”Oh, I know, and if I was just trying to make an impression?” he teases, and she barely refrains from rolling her eyes in response and her mouth becomes a surly line of disagreement – that impression was a failure. But she wouldn’t cut his soul so deeply, not so soon into their conversation. There was something about the red and white stallion that had her intrigued, even if he had immediately dropped the ball – she could get it rolling again, which was to be sure.

There were few men who could resist her charm, if she wanted it to end in such a way, and that quirky grin of his keeps her sharp tongue concealed behind dark velvet lips. His chuckle wipes the unpleasant expression from her face, bringing her own soft smile back to light as the man names her feelings most precisely as his own. Her own giggle is delicate and pristine on the mountain air, pushing ripples of steam around her face as it bobs in her mirth.

She wasn’t sure how well she believed him, that he was loyal to his leaders. He hadn’t been there to help her defend the Lady Psyche at the meeting, but perhaps his absence had been his silent disapproval of the General turned leader. "But what is a Lady without her devoted subjects?" crooned the golden wench, her head tilting ever so slightly as she made her pointless inquiry, "I myself would be quite upset if they were all to drop dead tomorrow. Though, I will admit…" a long pause fills the air as she steps slightly closer to Tolio, her grin wry and playful on her lips as she whispers the ass end of her statement (one never knows who might be eavesdropping, and while she didn’t know him well, he seemed the sort to keep things to himself), "some I would not miss at all."

Deimos, for one. Her mood sours instantaneously at the thought of his still breathing existence on the mountain, deepened as she recalls the hybrid filly known as Destry and the other less than pleasing members who had wormed their way into the vale. Reparations could be made later, however; she was, after all, new to her position – it wouldn’t bode well to her myriad subjects if she were to go seemingly mad with power, tossing person after person down the mountain.

The ultimate test of whether or not the pegasi were the only ones who could truly fly.

The man’s roguish personality draws her back out of the darkness of her ponderings, golden eyes crinkling happily at the notice of his playful wink and even more capriciously placed statements. Her heart is fluttering away like the happiest butterfly in the largest field of flowers to be found in the entire world, not a single storm cloud on the horizon or a draft to upset her delicate procession, and she finds herself slipping into his company quite comfortably despite the wrongness of how it began.

"Aren’t we all truly wicked though, dearest Tolio?" playfully jests the mare, though behind her ruse is a heavily enameled piece of truth. Here on the mountain, especially.

Her grin slips away as he makes note of the slender evening patrols, her mind making a quiet note to make mention of it to the soldiers after all was said and done with the tournament for the open ranks (the bile threatens to swim back up her throat at the thought of Lord Deimos); but it was not what she asked, and so she listens intently to his reply, her features bursting into a humorous grin and peal of laughter as he mutilates his once charming features into a grimace befitting the most horrifying of all the hornless.

"Only if you promise to meet me with such charm on each morning," giggled the golden minx, her eyes still crinkled with her good humor and burning quite intensely from between her long, dark lashes. "I suppose I chose the early morning to wander for the same reason," she mused aloud, hoping to keep the conversation alive for as long as she might before the others came nosing around, ruining their currently cozy and quite private arrangement, "though more often than not, I simply leave the comforts of this valley to view the world outside of the eternal snows. Helovia never stops filling my heart with her beauty. All my life, I have lived here." She pauses to let her eyes run across the horizon, admiring the home which the Lord Time had provided them, remembering her brief adventures outside of the lands of Loorien; she did not lie. Helovia was by far the most beautiful province she had ever encountered, so full of magic and life that the scant natural wonders to behold outside of her proud borders seemed punitive in comparison. "I have left, of course, but I came home. No where in the world does the magic run so deep as it does here."

There was a river once,
with many round stones
enchanted by shallow hopes
of embracing the ocean;
water is peculiar this way,
how its life is a line
that cannot bend or change
without the approval of its bed.