DRAGOMIR

He smiles as she adds to his immediate thoughts on musical objects, her reference to the weight of his hooves in comparison to her own clever and knitting a deeper fondness in his heart for the little dragon child. She was her mother’s daughter, that was sure; he’d never spoken to her dad to know if he was as wise and full of wit as the Dragonheart, and he supposed it didn’t matter. Semira was female; it was of his belief that daughters tended to follow along their mother’s path more so than their father’s, and vice versa for young boys, even in such a situation as the Silver Dragon alongside him had been born into. Some might think she would be more like her sire, for she wore his natural armor and wings, but Dragomir saw so much of Mirage in every movement and word that fell from the child that it was hard to deny her lineage was that of the Moon’s favored queen.

Surely, Mirage never giggled and laughed so much, but she was also a mother and a ruler and much more aged than Semira at the time Dragomir had met her. Perhaps, once, the black lady of the mists had once been as enthusiastic about life as her daughter, or perhaps she had always been as she was then and as her other child, Amaris, behaved.

He does not know; he does know, however, that the way Semira is makes her much more inviting than her solemn sister.

"I think I might take you up on that offer," he says with slight cheek, his grin mirthful on black lips.

He nods in accordance with her statement that she does not know Nyx; he only knows her because she seemed to flit around like a social butterfly meeting everyone she could as far as he could tell, but he hadn’t seen the unicorn mare in a while now that he really thought about it. It made him wonder where she might be, if she was lost with Lace and Mirage. "She hasn’t lived there long. She arrived with an older unicorn stallion, maybe her father. I don’t know his name. White and black, bloody red eyes, quite serious and foreboding in his mannerisms…" he chuckles, glancing almost playfully at his travel companion, "I’ve made sure to avoid him."

As the mood grows dark, he slips from his unusual cheer into more common place somberness, dark rimmed ears hovering dismally atop his crown that bobs easily with his steps. If he could come to see the world and himself as Semira could, perhaps these conversations and events would weigh more easily on him; as he stands now, all he knows to do is avoid the topic of the darkness at all costs with those that had seen it and to tenderly tip toe about the issue whenever it is brought up, as it had been with Ranjiri. He cannot see the world as Semira does, not yet, anyway, as a sort of phoenix that burns and writhes before being reborn more powerful and gleaming than before; he cannot see himself as a mortal man, flawed yet flawless, a being crafted of earth and pure ivory, coated in a veneer of darkness.

He is clever, but a fool. It is so with most young men.

Her hope scalds him as she turns her draconic stare to him, the words ringing with truth that he nods his head in reply to, stuck nearly numb by the simple reality that hung in her syllables. Her final words rang with the most truth to him, so staggered by what she had said that he quietly and without a thought accepted that he had just been berated by a girl much younger than himself.

"I hope your right," he says, returning his eyes to the sway of his limbs progressing forward with faint notice that the sun was falling from the horizon, hiding the way his features gleamed with sorrow when he thought of how deeply he truly did hope that Mirage would return with the others as the fading light cast its bleak glow across his lowered face. Not that he truly cared so much if everyone else came back – he mostly wanted his moral guide back. Without her, he felt as if he would continuously flail in the moral grounds of his herd, unable to come up for a breath of air in her company as he always had, and the thought frightened him.

Truly, it was only that he’d never truly gone without any sort of mother so long as Mirage was around; he’d met her so early into his arrival to Helovia that the wise and nurturing ways of the black queen had quickly swept him to her side, holding him fast to her as a parental buffer between himself and the world, no matter how much he wanted to discard that theory. The core of his fear stemmed from his loneliness, his lack of a maternal shield; but it also grew from his own fears of failing to become anything more than a pile of bones with no name.

CrafteR

world's edge