She’s lying, he thinks to himself after she finally responds to him, her features most immediately returning to the grass as he asks her if all is well. He won’t press it; he himself knows how it is to feel miserly, and that the last thing on the mind of those in emotional turmoil is to discuss the decibel levels of their inner waves. She is young, and so that leaves him with an excess of wonderment as to why such a youthful creature is so full of sorrow on such a fine afternoon, but he simply looks at her with his soft blue eyes, letting her think she has fooled him.

”The sun is bright today,” she says, and he smiles warmly in response, trying to meet her eyes with his own though he still feels a slight recoiling of his soul as he spies the horn and the shadow of her wings behind her. It is the least he can do, truly, to be an wall to lean on, even if the creature he seeks to aide is unworthy of his time or efforts. Its not as if he will ever seek to possess the gold and black mare as one of his women, for she is not properly gened for such things, or that he owes her his friendship for sharing the herd land with him, as she was not of the Edge.

It was a warm shawl to wrap his cold soul in, to stand and provide help wherever he saw it was needed. It was a way for him to recompense for the wrongs he had committed upon Shadow, the dark lies that wormed through his heart about what made a great man over just an ordinary one. He wanted to be great. He truly did.

"It is spring," he says, an equally useless tidbit to the conversation, taking the time after his words to search her wings for missing pinions where he believed the feather he possessed and the others he had helped the wraith with to have come. Sure enough, there are gaps in her gleaming plumes, and he pauses to pivot his head around to his tail, grasping the feather and ripping the strands that hold it in place from their beds.

It stings, but he hopes that the pain will end there; surely, he is not wrong in assuming that this is hers.

"Dis is yours," he says, dropping the feather before her and atop his collection of flowers and stepping back a pace, "I got it from a wraith, after I figured the feathers belonged to you." He wonders what use it will be other than to ease the weight of his worries that he shouldn’t have it; he’s pretty sure that pegasi cannot simply stick a pulled feather back into the hole it had come from and everything be fine, but he’s also not entirely positive that this is the case, either. If nothing else, perhaps it would bring some cheer back to her face, to know that she had been remembered and thought of, even worried over for a time.

"I’m glad you’re not dead," he adds as an afterthought, unsure why he had felt the need to say them or why they have left him feeling awkward and half nude in front of the girl, pale gaze flitting away from her to watch the grass tumble beneath the gentle kiss of the wind. It was true, though; he had worried that something horrible had befallen the gold and ebony child, that her surly friend would boundlessly be punched in the jaw at the threshold of other lands for her snappy mouth without Ranjiri around to assure she didn’t get herself in too much trouble with her words.

The boy is odd, in such ways; he finds great value in such friendships, and he wishes he had more of his own on days he is not hiding from the myriad faces of Helovia.

@[Ranjiri]

Dragomir