’Dragomir!’ he hears, pulling his head quite suddenly towards the sound of the familiar and playful voice, berating himself for having looked away from her seemingly empty clearing in just enough time for her to arrive and spot him. He has paused as soon as his name hits him and discovers that perhaps he should not have, for the boundlessly playful queen of the Edge has invited him into a game.

It takes a split second watching her recede away from him, towards the region that the land had been named for (he could only assume, as it did very well appear to be the end of the world in the northern stretch of World’s Edge, a great stone face dropping directly down into an ocean that spanned out as far as his eyes could see), for the stallion to react. He is tired, surely, but the sight of his beautiful Kahlua loping so joyfully beneath the sunlight is too alluring a temptation to avoid; his dark lips quickly reach back to his shoulder to grab the harness gently between straight, white teeth, muscular limbs driving into motion with a playful buck that sends him sprinting at full speed to close the gap that has already grown between them.

For a moment, he is but a boy again, with no worries and no life to shape, only an island to explore and dragons to share the wonder of his innocence with. But this is not an island, not really, anyway, no matter how much of an island of peace and fortitude it had been to him during his stay here, and instead of dragons pulling him along with a heart bursting outwards with enthusiasm, it is a black and white mare, gleaming and pristine. He loves her, like he loved his wild hearted friends, the nameless wyverns who had shared the hours of his youth, and it is that love that so quickly has him discarding his stoic exterior to frolic and play in the meadows of his home.

Had it become this? On what day, in which hour had he ceased to find home where his father was, and instead where his heart took each heavy beat?

When… when had he come to feel this way about her?

He feels the smooth pressure of the beads press against his tongue as he chases her, heart exploding with a thousand tiny bursts that propel his frame through the tree line and out into the flower dappled field overlooking the sea.

She waits for him there, his anxiety forgotten in the chase, the gleaming glass treasure dangling from his lips as he arrives smiling and alive from the brief run, his heart pounding in exhilaration rather than fear, for once. There is something about her that is captured so perfectly in this scene that he will replay many times in his life, the jovial rippling of her mane and tail behind her perfect body in playful flight, the way she stands as if the first breath of a meaningful laugh given a physical form with the sun shining above her. The sea is a whisper, a sounding of notes that rhyme with the name of her heart, and he is breathless and charmed as he comes to a halt alongside her.

Gently, he lowers her present to the ground between them, pausing to look into her face for a moment before he finds the words he’d searched so hard for while wandering in the woods, words that came so easily now that they stood here, overlooking the endless possibilities of the sea. "I made this for you," he says, a faint and brief flash of worry crossing his blue eyes that she will dislike the gift he worked so hard on, words wispy with his deeply drawn breath, "to say thank you, for all you have done for me."

Even if I cannot tell you how much it truly is, he thinks, smiling at her with a burning hope in his heart that she will find it as pretty as he’d hoped she would while making it. He owes her much more than this material object; she has given him a reason to be better than he thought he might have been, unconsciously driven him forward in life where he might have given up or fallen into dark places. Sure, she was not alone in the tethers that had pulled him, but he always returned to her smiling face when he thought of those that would make Helovia hard to leave behind.