He was cold; winter and stone, the breath of frost on glass. She was not afraid of him, rather, took a strange fondness to the inscrutable Deimos, the intrigue of his silence and of his craft drawing the ever-curious rainchild ever inward. There they stood: so far apart, watching each other in the starlight. Huyana wondered if there was any meaning to glean from their encounters, but she brushed it off as coincidence. He was a creature of war, a beast of terror, and she was as fickle as rainwater and as savage as storms, and that was that. She let her gaze wander to the distance behind the General, watching the sharpened peaks of pale mountains rise behind their gentle green valley, like sentinels ready for war. For a moment, she thought of her father and times past and was saddened, but the cool dance of autumn rain on her shoulders brought her eyes back to Deimos, and fleeting was her melancholy. The faces of dark ears perked forward, attentive to the mechanical breathing of the murky partisan. Perhaps she could hear the grass wither beneath his feet if she listened closely enough, but his respiration distracted her, reminded the roan that for all his death and demise, he was a mortal thing, no different than she - that all monsters were nothing more than creatures cut and carved by life's knife, but Huyana knew that he was no foe; at least, not to her.

You are well, he said, his voice as flat as the blade of a sword. The rain seemed to hesitate, its power waning until it was nothing more than the nuisance of scattered drops. Her tail twitched once more, brushing the back of her hocks. Lips pulled into a demure smile, her gaze boring into his own like twin oceans. "As well as ever," she said, tail quivering more decisively. "The same could be said of you, General."

A flicker of mischief was set alight in the depths of her eyes, and she turned her face away from Deimos to face the sprawling lake before her. With unwavering intensity, she watched it; it beckoned her. How long had it been since she had felt the gentle embrace of water? Unhesitatingly, she plunged one hoof into its surface, and then the next. The shock of its coldness took her breath away, but she relished it nonetheless. Lightly, Huyana made her way through the lake until the bottom of her belly stroked the inky surface of the water. She turned to face Deimos, who seemed nothing more than a shadow in the murkiness of night. Carefully, the roan girl dipped her nose to stroke the water, and with a ruthless grin, she flicked it, hoping to phase the general (although she knew he wouldn't be, not at all with that iron heart of his). She felt half a girl again, when wars and destruction and hate did not matter quite as much as it did now. Huyana wondered (not for the first time) if he was a careless child once, as free as sea-gulls; would he remember?

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