Individually, we are one drop
Together, we are the ocean.
- Ryunosuke Satoro

The light from the bio-luminescent algae that floated in the waves made Psyche's presence known from a distance, and he audibly groaned into the wind, a sour expression turning his face. Everything about the way she so haughtily pranced over to him like the little pony of evil grated on his nerves, and he grit his teeth. It was hard for him not to feel superiority over her because of his appearance. She was plain. No color. A daughter of Riekahn with no crimson and no royalty. She was to be front-line fodder, if the general pattern of Dorngarrow had continued to work as usual, and he doubted that his father was a man for change.

She was an ordinary whelp, but he was a favored prince. Well, had been. When he left his post as a general, he had put a kill order on his head, and he could only assume that they had done the same for Donovan. Psyche called him brother, and the stallion stiffened over so slightly, his own crimson eyes boring in her general direction. Once, he had been feared, even among his siblings for his brutality, strength and kill streak, but now it seemed like on foreign soil they had every desire to mock him.

Apparently he was her favorite person to find alone in the dark, and he had a hard time believing that bullshit. In his time in Helovia, he had done a very admirable job of avoiding her and Giselle as much as possible, but it seemed that good luck had finally failed him. Though her expression may have scared another, Paladin was not phased; he had his own, healthy... respects (fears) of various creatures (dragons), but his short sister with no color was not one of them, even if she was trying to wear the mask of impermeable evil.

"Of all the times you could have found me, you chose now to come to the beach... in the dark," he rumbled, his face in a sour frown. The hairs on his long, thick, winter's beard were silver from his brutal and violent life, and the scars along his shoulder and neck were also beginning to hold signs of premature aging. However, his body was still incredibly fit as always, and he stood, well defined after his exercise.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, his crimson gaze rather pointed. "Should you not be in your rather slanted herd doing slanted things and being a general thorn in the side of the rest of the land? Taking a break from being Princess of the Dark for once?" He growled, not in a mood to take his sister's shit. He was hungry, dammit, and a man's stomach was important.

Paladin's warrior senses had been honed for battle, tuned to sights and sounds that were outside of the normal. Even as he snapped at his sister, an alert in his brain was chiming, telling him of the shifting noise in the sand and the shadow that blocked out a strange shape in the algae-lit ocean. The stallion looked over just as the vague shape of some strange monster opened it's jaws toward Psyche's horn. "MOVE!" he commanded, the tenor and role of a leader easily sliding into place. Paladin tried to move Psyche out of the way with the force of his body, and he tilted his head, aiming to stab at the monster with his pearly horn.