He turns to watch his friend observe the damage that has come to the wall, the figurative message he’d mentioned early apparently having hit home soon and hard. She seems sad, almost, he thinks as he looks at her and pants away their race, the thrill of the run lost quite suddenly in the solemn sight of a dragon along the wall for the first time since all that hell had come down on them. As she descends back to earth and the pair come together once more, he feels the sweeping touch on his cheek and feels the heat rise in his face, awkwardly looking out into the wood so that she won’t see the bright emotion that consumes the pale blue of his eyes.

He figures she may have some part of it right, that the wall had been destroyed because the Lady Moon had disliked it, but from what he had seen and heard of the other lands, not a single place was left unscathed by the wickedness that had swept their home. What he does know for sure is that not a word has been said of it since the disaster, and if Semira looked closely at the color of the soil inside the walls she might see why.

The things that had been built to protect them had trapped many with few options of escape when the threat had come from within.

”Not that I know of,” he says, thinking as to what all Aaron has been working on, ”Resplendence and Alysanne have started a garden. Most of the crafting efforts are going towards creating a greenhouse.” He spares her the truth of the wall as he sees it; it would be painful for a newly returned child to think of her mother’s finest achievement as a failure. It was better to let the ghost of its majesty live within Semira, at least until someone else crushed the embers of that flame.

He would not be guilty of such crimes.

He watches her walk deeper into the misty wood and smiles after her, the song of her kin rising from her throat in haunting, melodic notes that swallow his soul and pull him into his past, into eves filled with such music and the soft staccato of the sparrows bedding down for the darkness. His eyes slip shut, ride the magic in the notes of her voice, and for a moment, he can almost hear his mother’s laughter, the gentle rumble of his father’s voice over the ushering of the waves.

There is not much time to spend in his dreams, however; the arrival of others is quick as it normally is, the first face to break into view that of his splendid Queen, all his boyhood love writ across his features as if a billboard for angst and hormones. It can at least be said that he is relatively sure at this point that is love is unrequited, a truth that might have made him sad if it hadn’t have made him start to thinking as to the nature of the woman who had become the focal point of all his youthful desires.

On one hoof, the Queen was kind and boundless in her joy and optimism, something that Dragomir had believed at first to stem from her sense of philosophy and a brilliant understanding of the world around her. However, the more he observed her from afar without engaging himself in her presence so as to distract himself from logical thought, the more he was sure Kahlua was more closely related, mentally at least, to a child rather than a wise woman, her charm all flowers and moonbeams rather than the gentle purring of water carving through rock. Still, it is not astute enough an observation to rid the boy of his flooding emotional responses to just how pretty the painted mare is, and his smile is broad and pleasant on his face in light of her subtle praise.

The next to arrive is a hound that Dragomir knows to belong to his fellow Glazier, Aaron. The stallion follows in shortly after, his joy upon seeing the lost child of the Dragonheart evident and drawing more warmth to the surface of the young man’s features. At least, in this way, Semira will know that she was missed; while he doesn't know much of the history of the herd before he came, he does know that Aaron has been a part of the Qian for a long while, judging by how well he is known among the others and the position that he holds.