When he arrives, the Lady stands stunned and awed by the rare vision that has returned to plot and ponder on his massive, bronze children. He is clean, something that Illynx has yet to see fitted over his muscles, and the way his black body gleams beneath the sun and the dark locks of his sway in the breeze, she’s caught quite off guard – but pleasantly so. A momentary gleam of hot aggravation floats across her surface thoughts as he asks if she had been looking for him; of course I am! she wants to spat at him, why else stand here between a behemoth and the rest of the world? But the sight of his handsome figure there, glistening with the waters of the mountain, leaves her wordless and staring with bright, golden eyes, stirs the emotions already brewing within her seasonally tainted heart into a frothing tizzy that she finds hard to overcome.

"Perhaps," even, slow, desirous. She plays the game too, arching her neck and holding her body just so, allowing her muscles all to be revealed beneath the perfection of her pelt, the few scars she holds white and honorable against the darker colorings of her frame.

She tilts her head, silently taking a quarter circles amount of paces around his figure, admiring the work the water had done to reveal his sinew beneath the layers of old, mottled hair and dirt. Always one to have figured this lay below the grime (she had pressed into him once before, hadn’t she?), she drank in the sights that had previously only existed within herself, each sip dark and luscious as she swallows in the man she has chosen for her own, at least for this moment in time.

Maybe it is why her God loves her so, and helped her appear stronger in the face of her kin, that she lives so freely on the wakes of his bidding. Each day brings something new for our Lady in gold, though many things about her stay the same; she cannot forget what has happened in the past, but she can change what becomes of her future.

She is not entirely without hope, or she would not be here, approaching and slipping past the Engineer after getting a sufficient eyeful of his good looks, close enough that she hopes her body brushes against his and successfully might lure him into following her into the woods. "Come with me," she states, though it could pass as an inquiry; her heart beats hard against her ribs, pushes her blood through her veins at an accelerated pace. Is it poor tact of her to pretend to be a temptress when all she had ever done was tease? Still, she’s seen it played from afar, she knows how to utilize her body during this time to get what she wants, and she is not the sort to feign ignorance just because she hadn’t ever actively participated in the spring time mayhem.

Hopefully leading him into the trees with her and towards a cave she’d selected many years ago for such purposes, she keeps her dark banner lifted and cast aside, a trail that even socially inept men such as Ulrik cannot help but follow, as she has seen it play out; surely, there were a few paired stallions that could resist the temptation of a mare in season, so long as that mare was not his own, but as she knew, Ulrik was a bachelor – one that she was relatively sure would not refuse her offer.

Pausing outside the entrance to the cavern, she gazes deep into its dark mouth before returning her eyes to the master of metals, her sweet expression adorned with a smile and soft, supple body language. "You clean up well, Sir Ulrik," she says, purring his name and tasting it for perhaps the last time before…

Before what? Love?

I don’t love him, acidic the hisses of her thoughts, rebuking such weakness even as she feels her heart tremble, an infant leaf caught in warm spring wind.

@[Ulrik]