He watches Resplendence move from emotional to almost frantic, her small sides heaving and her pretty pink face suddenly glistening with the slip of tears. The truth that falls from her is poignant, staggering – it draws a gentle expression to the face of the compassionate stallion, one that is outlined with an ache that spreads outwards as her words resonate in his head.

The Qian was Mirage.

Perhaps it had been, hadn’t it?

The last time he had seen her this emotionally distraught, it had been a dream that their home was burning, falling apart. That she was as upset as she had been then now is of logical order to the stallion, and so it is also logical order that he do the same things now that he had done then – but as he recalls it, he had been far more intimate with the small doctor then than he cared to be now, in front of so many strangers.

And so he awkwardly fails to do much at all other than look at the down trodden, pretty mare with the expression one gives a lost child, or mourning widow.

He wants to leave with Ranjiri when she gets upset then for many reasons, not just because the gold and ebony mare is his friend, but because he cannot bare to be around Resplendence and her sorrow when his is so fresh, and he does not want to think anymore of all the wonderful, angel like women who guided his path in this land so far from his father’s teachings, the women who can no longer guide him… because they are gone, dead or vanished.

He hopes vanished – or tries to, anyway. A small voice in his head demands that they will never come back.

The soft question that falls from her lips makes him stop, makes his crystal eyes shudder with regret that he has only deepened her sadness in his attempts to escape his own. For a single second that feels like a thousand years he stares at his hooves, stopped dead in his tracks, dark rimmed ears falling back just before he looks back to the herbalist.

The reels click within his mind, they pull her words together, and his words offer her what solace he can find in the truth that he does not know if he will ever live in the Falls, if he will ever bare to see such similar faces in such strange surroundings, blended with those who held prior allegiances and loves.

Family does not break apart, Resplendence, he answers, thinking of his mother, his father, his siblings – how they wandered the face of Loorien and still, when he reached deep into his soul, he could feel their love, love does not fall away, no matter how far it is stretched.

His ears pull forward, his brows furrow thoughtfully, ice blue eyes searching her tear stricken face with hope that she will be consoled (for his words have eased the tight knot within himself ever so slightly as he said them).

Isn’t that right, Ranjiri? he asks his friend, pulling his gaze away from the pale mare the nudge the golden marked shoulder nearest to him with a dark muzzle, his tail swaying to let the glass feather and branch clink against one another.

@Resplendence
[ OOC: Closure postages ~ that way he doesn't just walk off with her all upset because he would so not do that D: ]