle once his dog found her hiding nearby. We broke her wings, her ribs. I’m pretty sure she snapped her leg trying to get away. I… I was moving in to…" his eyes push shut, the scene replaying in his head, the damp black earth beneath her body, the way she’d look at him with those eyes of horror as he swept in towards her, hooves aimed to crush and kill. He feels physically sick again, reliving it so vividly, repeating the dark deeds of his soul. "Another mare came, and saved her."

Slowly, his own tears slip from the corner of his eyes as he looks down at his hooves, unable to look at the girl standing with him anymore because he knows that he could have done the same to her had she been there instead of Shadow. "Her name was Shadow, of Dragon’s Throat. She… she died, during the darkness. I saw it. I never got to say sorry."

Died, with her son looking on; he wonders if Ranjiri has thought of such things, that she or those she loves might not live for her apology, if they even wanted one. He wonders if she has ever seen death and quickly decides no, for why else would she be so devastated over something a curse had invoked within her? It then leads him to question even harder why it is he has shared this story with a girl who could not understand his pain, a story that he had held to him in silence for nearly a year; that Ranjiri could see through the hole in his heart made him want to vanish into a ball of nothingness. Nervously he glances about him to make sure that no one has come to catch what he’s talking about against his will; its not like either Ricochet or Shadow could testify against or for him in a trial, both were dead, but he did want to have the freedom to chose who he attempted to heal his soul with, whether the balm was silence or a pretty hybrid filly.


@[Ranjiri]

Dragomir