Ah, how little she knows him; the beast before her is perhaps more vain within than those who prance and strut, superiority a mask. His superiority is naturally given, no mask but a state of existence; never has he been truly challenge in his right to life and the things he has decided he wants, and so he has never been faced with the notion that he isn’t the greatest thing to happen to Helovia.

Maybe that is why his arrogance is undernoted unless challenged by some abrasive ego – in which case it lifts its monolithic head and roars, never strutting, never prancing. He owns his power, he wields it without thought to how others may perceive it, assuming only that they know, that he does not have to flex figurative muscles and flash the shining edge of blades to be given the respect he demands.

Such things are for women, and physically incapable men.

It is not to say that he doesn’t occasionally let his Goldenballs sway (some pale faced colt knows him better than he should, the same colt who had earned the pretentious retorts of the haughty black bay).

Of course, he knows none of her thoughts, left only with the soft smile she returns, her gentle laugh making his golden eyes glitter in delight to have pleased her – the boy knows enough about relationships and girls to figure that making them smile and giggle cannot be a bad thing. And, while the azurite and ebony mare before him is starved and lacking certain voluptuousness he has come to expect from fillies no more, her eyes are luminous like fire and her face is pretty, delicately sculpted, suggesting that her figure, when not emaciated, is dainty and fine; the added ripple and shine of the water in tow, the promise of magic flowing through her lineage, makes her laughter and attentions a fine prize indeed.

He nods in accordance to her statement that she is grateful; he would be too, he supposes, if he were being starved and tormented by a God. His Gods, the First and the Spark, have been nothing but good to him – even if the true Lord of the Mountain was prone to coming across in awfully frightful manner (as far as Rikyn was concerned), he had also never known the Basin to suffer long or hard under the watchful eye of the Timekeeper.

Her next words, however, make his smile falter ever so slightly that he has been caught in his web of bullshit (though the grin remains, never quite flickering all the way off); she immediately veils her accusation in kindnesses, but it was a pointed horn none the less, and he felt his ego squirm in aggression and his heart to twinge at having been called out.

"My mother was born to Helovia, as was I," he answers, finding again the fullness of his grin, not mentioning that his mother was once a Lady, his father once a Lord, that both had done many great things and were known by many - mostly because he does not like to flash the names of his parents about, feeling as if he hides behind their titles and legends (though, surely, it fueled the arrogant pride that runs rampant through his youthful veins), "and my sire has lived here many years. I know its history as well as those who raised me, and she is politically involved in all the ways my father is clever."

He refuses to place her in the past tense, though his mind tells him she has been gone too long to be believably safe or returning, and he refuses to let Ming Yue see the scars on his soul with any sort of ease (for real men don’t cry). A sorrow bends through aureate eyes as he grasps for the charm and happiness that had been there before he’d thought of her - a split second darkening that he immediately shunts aside with youthful ease, not truly understanding how bad letting such wounds fester in the shadow of one’s mind can be.

With a chuckle, he amends her statement on his wisdom – he’s far too young to be called such things, as he displays now, ignoring his half life sorrow to dwell on the pleasant present. At least he has the decorum to admit as much aloud (he generally is not so humble).

"I'm not really wise, though," he answers with a chuckle and a wink, "I just know more than I should."

Then the water walker is on the ground, and he is hovering above her like an impotent savior until she nods that yes, she will go.

And then he is a flurry of action and male chivalry (because even supremacist unicorn princes have hearts that soften for pretty women, after all), falling to his knees alongside her with as much decorum as he can muster. He barely knows her, the strangeness of the delicate damsel filling him with an odd rush, very different from that which had filled him as he’d walked with Xynia, shoulder to shoulder; feeling his blood run warm though his veins, he waits for her to adjust her weight against him, to allow his larger, much more healthy frame to support her own.

Of course, she’ll still have to shuffle her hooves forward on her own – but he is a patient boy, despite his youth, and his commonplace fearless leaps into the unknown, and while, most days, he would almost fly on his way home, letting the long pull of his legs over the earth build his sinew and deepen his lungs, he has taken enough walks with women to know how to stroll.

This one, he thinks, now near enough to her that the ruddy shadow of the blood wood does not obscure her thinness, will be a stroll accompanied with many lounging picnic breaks. She is thinner even than Aithniel when he had found her nestled among the thistles, so thin that he wonders how she has not already died.

Perhaps her God was cruelly sustaining her past the point when most would have withered. Perhaps her soul was valiantly fighting back the shadow hands of death.

He did not know. He did not think it truly mattered, either.

"When you are ready, Ming Yue," he says, remembering from some distant memory (was it a priestess in the Nightwalk, or a being of his smallest days?) that ones name pulls upon the soul, hoping that tether binds the fragile damsel to this plane.

[ OOC: Basin thread comin' up ~ ]