He stands quite disinterested in the ongoing events until Resplendence’s dragon hatches in the middle of Kaj and Kahlua’s meeting. It was all going as he expected, anyway; Kahlua was all laughter and sunshine and the others were as strange and foreign as they had always been, though he did recognize a face here and there and nodded his hellos when it was appropriate.

Even after a year in the land, he is still as uncomfortable as a baby bird in a pool of ice water among all these faces and voices.

A passing thought drifts across his mind when the pegasus known as Quilyan vows his life for those standing in the clearing with him, the young stallions pale blue eyes flashing towards him with a hesitancy to believe the words. Any of us? he thinks, but I do not know you.

Perhaps he has much further to go on his path of honor than he has once believed. A soft sigh escapes him at the thought, mind drifting back to the flow of voices and the progression of the minutes.

He lifts his eyes and ears to watch the birth of the hatchling with avid interest, however, all awkwardness forgotten in his excitement to witness the birth of something he has admired his whole life; its not that he hasn’t seen it before, just that it never seems to loose the wonder that accompanies it, the excitement of admiring whatever color it was born as.

This one is red, and quite fine. He smiles happily at the gardener for her new friend, though a pang of loneliness enters his heart that he too does not have one of his own. At least his parents can’t see him here, accomplishing nothing but stuffing quite a gruesome skeleton in his closet alongside a glimmering affection for a certain mare that he believed to be quite different than she truly was.

He feels an obligation to tell the gardener that she should find food for the hatchling, but he knows she has another companion already – surely she understands this. Instead, he’s left smiling stupidly at the cute lizard until Kahlua’s voice enters the subject of the crafters, a subject he finds interesting beyond belief (and not just because the Sunshower once worked the field herself), and later standing with his mouth slightly agape and an overwhelmed gleam to his eyes.

And I didn’t even bring her the palm leaves… he thinks, more sadly than he ever thought he would have when first approached about the task of exchanging a harness for treasures from the Throat. It had been the mare from the Grove that they’d gone to save… and they hadn’t done a very good job of it.

His soul was still black and there was no woman any longer to forgive him so that it might be clean.

Can’t she see it when she looks at me?

"Th-thank you," he finally manages to stammer, his head reeling and his heart aching in the wake of the stirred memory, only managing words because he figures others are looking at him and it is only proper to respond when such things as monumental career changes happen.