The sound of laughter draws more than one’s attention, though I am certainly less clandestine in my arrival than the winged, ebonite dwarf which stands in the outskirts. I pass her some many yards away with a cursory glance, fleeting – she is not worth my time, an aberration best ignored, and so my attentions focus instead on the copper figure tracing yet unseen images in the powder of the Steppe (though one ear tilts back as I pass the onyx bird, her body elaborately feathered and baring only one wing – interesting things, hooks which dig into the furthest of my thoughts and linger – I hold her in a corner of my thoughts and listen for her approach or departure), approaching him with long steps that glitch as my left fore is pressed into the snow.

The wounds, a triad scabbed with dark, almost black ridging, are pretty gruesome looking; the largest of them all, a downward puncture which ends in a large, almost L shaped severance which has healed mostly flat along the rest, occasionally seeps clear liquid. Despite the hurt it causes, the wound is mostly superficial – it had taken me a day of resting to regain my lost blood, and now I chose to let it heal, to wear the scar which, surely, would be impressive. I’m only coming home to rest for a while in the warm waters of the spring, to ease the ache in the deep bruises the silver maned damsel had left behind.

The closer I get, the more I notice that he is wiry, not built for battle as many of our kind are, and while I have less use for him than I might another for this difference in our structure, I do not immediately discredit him as weak. Xynia had been delicate and lithe, as well, and her mind was as sharp as any blade, perhaps more deadly in its precision, its quickness, and while etching doodles into snow doesn’t immediately foretell of any great intelligence, I know better than to judge anyone before they open their mouths, at least not a judgment given to anything more than that which is immediately discernable from the physical truth.

Tall, his extensive horn is a burnished, metallic color, twisting upwards to a point in a tight spiral such as my own. I pause at a friendly distance, some three, four feet or so, my own golden crown held high and aloft, the thick tangles of my unkempt mane gently tugged along by the brisk mountain wind, the curl of my leonine tail slow and leisurely as a single, golden hoof cocks to its tip in a display of confidence, trust.

"Afternoon," I say, letting my eyes run across the indiscernible squiggles in the white, wondering just what the erratic lines are supposed to be – even as a foal, when we had painted leaves and delivered them to the herd lands of Helovia, inviting them to dance among our kin, my friends and I had displayed much greater skill than… whatever this is – and so I ask a logical question, "what are you drawing?"