While he had entered the conversation unwilling to share words with her, he found that the one winged creature had a few traits that made him feel a mild friendliness towards her. For one, she seemed as socially inept as he did; the terse response with which she was initially given drew to her body the tiniest of tremors and shuffling, a similar bodily motion that he himself made when forced to the limits of his bounds. He supposed he couldn’t truly blame her for being so: any pegasus with one wing was bound to have some emotional issues, as one would expect a dragon that could not breath fire to be of a smaller soul than those who burned all they desired.

He could not know that this was simply the woman, just as he was simply himself. The loss of her wing had not changed her into an anxious creature, rather relieved some of the troubles her own mind caused her, and if Dragomir knew that she had somehow overcome her distrust and dislike of self to become as strong as she was now, he might ask her for the secret to her comforts. He has no such option, merely stands uncomfortably trying to not be overly rude to this woman whom he firmly believes holds no purpose to him other than to distract him from his studies of the stones in the earth, watches the faint flickers of emotions that leak into her physical stature.

Nodding to her first stream of words but finding a slight pleasantry in the vivacious lilt of the mare’s voice, he cannot find anything worth saying in reply to her. Thankfully for him, however, Africa seems to have noticed he sucks at carrying on a long term conversation with anything not equine, and her next stream of brightly toned words is formulated into a question.

He couldn’t help but smile in reply. It had been what he had gone to investigate when the mare first called his attentions to her.

"Indeed," he begins, voice deepened by the sparse dryness of the air in this place, suddenly realizing that he has grown thirsty along side the great fire and that sweat has begun to build in the crevices of his frame, "perhaps magic can break the seal that holds them." Stated quite ponderously, he turns his eyes down to a small scattering of the glimmering objects held beneath the surface of the glass between the horse and flightless pegasus. "Haven’t seen anything like it before, that’s for sure."

He had seen obsidian, lacquered in thick layers from the eruptions of the myriad volcanoes of his birth land, and even some of the gemstones that winked at him from their safekeeping, but he had never seen glass cover such an expanse of earth or such a fire burning out of seemingly nothing. Always, when the peaks of the volcanoes had gone, there had been a clear source of the boiling rock that poured from them – his mother had explained to him that deep beneath the cool earth, a great oven baked the guts of the planet.

Occasionally, the guts got a belly ache, and like dogs, would spew the excess fluids from deep within the heart of the mountains. Thankfully, none of his family had ever been harmed in one of these incidents, his father cunning and having found a proper set of deep and safe caves along the far edge of the island that held no active peaks (as far as they knew, anyway, as the dragons said they felt no tell tale rumbling within the bowels of the low lying ridges) that they hid out in when the black cloud covered the sky and fed the earth with the black flakes of its body.

More mountains, he silently ponders, pale blue eyes returning to the one winged mare with a faint twinkle of wonder in their depths.

Dragomir