He’d returned to the scene of the crime, a maw full of flowers and a heart less heavy than it had been a season past. The sight of the willows still filled him with an acute sense of failure and shame, but it was different now that time had passed and he had put in place some emotional safeguards that, he hoped, would protect him from future disasters like what had occurred that rain saturated afternoon. The most common of thoughts here, as he walked through, was in fact those of his father; he wondered if what he had done with Ricochet was something his sire would have approved of. He knew that surely his mother would not have – she was against violence for the sake of blood, believing the weapons should be raised only when one’s family or home is threatened. His mother was an odd creature, though, riding the drifts of time with all faith that she would wash adrift on some pleasant shore.

Dragomir had more of his father in him than she; his soul was restless, his heart desirous of achievements and recognition, and while that same path had led Adalwulf astray and quite lost at one point in his life, the boy didn’t see his father’s mistakes as failures and thus didn’t attempt to remedy them for himself. He only knew what he had been told, and all the things that had passed his ears didn’t always click together the proper way at all.

For one, that he was an equine, inherent ruler of the earth and all that the hoof could carry him across, that the pride of his people was heavy in his veins and that to disobey the natural order of his species was to commit a treason more vile than the assassination of one’s queen. He had been taught to take no bullshit from anyone (especially the other species) and to deal with insubordination to his will with force and logic, and to seek knowledge from the world around him. He had learned that for all actions, there is a consequence, and that he could not foresee them any more than he could will his massive frame into the skies.

On the other hoof, Mirage and the Qian had left him with many more lessons of truth, ones that cast light upon the dark facts that had been fed to him through his growth and made him question all that resided within his heart. Was it wrongful, to be proud of one’s blood? He had learned that, for the most part, it was not – so long as your pride did not bring pain to those around you. The dragons of the Edge had taught him compassion, unconditional love, a unity among strangers that he had never perceived as a possibility in the small world he had been raised in, and while he feared the interactions with the blasphemous other breeds, he was also beginning to learn that they were rarely any different than he was, at least beyond appearances.

He had also learned that no matter how he had been trained to feel and think, the world would cast him into a path that forced him to see the reality of his illusionary truths. After all, Helovia had already taught him that his heart wore guilt like a chain of knives, pressing each hungry tip into the pulsing of his soul and causing a wound which bled for months, perhaps even years, and that the life his father had planned for him was simply not possible in the land he had chosen to begin it in.

He sighs and forces himself from his mind as he finds a flat and large stone alongside the still waters of the pond in the heart of the weeping grove, scattering the flowers across the surface and setting about sorting them and trimming away the stems. He begins with the hellebore, the deep red and laughing pinks of the soft, round petals his most favored of the blooms he had discovered in the fading frost; they remind him of Kahlua, in way, the only other color more true to her persona than passionate pinks and crimsons the riotous joy of yellow – and he had some flowers in that shade, too, as well as white, and periwinkle.

Focusing on the nearest hellebore to him, he imagines the flower incased in a thin sheet of glass as he was instructed, a small loop located at the back of the flower’s heart so that it could be strung onto the harness as he formed it later on. Pouring his will outwards and projecting his desired outcome, he stares with pale blue eyes at the petals, the slow inching of the glass as it coats each petal in a veneer shallow enough to allow the color of the flower to gleam through.

He doesn’t feel very tired when the task is done, as Kahlua seemed to when she worked on both the wall and the object for Shadow, but it is also very small in comparison to her masterworks. Still, it makes him smile in pride of himself, the way the light catches on the curvature of the flower and gleams an icy carmine.

Made all the more eager by this small success, he turns to the winter jasmine next, clusters of small and pale blue toned flowers that should sound with music whenever the Weyrleader steps while wearing her present, the first glimmers of his new found magic whispering across the soft and fresh surface.

@[Tyradon]