A little fawn like creature approaches, and Dragomir looks over to him with a flicker of recognition crossing his face; the meeting during the darkness, a search for a mare who had gone missing that had never come to fruition. He knows the boy to be Shadow’s son, and his reservations on talking to the odd hybrid colt is writ all across his face as he stares at the approach of the child and remembers that he still has a harness made by Kahlua sitting at home, waiting to be given to the boy. Its probably the only reason he doesn’t turn around and move away when he takes notice of the colt taking notice of him, and while he is unhappy about the sway of fate, he is loyal to his responsibilities – at least to a point.

He didn’t go out of his way to make himself grossly uncomfortable. The world did all that work for him.

Trying to stuff his guilt behind the clear blue of his eyes, Dragomir meets the features of the kid as he stops in front of him and asks what that is. The stallion is momentarily confused, having been so distracted by the distressful arrival of the son of Shadow that he had forgotten he was holding something in his mouth, and he almost looks behind him in curiosity as to what it is, too, until he feels the twine against his tongue.

A silent curse crosses his thoughts, and he takes a deep breath to settle his nerves. He can’t go around looking like a dumb ass to members of oppositional herds, not when he was as unsure of the political standings of the herd he lived in as he was of most of their names. He drops the trinket at his hooves (actually remembering to wait to speak until he’d dropped what was in his mouth for once), the glass thumping softly into a bed of grass and glittering in the sunlight. "It’s a totem of sorts, for the Earth God," his deep voice explains, "I was taking it to the shrines when a cloud brought me here." He looks around him and manages a barely there smile (almost more of a grimace) and then returns his eyes to the boy.

"Kari, right?" he asks, a watery ripple grazing his eyes in guilty remembrance and the half truth he is about to tell, "I knew your mom, and you and I met in the caves once."

@[Kari]

He’s glad to know he’s not the only one who was carted upwards by a puffy bit of condensation against his will, smiling now that the terror he’d experienced in the first few moments of the ride up was well behind him and the child before him seemed whole and unscathed having gone through the same ordeal. He’d doubted that the clouds were malicious as soon as he’d seen the floating land it had brought him to, but one could never be too sure; he remembered Vihar telling him that sometimes, the most beautiful things could be the most dangerous.

With a slight tightening of his chest he watches the boy prod at his gift, restraining his urge to step forward and swat the child away with his nose. Surely only a cruel and wicked child would break something that had just been proclaimed a self made offering to a God, and while he wonders as to how well the child of Shadow has fared since the darkness, he does not believe it was so bad as to sour his heart in such a way.

He keeps talking at the ground even though his words are aimed at Dragomir, and the stallion flickers an ear back in reservation at the odd way of addressing someone else. He could imagine how such a display would go in front of his father – it had happened a few times to Dragomir, himself, and its what keeps him from shouting about how its rude to not look at someone when you are speaking to them. The realization that the colt might be shy and uncomfortable making eye contact with someone he’d just met trilled through him with a stunning amount of discomfort and kinship all blended into one weird cocktail.

It was nice to meet yet another quiet soul when he lived among such vibrant and verbal people – but that it was the hybrid child of a woman he’d nearly killed (while she’d been pregnant with the boy, no less!) was a notion engrained with guilt and took much of the delight away that he’d felt when meeting Cheveyo, or Resplendence.

"It does, doesn’t it?" his deep voice rolls forth, the normally rich tones flat with the memories, needs, and instincts that reach at him. He still manages to smile and meet the boy’s eyes as the little fawn’s nose bobs up and down.

The conversation keeps his mood relatively dismal despite the cheerful colt’s presence and the effects such a cherub normally has on kind hearted folk; its that same dismal mood and his usual poor ability to decipher what people actually mean from what they say that let Kari’s lie slip by. Its better for Dragomir if he remembered, anyway – offering to help Shadow had made him a noble man of sorts and he preferred the child knew him as that person rather than the one he could be.

He’s out in his thoughts again in the brief time it takes the colt to slip alongside him in the most amiable of ways, his chipper voice striking Dragomir from his thoughts with a sudden swoop back into reality – where he finds Kari alongside him where he had not been before.

A surprised expression sweeps his face and he nearly jolts upwards from the shock, but he would like to think the twitch is quickly replaced by a smile that begrudgingly welcomes the boy’s presence.

He owes him as much, anyway – and besides, he still has that harness back home, hanging from one of his trees. Shadow and her kid had been put aside for happier things, even if it meant he’d failed Kahlua in the process.

Dropping down to grab the amulet, he quickly loops the tethers in the strands of his mane and looks out in the direction he’d been traveling in before Kari had stopped him. "I guess to see what all is on this island," he says, smiling as happily as he can manage with his head chock full of his hidden and dusty skeletons clattering away and laughing with their fleshless jaws over the sound of his large, multitoned hooves as he begins to walk out on the exploration he spoke of, "I wonder where it came from. It wasn’t here when I first came upon the shrines, that’s for sure."

The boy is quiet, which Dragomir supposes is normal for a child who has no mother and must rely on the herd and kin around him to limp by; its not like he has any experience in such matters, having been one of three on an island that had been everything a boy could want in a birthland. His family had always been near, and was still there if he ever grew tired of Helovia and the friendships he had made there, if ever his soul was too weary to continue on the path that he had already set out upon. Kari didn’t have this option so openly available, and as the young stallion retrieves his gift from the grass and hears the faintly mumbled oh that falls from the colt’s mouth, he ponders precisely what sort of being such a childhood would bring to life.

But strange things come to pass as they begin their walk, normal at first as the youth elaborates on what he knows of the island; it’s been here a few days, and he nods that he has heard while his pale blue eyes roam freely about them. It makes sense that he knows of the isle before the Glazier, as even beneath the lustrous smell of the cherry blooms that drift lazily through the air and settle on the grasses like strange, pink birds, he can smell the sand on the boy’s body and figures that means he belongs to the Throat. He knows very little of that place other than that his Queen and King had decided to offer friendship to them, and that it is a desert south of the Heart, but its enough to allow him to decide that it was from their oasis in the heart of those sands that the people of the Throat had first seen the floating construct in the heavens.

Perhaps they had been the first to come.

These thoughts among others trail through the quiet crafter’s thoughts as their shoulders touch; it is only the smallest of embraces, barely noticed by the stallion who instead takes note of the way that Kari suddenly stops, his small limbs splaying and his eyes misty and rolling.

Dragomir balks, a few steps taken away from the strange sight, his smile flashing to fear evolving into worry in only a matter of moments. He takes a hesitant step forward and extends a dark muzzle to hover fretfully around the shuddering boy, not really too eager to touch him again or at all, for that matter, but worried none the less. After a few seconds that feels like eternity to the easily flustered and quiet man, it seems that Kari is again cognizant, but hushed – and he refuses to look at the sabino spattered glass worker for a long while (perhaps only minutes, but Dragomir is a strange bloke).

His trinket falls to the grass with a soft thud.

"What under Nieque’s hooves was that?" he blurts, his forgotten fear resurfacing now that its becoming more apparent that Kari is not going to die.

@[Kari]