For a moment, he feared he had lost her. The little mare seemed to cower, to quaver, to dissolve before him, to crumple and fall down into a pile of broken memories, a shadow of a tortured soul. Had he pushed her too far? Was he too direct? Too harsh? No, for she recovered soon, she found the comfort he offered, the hand he had extended to her in help. Had he been a steed to express his emotions more freely upon his façade, he would have smiled a warm smile to her, but he remained passive, indifferent as ever. Only his eyes seemed to open up to her, to hold her gaze steady, to present her with a promise that he was here, to help her, if she would only accept it.

You know me too well, she spoke to his awaiting harks, and his stony gaze might have softened ever so slightly at them. He had acted on a hunch, an instinct, and once again he had been proven correct. Madyrn shuffled nearby the yowling cat, whickering his own low response to soothe the kitten, hoping the child did not wake to complicate matters. Maskan kept his focus trained upon the roan maiden before him, glad that she was able to trust them both. Yes, she was family, and she would grow to be a strong mare, once she was well enough to see past the hurt that had blinded her. He was not discounting the fact that she had been through a traumatic experience - he simply could never imagine what it could have been like for her. He remembered his mother telling him of a time when she was forced, a time before his own father had come along.

'I birthed a daughter before I birthed you,' she had said to he and his siblings, 'a daughter who I had no choice but to bear. She came into this world broken; a cripple. And yet, when she was struck dead, I wept for her passing. I hated the being who put her into me, he took from me the one thing every being takes for granted. He took my dignity, my control, my sense of self-worth. And in return, he gave me a life that could not live longer than her first breath. But I loved that life, even if I hated the monster that put her in me.'

He didn't know what that felt like.. to be stripped of everything, to be torn to pieces so that only a shell of your self worth existed. Malachi lived, however, where his dead sister had not. Was it that Kiara struggled with the love she naturally felt for the boy was conflicting with the hate, the shame, the guilt that plagued her from the actions of his monster of a father?

"I do not pretend to know what you are going through," he began slowly, deliberately. "The Qian welcomes Malachi into the folds of its family. He is not judged for the blood that makes him, but for the choices he makes." He paused, chewing over his words carefully. "Why do you think my sister chose to save you that day in the meadow? Or to welcome you home again, after you left us to find your mother?" He posed the question with another piercing stare, one that encouraged Kiara to delve deep, to search for the truth, to realise that even if she did not see it, there was a strength, a resolve, a hidden determination to survive, to live, to overcome all that would otherwise bring her down.

@[Kiara]