The season’s heat had brought other warm things into motion, estrus blooming from the mare in invisible, undulating waves that made her all the more delectable than she was even on normal days. The morning had been easy and simple, begun with a bath in the hot springs that left her coat glistening and pristine, her dark hair damp and heavy against her neck as she ventures out of her cave post grooming the knots out of her extensive tail and what remained whole of her mane.

Battle and training took a wear on one’s luscious locks, she had learned; but the bits that had been shorn by the weapons of the Reaper now lay flat with the rest of her mane, albeit short, and her forelock was steadily recovering from her mishaps with the electrical current she was still learning to completely control. It was the cost of power, she figured, to lose ones beauty in exchange, and, either way, it had damaged very little of her that was truly inspiring to poets and painters; her figure remained perfect, long limbed and muscular, a sculpted and lean temptress with broad haunches and a deep chest, golden frame glittering in the late morning light.

Her tail is raised, a banner of conquest to tempt the loitering stags about her home, though she feels little threat even among the barbarians of the mountain; secure in her position, convinced that all will be well for her among her kin, at least for now, and even more trusting her in own abilities, she is quick fearless in this time of natural weakness, a week in which she would susceptible to the softer songs of her heart and the robust vibrancy in souls of the men around her.

And the men would flock. They generally did, anyway, if she bothered to remain around the herd during this delicate, feminine time, and this time… she could be bothered.

She had her eyes set on a certain someone, a stallion who had done more for her in the past months than he needed to, even if she was his Lady. Each time she had called his name, there he had been, a dark beast with wild eyes, his coat so fittingly suited to match alongside her own, both marked in metal as they were. Even if she could not have him this season, she would give him much to think about over the next year of waiting for her to come back around again.

Much more than just a jilted and rather confused mistress watching an awkward genius fleeing her personal quarters, or tall bronze statues to guard their home; she would leave his poor, helpless male mind spinning.

It would be fun, truly; her smile tells everything the world needs to know of how much she looks forward to this game, one she’d refrained from participating in for many years. She had never felt comfortable enough her home, or her skin; she had never had anything to truly back her, aside from the Empress, and one friend was no reason to go about procreating.

Now, she had a kingdom, a mountain brimming with elegant people and powerful magic, a herd to back her should the world come crashing down around her as it had so many times in her life. It was the time for the dreams of a girl to finally die within her; it was time for her to grow, and become wise in ways that only mothers were.

Sweeping to the fore of the herd land at a quick and effortless canter, she lets her scent trail behind her from beneath a lofty, dark tail, journeying to where he always is, working on the sentinel statues or simply staring at them, dreaming whatever dreams men such as himself could have. But, when she arrives, he is gone.

She stands alongside the functional, bronze steed and pouts, depressed at her dismal luck. Of all the times to arrive, she picked the first time in over a month that he had moved from the gateway for any reason other than he had been summoned away by his superiors.

I will die a virgin, she mourns, her face a mask of angst and frustration.

@[Ulrik]

When he arrives, the Lady stands stunned and awed by the rare vision that has returned to plot and ponder on his massive, bronze children. He is clean, something that Illynx has yet to see fitted over his muscles, and the way his black body gleams beneath the sun and the dark locks of his sway in the breeze, she’s caught quite off guard – but pleasantly so. A momentary gleam of hot aggravation floats across her surface thoughts as he asks if she had been looking for him; of course I am! she wants to spat at him, why else stand here between a behemoth and the rest of the world? But the sight of his handsome figure there, glistening with the waters of the mountain, leaves her wordless and staring with bright, golden eyes, stirs the emotions already brewing within her seasonally tainted heart into a frothing tizzy that she finds hard to overcome.

"Perhaps," even, slow, desirous. She plays the game too, arching her neck and holding her body just so, allowing her muscles all to be revealed beneath the perfection of her pelt, the few scars she holds white and honorable against the darker colorings of her frame.

She tilts her head, silently taking a quarter circles amount of paces around his figure, admiring the work the water had done to reveal his sinew beneath the layers of old, mottled hair and dirt. Always one to have figured this lay below the grime (she had pressed into him once before, hadn’t she?), she drank in the sights that had previously only existed within herself, each sip dark and luscious as she swallows in the man she has chosen for her own, at least for this moment in time.

Maybe it is why her God loves her so, and helped her appear stronger in the face of her kin, that she lives so freely on the wakes of his bidding. Each day brings something new for our Lady in gold, though many things about her stay the same; she cannot forget what has happened in the past, but she can change what becomes of her future.

She is not entirely without hope, or she would not be here, approaching and slipping past the Engineer after getting a sufficient eyeful of his good looks, close enough that she hopes her body brushes against his and successfully might lure him into following her into the woods. "Come with me," she states, though it could pass as an inquiry; her heart beats hard against her ribs, pushes her blood through her veins at an accelerated pace. Is it poor tact of her to pretend to be a temptress when all she had ever done was tease? Still, she’s seen it played from afar, she knows how to utilize her body during this time to get what she wants, and she is not the sort to feign ignorance just because she hadn’t ever actively participated in the spring time mayhem.

Hopefully leading him into the trees with her and towards a cave she’d selected many years ago for such purposes, she keeps her dark banner lifted and cast aside, a trail that even socially inept men such as Ulrik cannot help but follow, as she has seen it play out; surely, there were a few paired stallions that could resist the temptation of a mare in season, so long as that mare was not his own, but as she knew, Ulrik was a bachelor – one that she was relatively sure would not refuse her offer.

Pausing outside the entrance to the cavern, she gazes deep into its dark mouth before returning her eyes to the master of metals, her sweet expression adorned with a smile and soft, supple body language. "You clean up well, Sir Ulrik," she says, purring his name and tasting it for perhaps the last time before…

Before what? Love?

I don’t love him, acidic the hisses of her thoughts, rebuking such weakness even as she feels her heart tremble, an infant leaf caught in warm spring wind.

@[Ulrik]

Hngh, says her always charming Engineer, and she giggles most abruptly, ears falling to either side of her head in an awkward, equine blush, watching with avid eyes the movement of his sinew beneath the sleek darkness of his pelt. She breathes deeply as he steps closer to her, the smell of his wild spirit still clinging to the freshly scrubbed skin, lingering in the resilient knots too long lived to have given up on their life’s work reborn in the moments it has taken him to be here, with her; there is the smell of snow, sweet, blessed snow, and the gentle kiss of cold wind rustling the evergreen boughs above.

Her skin clenches into itself, a billion pricks of flesh puckering up and sending chills that evoke the most primal feeling of desire through her, the way his bronze eyes burn fiercely from behind his dark hair and pierce through to the deepest part of her being. The seconds it takes him to near her side and graze his teeth along her flesh is a century of watching the light play across his body, the frenzying pace of her heart with each slow motion drum of hooves on the earth.

It is her turn to follow him mindlessly, the darkness covering her as they slip into the folds of the cavern, a black veil for a wicked innocence that fades, one trembling heart beat after another, into nothingness; the last tender part of herself forfeited at last to the flow of time and the rough touches of a worthy partner.