His days were spent alone, as they had been mostly since he had come to the Edge. It wasn’t for a lack of liking those he lived with – they were good, and good to him as well, and he even found within his quiet heart that he would be quite sad to leave them all behind if he ever had to. When he had first come here, he hadn’t expected to find much of anything; he was, after all, the son of a man who had done much to defy the laws that Kahlua and the Dragon Queen had set in place, and he had been raised by that man alone and with little outside influence to the wickedness that the cruel Gods of Isilme had implanted into his heart.

They had to be ruthless, Neique and Cinnoru and Sepagus, their three blessed children, because when he compared the law of these powerful beings to the magic he had seen born from the Gods in Helovia, he found that they were selfish and without mercy. Founded on a distrust of one another, fueled by the natural tendencies of living things to be unkind, and perpetuated even now in some minds who had escaped the fall of that kingdom; Ricochet had been one, as had his sire, even his sweet mother had held reservations upon spying a pegasus for having been captured by them early in her days among the equines of the valley.

And he supposed their were cultures elsewhere that taught each species to hate, to cling and hold fast to ideals that were, in truth, rusted; he had experienced the thrill of dominance his sire had always discussed with him, and it had ended in this silence, this dusty skeleton in his closet and a little boy with a broken heart out there in the real world somewhere.

He hadn’t liked it one bit at all – and maybe he might have, once, if he hadn’t have met Mirage and the people who she found and gave haven to in her years. The Qian, their laws of peace and knowledge, had spared him a dark path, a bloodied soul, and he would always be grateful to the wood, the woman, and the Goddess who had salvaged him.

This gratefulness is what keeps him from quietly meandering away when a yearling filly appears in his view as he walks out towards the wall from his cozy clearing and collection of stuff (oh so many things, you see). Most days he abruptly but with little noise as possible adjusts his path to avoid people just standing alone in the Edge, and he nearly flees when he stumbles upon a group, but something about the sorrowful way her white flecked shoulders and slumped down and the mirrored expression on her little fox’s face makes him stop rather than turn away.

He’s never seen her before, he doesn’t think. It isn’t really an uncommon occurrence. Even if he had seen her, it had likely only been for a few fleeting moments in his peripheral vision and that just wasn’t long enough to give identities to his herd mates. Meetings were always nice – but she was young and surely hadn’t been born for the last one to be held on the Edge’s soil.

He glances down at his pendant happily, the indigo stone pretty. He’d gotten it in the Caela, from Kahlua, and while he mostly tried to ignore how he felt about her, all the emotions were still right there beneath the surface… he just never really thought about her that way anymore, and it had done wonders for his mood and work ethic.

A cheerful nicker of greeting preludes his voice – its rather deep and can be loud at random because he’s not the most… talkative of men in the forest. Disuse can make the vocal chords do some odd things. "Are you two okay?" he asks, deciding on a good, open ended question that gave her plenty of room to answer. What was wrong with a yearling could be any number of things (he’d been one not so long ago), anything from being lost to being emotionally lost, and every thing in between. Add in that she was a girl, and well…

Dragomir just thought it was best to let her answer.

@[Merida]


Dragomir</style>
where light shines, shadows will stretch</style>

He has surprised her, which in turn surprises him.

His ears perk forwards in a sudden motion and his head shoots upwards, nostrils curving deeply in the swift inhalation of breath that accompanies the sudden motion of the little one and her bonded. The little fox scrabbles for purchase in the swift transition of her positioning, and what shock had coursed through the anxious stallion’s heart was quickly swallowed in the warm smile that rises that the mildly perturbation that crosses the kitsune’s face and the surprise that lingers on the childish (and sad) face of the girl.

Her answer comes pretty quickly, and it’s short and to the point. He meets the eyes of the fox who clambers up between her ears, his gaze seemingly more in control of the situation than his youthful friend, and while he knows not what the animal is called or the nature of his species, Dragomir does know that the companions kept by the four legged masters of the earth were often intelligent and full of wisdom that was lacking in the souls of those they kept company with. His mother’s dragon, for one, had been full of much deeper thought than his sweet dam, his warrior’s soul overriding her naivety, her innocent perspective of the world around her.

He at one point in his life had been entirely unable to discern what people were feeling based off of their body language – he’d had too little exposure to others in his early life and had suffered some in reading what small signs meant – but he could now take note of the low ride of her shoulders and the way her eyes were dull where the eyes of other children sparkled and glimmered in their youth, and so he cannot help but transpose himself somewhere in the mix of her day and to take her lie as what it is.

She’s not fine, but whatever. She can say she isn’t and deal with it on her own if that is the path she wants to take, and he can be here for now to bring a smile to her face for a while before she goes back to her sadness. She already lived in the Edge, obviously, so he couldn’t offer her consolation and potential friends in the border as he had Cirrus, but he did have at his disposal himself.

As little as that might count for.

"That’s good," he says, looking at her for a while with his soft and perhaps dopey smile lingering on his mouth before he lets his blue eyes run over the fox thing again, "say, what kind of animal is that? He isn’t a normal fox at all."



Dragomir</style>
where light shines, shadows will stretch</style>