Whoever Gaucho is, he has some sense if he finds use for Ranjiri, the tall man thinks to himself with a soft smile of praise offered on dark lips; she is a good friend, and Dragomir can only assume that means that she is an excellent herd member, faithful to the last in their trials and tribulations. Each time he has been here for the dark turn of the land, she has been like a light, struggling valiantly against the cold shadow of the moonless night.

That she hasn’t gotten to use her magic yet saddens him, is downright disheartening. There had been no feeling in his short life that had encompassed or defeated that which filled him when the magic coursed through his being and out into reality, when he gently landed back in the realm of reality, untouched by the Moon’s shining starlight, and saw there in the world that which had only been in his mind.

Maybe she wouldn’t care so deeply for the power her God gave her; he couldn’t help but wonder how much more sharply the fires of the molten metal would burn in creation, or if it was simply so warm that it was like drowning in sunlight. He can’t ask, because she has said she doesn’t know, but the questions are still there, lingering and bouncy, what he knows of metal creating sending a million inquiries like wildfire through his mind.

These thoughts take Dragomir, as usual, down new lines of conversation.

"Perhaps you should make yourself something," he says jokingly and with a short, awkward, and rarely used emotional chuckle, gesturing to her wounded wing and remembering a pale, blue marked damsel he had once made a thick, glass cover for such a region, "it is best to start small, and to lose your flight…"

He thinks of dragons pin wheeling and dropping like multicolored bullets through blue, their leathering wings billowing out just when one was sure they would smash into the rocks, to send them spiraling back upwards with powerful, long strokes; the screams that ushered from their lips were the giddy, sheer sounds of childlike abandon, a delight so pure that it had infected him, as a boy, to such a degree that he had raced beneath them, his own laughter falling like rain to the rhythm of his thundering pace.

He wants Ranjiri to have that forever; he lost it somewhere along the way, he’s relatively sure - perhaps in the rain, amidst the willows, or somewhere less distinct.

Life has a way of blocking out the sunlight, turning the robin’s egg of youth into a broken sapphire dappled with grays, whites, blacks.

She is blue, blue as the tropical waters remembered from his childhood, pulling him from the depths of his often overwhelming ruminations with truths and complements. Naturally bashful, the stallion feels a warmth rise beneath the dark hairs of his coat, black lined ears pulling aside awkwardly as he tries to smile and not scurry away. Glistening, his crystalline eyes run across his glass, another small crack breaking outwards from that which has already begun to grow, and yet, the fracture radiates with pride, warmth, especially when he thinks of how she has kept them safely with her all this time, when he remembers knotting them there all that while ago.

"Maybe you are right," he says, when he at last finds his voice, reaching to tousle the strands of her milk and honey mane about so that the beads might sing against one another again, as they occasionally had as they’d walked, as his own tied trinket does when he swats at insects and itches – or when he simply sways the thick ivory and coal strands for the pleasure of hearing the durable glass’ song.

A pause takes the air, a comfortable silence growing as they look at one another; when at last the stillness is broken, it is Ranjiri (an almost usual thing, for Dragomir would happily let his vocal chords rust away if no one bothered to stir him into conversation) who draws his attention from where he had been dwelling in the past, dragging him whole heartedly into a present he didn’t really want to think about – but had to.

Life was full of such pains.

"I don’t know," he says, rolling his shoulder slowly, looking down at the reddish beach that their hooves rest upon, "I stayed to aid Mirage, and then Kahlua. I stayed for my glass."

They are all gone, he thinks, and while Kaj leads the Falls, he had never known him beyond what he saw in meetings – whatever little he had learned of the man’s character was lost on the hurt that Dragomir had suffered to see the pegasus and Kahlua together. He had no allegiance to that King and he had very little knowledge of Archibald, and he had even less knowledge of Torleik and Mauja, whoever on Nieque’s green creation they were.

"I shouldn’t have left," he almost whispers as he stares at the glistening sand, wishing the rain would come again.