Those lovely eyes don't miss much, do they? They swept her body, evaluating, analyzing, calculating her flaws, her strengths, and everything in between, but the process was so subtle, so fleeting, even Yseulte could not be sure it had happened. But those violet eyes lingered one moment too briefly on the lower half of her body, sweeping her legs as if those violet eyes possessed x-ray vision. Who knew? Perhaps they did. So the stranger was clever, as well as beautiful; Yseulte would give credit where credit was due. There were not many mares who could boast of being both.

Itzal prowled from the trees into the dim clearing, feathers protruding from between his needle-like teeth and pearls of blood beading his pale throat like a necklace of rubies. He looked so young, so harmless...seemingly no more than the frightened cub she had rescued what seemed like an age ago. Despite his obvious youth, she caught glimpses of something dangerously powerful in his strides, and in his devious mind, she saw his sly and cunning nature, and was oddly proud. Although she could not understand him yet, she almost knew him better than she did herself. It especially unnerved her to realize the darkness and anger in his heart belonged just as much to her as it did to him. What had she ever done to make him despise the world so? His venomous eyes glanced at her briefly, as if pondering the same question, before he turned away, and settled down in the snow in a nonchalant, bored manner, cracking the feathers between his glistening white teeth like bones.

Well, Itzal might be comfortable in this bone-chilling cold and smothering darkness, but Yseulte was not. She was a wild desert flower, conceived and born of fire itself onto sands scorched and burned beneath the sun's hostile gaze, raised with the dry desert wind in her hair and the shifting earth and scorpions beneath her hooves. Even the seasons were different here in Helovia—this Frostfall was an alien concept to Yseulte (only last year had she experienced snow for the first time), and her lithe desert body was ill adapted to such a frigid environment. She was thinner than she ought to be, and colder than she would ever admit, even to herself. Twitching her ears in an irritated manner at the sound of the bird crunching between his teeth, Yseulte refocused her attention on the dark unicorn. She listened to the violet-eyed mare's statements thoughtfully, amused with their easy banter. It took her mind off the darkness, however brief the distraction might be.

Before she could reply, however, another joined them in their shared darkness. Even in this never-ending night, he was a pale, ghostly thing, and the faint glimmer of his horn reflected the inky darkness like black ice, reminding her of the frozen glacial caverns she had explored last Frostfall. His eyes, too, glittered like a thousand shards of shattered ice, and she did not doubt for a second that his mind was not as razor-honed as the rest of his body. While she could appreciate intelligence in her female companions, it was to be scorned in the opposite gender. An intelligent man is an unpredictable man, and an unpredictable man is a dangerous man, and smart, unpredictable, dangerous men must be respected. All around, it was an unfortunate circumstance, and his cold beauty did not, by any means, further her recruiting cause. Threatened it, more like. She thought of her father, then, this stranger's cold, other-worldly beauty distinctly reminding her of Zjarri's divine eyes and body. It dismayed her.

Above all else, beautiful men are not to be trusted.

Despite her heart's misgivings, she held her expression in check, ever the dutiful iron maiden. As men have a tendency to do, he blabbered on about something or some such, before cutting straight to the point, as blunt as the rockslide she imagined in her mind's eye sweeping this meddling man far away. He was a northern man, was he? Cold and cunning as winter, surely, and she, a southern woman at heart, passionate and blazing as the desert heat—both unpredictable as raging sandstorms and freezing blizzards. Scorn him, she might, but it would not do to underestimate him.

And what of this stranger, where did she come from? Perhaps from somewhere in the middle, by the sound of her lingering accent. It was a charming, exotic sound. "All the same, eyes are useless in this darkness," she said bleakly to the unicorn mare. She glanced briefly at the stallion, as if noticing him for the first time. "Especially when discerning friend from foe." Two can play your game. "I offer you the same, of course. I come from the west of our good northern gentleman, from World's Edge. There, we call the sea and sprawling forests home, where the trees are so thick and grand that the snow rarely touches the earth, and our fires burn throughout the night." Home. It tastes odd in her mouth; false, somehow, as if she were attempting to convince herself of World's Edge rather than the stranger. "We are lead by a fierce queen, Mirage the Dragonheart, and a compassionate king, Thor the Gentleheart. I owe them much for their generosity."

And I am repaying them by leaving.