I’m sulking quite thoroughly when a friendly, female voice lifts my eyes from the griffon at my hooves who playfully swats my own when it arcs by her in our game we’ve been playing since momma left us. Kyst can’t talk, but that hasn’t stopped me from talking to her and taking in her blinks and stares as replies to my words; that someone is here who can actually respond to me is a delightful turn of events and I greet her with a smile though I don’t know her name or recognize her from any of momma’s personal conversations. She had been at the herd meeting, I knew that much, and so I instantly put faith that a friend rather than a foe approached me, my lion’s tail curling about my side and knocking the griffon in the head in passing on accident.

The cat creature hisses a noise of displeasure and sinks her claws into my leg.

"Ouch!" I nearly shout in surprise, face surly and the urge to kick the creature restrained by two things: one, momma would surely beat the daylights out of me, and two, this woman didn’t need to think I was a barbaric child who kicked young companions that were not mine. Thankfully for both of us, something distracts Kyst over in the nearby trees and she prowls closer to it and further away from me – allowing me to turn my attentions more fully on the grey and snow toned mare who approaches.

She says her name is Tangere and that she knows who I am already, drawing my eyes wide with surprise that my name is known to those I have never met or shared it with, my smile bright in the realization that I was not even a year old and already had a blooming reputation. She laughs, her tail swishing through the air with audible wooshes of noise and dispersed air, and I almost return the sound, so easy and light is her own delight.

"Everyone knows me," I say regally, my slender neck arching, though I know its not true; I hope my ability to cover the lie is good enough to disguise it from her. I couldn’t think of anything better to say in response as she’d taken the natural reply for first meetings – my name – and used it already.

She looks around her as if she wants to find something, turning her eyes back to me once she finds nothing and speaking, once again, with the light quirks of humor to her tones. An ear falls back at the initial mention of momma, wondering if she doesn’t really want to talk to me at all and is just here looking for my dam, but I think – key word being think, of course – that she mostly means it as a jibe towards the fact that I was mostly alone, but for Kyst.

I look over my shoulder at the griffon tucked low in the grass, her banded tail swaying behind her neatly folded wing tips and her eyes trained on something in the trees, then back to Tangere with a slight wonder as to what the stupid cat creature is staring at. "She went to ask others what this place is," I explain, now looking out towards the direction she’d departed from with a faltering expression that says I don’t really know where she is (suddenly scary now that I have actively thought of it – what if she didn’t come home? What if Tangere decided to eat me?), "been gone about a half hour or so. I don’t think she’ll be gone long. The island didn’t look too very big from down on the ground…"

It’s more me trying to ease my worries than anything else, and I realize as much as my words trail off and I refocus my young eyes on the mare before me. "How do you know her?" I ask, smiling wryly as I realize she knows her because she is her Lady – and further clarify, "you act like she’s closer to you than just your leader. Are you a soldier, too?" I remember that mother had told me she was once a soldier and then a corporal of the Basin and the Plague, working her way up alongside my nefarious Aunt Psyche until she had earned her current place. It only made sense to begin there, in the past of my dam, to find where she might know this woman – but its also possible that their relationship is newer than that, and that I have just given away things about my mother she may not have wanted her to know. I don’t see why it would really matter, other than maybe mom’s insane need to be better than everyone all the time, and so I feel little guilt over the matter – mostly just shame, because I’d failed to thoroughly think through my words before speaking them, something that would definitely have earned me a hard stare and smack from the woman who was teaching me to use my tongue as a weapon.