By the time he returned to the Edge after dealing with the wraiths on the tundra, everyone was gone.

He found everything unusually silent and creepy, the sound of rustling in the brush deeper in the forest cryptic and wrong. Whatever it was in there, it moved too quickly to be truly alive, too much like the flickering black mass that the painted stag that had challenged him had become. Looking around him, he noticed dark smears along the trunks of the nearby trees; raising his muzzle to scent at the bark tentatively, he recoils from the metallic tang of the blood that marks the silent sentinels of his home.

It took him no time at all to turn back around and make his exit. He knew when it was time to go so long as it was splattered all across the walls as it was now. Immediately after exiting the once secure confines of the glass wall, he discovered a serpentine pathway before him, worn into the leafy undercover of the wood, it would seem, by the hooves of his herd and few friends. The scent on the ground was faint and fading, letting him know he’d missed their departure by some hours, silently cursing himself for being such a curious and foolish idiot.

He hoped, with a fleeting beat of his heart, that Kahlua, Semira, and Mirage were safe, his large hooves beating silently as he could muster along the ghost path of his herd.


The Heart grew before him, his eyes falling upon the pyre in its red center with a curiosity that was not hidden from the clear blue depths of his gaze. Dragomir wonders why it is that they have come here, of all places, where there is not cover to be seen and only a vast, radiant fire that engulfs the sky in rippling heat. The path he has followed continues through the red dust that has chipped away from the fringes, many more branching in from the outer ring of the place toward one particular area.

A rift? he asks himself as he trots forward, sweat slaked upon his sides from his arduous and pressed journey here. He recalls his mother’s tale of travelling through such an expanse in a forest, arriving in the land of Isilme; while he isn’t particularly sure he wants to go back to where she was from or to anywhere else, he is interested in what it is his herd has vanished into.

A cave yawns in the middle of the red earth, and he is even more intrigued. Its slope is delicate on the side he has approached, leading downwards for a long way before it turns hard and continues into the earth, but the earth it is composed of is loose and treacherous gravel. Even more upsetting is the thought of any unfortunate soul who happened to not see the hole before he fell in – that would hurt like…

”I’m gonna die!”

His head shoots upwards and sends his eyes skittering across the horizon for the sight of anyone being assaulted by a demon, but there is no one he can see but his own shadow. Quickly sorting out that the sound had come from below him (it echoed back at him, you see), he leaps down the path with his head tucked low to avoid any concussions, soon finding himself churning his powerful limbs to stay on his hooves. The gravel beneath him skips and skitters, grinds and flees before his bulk, and its all he has to maintain vertical position and yell out to the hopefully terribly wounded stallion below, "Look out!"

All attempts of a chivalrous and proud arrival are tossed out the window as the pace of the stones slow and he is unceremoniously tossed into the opposing wall of the bend, not very far from where the unusual buckskin stood. "Ooumph," manages Dragomir as he hits the wall, where he remains leaning his right shoulder against the cool stone and takes several deep and well earned breaths as he takes status of the situation and feels the steady growth of a bruise rise in his tissue.

Instinct draws his eyes immediately to the problem; the man has quite a serious wound to his leg and more than enough dust in its sticky folds to make him taste a sweet and sour flavor on the back of his tongue as he looks at it. Tearing his eyes off the gruesome wound and to the stag’s face, he manages a soft smile and a gentle glimmer to his eyes, hoping he hadn’t pelted the poor guy with more rocks on his own foolish way down.

He had a long way to go with this saving people thing.

"You aren’t going to die, so long as we can find a healer," he painfully manages, taking a step forward on battered and bruised legs, favoring his front right more so than any of the others. "I’m Dragomir," he says, nodding a greeting to the really freaking weird looking stallion. He hasn’t really noticed it until now, but the man is rather squat and broad, even more so than his friend Ricochet was, and his myriad hued mane stood erect and short along the thick ridge of his neck.

He wore no horn, and no wings, however, and while Dragomir could not figure out what sort of hybrid he was (oh, poor intelligent boy he is), he was pleased enough with the fact that he wasn’t as wrong as many of the others he’d met. And, either way, his encounter with the undead unicorns had taught him much very quickly – there were things in the world more fearsome than his own failures and discomforts. He couldn’t dwell on himself with so much at stake.

"Can you walk?"



Dragomir</style>
where light shines, shadows will stretch</style>