*"And did you... learn the ways of a warrior?"*

His reply is a calm one—sure in his bearing, for he’s not the mouse who squeals in the shadows. “Yes,” he breathes, memories of mother suffusing his sight for moments, images of her on this very shore, teaching them how to move with grace on the battlefield. He sighs, and his chest rumbles with stone. “But I have never been tried in a war.” Wars are for groups and societies, and he has ever belonged to the wilderness, where your very life is a war from the moment you breath with brittle lungs.

Her questions become many and her voice trails from her maw more and more, to the point where she has become tedious; he abides by her, and keep his sights set on her tail. “I would be a warrior for them,” he says—then, smiling lightly, she asks about his sister and his breast warms at her thought once again. “I do. Her name is Macaria and she will be a yearling when the winter thaws…she is my youngest sibling.” He pauses and the snow is cold against his fetlocks, the wind brutal on his back. “Our mother died just after giving her birth,” he says, the words falling frankly from his mouth. A mystery solved for the vexing little mare, even before the question was uttered.

She continues with the thread of thoughts he has planted within her, speaking of things he truly does not quite care about—although he welcomes the ease of her voice and the tension that had drawn her spine taut. It is soft flesh he aches for. “They probably think of you too, you know,” he says, and his voice has become lower, quieter, something husky rumbling just there behind his tongue, “Of their lost sister and daughter. Perhaps you will find family in the Edge that will come to love you in the same way…”

He shifts his weight in the snow; he shakes his mane, and his dark tail curls idly behind him. Ka’Ora watches; she is ever an attentive acolyte. “Aren’t you cold, Anzanie?” he asks her, and the curve of his voice is a warm one, even if there is still a trace of a husky thing that clings to his throat. Ka’Ora can see the fangs for what they are as they begin to emerge from her master’s teeth; and so, she watches her master hunt.

”Watch for Circe.”