She waits for Arah’s response and listens to the words spoken thereafter by both she and the man who sought a place to stay. Delicate, her smile does not falter on her mask despite what she thinks of each explanation in turn, her eyes twinkling deviously in her still mask of illusionary benevolence. Her gaze rests momentarily on the dark and pale frame of the large stallion, sensing in him a darkness as palpable as that which skirted the Reaper alongside him and those she had come to call family under the lofty title of their hidden coven; The Plague.

While the golden stallion with two horns may have nearly brought Arah into an unwanted scuffle, she has her doubts that the behemoth would have hesitated to drive in for a kill should the situation have sprung sour. She hears the warning, the subtle statement that to allow this one in was potentially to allow a dagger to angle at the center of her spine during his duration here…

But it’s intoxicating, that rush. To play a game that the other is sure to lose; too many have tried to bend their pawns around her and she had crushed each with the heavy weight and freedom of a queen. She does not fear the golden boy, nor does she fret too much on what harm he can bring her; she is surrounded by her peers while he is an outsider, a drop of fresh blood in a lake deep and proud.

Only a ripple; she could unleash upon him a thousand waves that blotted out the heavens.

When it comes time for the stallion to defend himself from these accusations, he is met with her golden stare and a slight raise to her brows moving across the stillness of her softly smiling mask, for the stranger is of a land so foreign to her that she cannot decipher what language he initially spoke; its humorous, the bounce and weave of his voice, the poor way which he constructs his words. That the others have tried to immediately banish someone who can barely formulate sentences in their tongue was embarrassing to her in ways, she herself having brought a few members into the herd who were not originally from Helovia and, who seemed to lack the skills she thought necessary.

They had succeeded, each in their own way.

Still… as she watches his lips bend and the odd way he formulates his wording she cannot help but see him as a man wearing two tipped weapons on his head and one who seems to enjoy words.

As he mentions a false glass horn, her mangled ear twitches ever so slightly in the most unnoticeable of ways, a memory of a painted mare arriving to mind, one she had promised something to. That she had the glass horn and had not come back to the mountain did not settle well with the Gilded Blade, not one bit.

No one refused an invitation from her.

While the man continues to speak, she cannot help but feel a certain fondness for him; he reminds her, in ways, of a stallion she had once known who had gone missing, named Ruka. The bay was, as this palomino, a savant with words, one who made his life being clever and subtle. She could understand this stallion more than she could the Lord Deimos, that was to be sure, and that he admittedly spoke of his talents in the art of acting before her was promising in its own right.

One seeking evil does not tell the truth in such situations; a snake hides, as do spiders.

If he is dangerous to her, she doubts it.

He confirms her suspicions that he had been following the unspoken word he’d seen written across the behemoth’s face, and her mind sours in disposition towards him most immediately that he was the first to cast a finger on the golden stag.

"Thank you for your honesty, Arah and Thranduil," she begins, her smile falling ever so slightly at the corners as she looks between the two who had spoken and the one who had only blamed, "and your fine decision to bring him here." She pauses after a fleeting smile towards Arah, glancing over towards the striped stallion who was from some far away place, hoping to ease his worries that one mistake in the field had cost him a chance to walk beneath the rolling lights of the God of Time.

"I hold no ill will towards you for your treatment of Abishia," she says with a brightening of her smile, "the little bitch had it coming for her ungrateful nature. It might be said you were an instrument of Time himself, delivering my displeasure with her impudence before you ever knew it existed." Gaining a slight drift and mistiness to her gaze as she speaks and ponders on how to go about… reclaiming her lost Abishia, she quickly resettles them back on the stranger known as Thranduil, smile still vibrant on her lips. "Your tongue is golden, and, presuming your act was only an attempt to blend in among your desired peers, your claimed skills are valid. Even Arah did not notice your guise. Still…" she says, crisp feminine voice trailing into the air, "it cannot happen again. We have friends in the world outside, my dear, and I’m sure you know just how valuable such things are in your field of work. As far as you… Crash Course, was it?"

Her gaze slides towards him, golden eyes narrowed and her smile all but vanished on her face, "If a situation like this ever arises again in your presence, I’ll personally see to it that the Sentinel holds you prisoner on this mountain to prevent you from further damaging the flow and function of my home. Remember your place, which is evidently one alongside unkempt, rabid hounds." Flicking her dark tail in annoyance, she turns to both Arah and Thranduil and attempts to soothe the rancor etching through her veins.

"He may stay, if he is not so offended by the events that have come to pass that he’d rather find elsewhere to live," she says, "in such a case as you find yourself remaining on the mountain, Thranduil, come to me when you are ready to learn of the home you have chosen."

There was a river once,
with many round stones
enchanted by shallow hopes
of embracing the ocean;
water is peculiar this way,
how its life is a line
that cannot bend or change
without the approval of its bed.