Look, Ka’Ora, comes the serpent’s thoughts, his command, See how small this female is. I do not like small. The eagle takes note of her master’s preference of flesh; she is dutiful, obedient, in tender love with the Grey-Scale’d. She baffles him endlessly with her gentleness, a gracious soul so eagerly bonded to the desolation that is his existence. He’s only just come to stop questioning the fate of it.

Now, he gazes down on a mare who seems ready to run at any moment. It amuses him, tickles him and strokes him in many ways how he strikes fear just by standing; how he inspires panic just by being. The hardness of his eyes only come from their color; his voice has remained stripped of evil intentions and a furious tongue; he has been neutral, and it frightens.

He looks into pale eyes that adorn her petite face. At least her head is not misshapen with the ugly dished slope he has seen before in many females. He forgives her ugly pelt, her infuriating smallness. She is woman. It is sufficient.

“I scare you?” he asks quietly, tongue laced with a velveteen chuckle, “Are you so lonely that a stranger’s shadow gives you pause? Have you no friends to watch out for your safety..?” His snort is soft; a cloud of vapor wafts around his muzzle, a dragon of ice and snow. “No matter…I am Reginald, if my name will put you at ease.”

The world around him is frozen in an abominable way. He cannot stand the frozen wind, the icy shadows, the thick blocks of ice that serve as barriers between him and life-giving water. He wonders, briefly, is this cunt will be worth the cold. “How did you come to wander this forest, Miss…?” his voice trails, expecting, demanding, her name, her title.


@[Anzanie]

”Watch for Circe.”

Talk is easy, he teaches Ka’Ora, perched as she from far above; her eyes are brown and tender as she watches the skittering of the female below, and behind her eyes there throbs a deep, knowing melancholy, for she knows what lurks behind her master’s face; it is a thing that makes her heart weary and sad so soon in her life. She weathers it—endures it—embraces it, for these vices serve to build the image of her master within his stony mold, and she cannot help her love for him.

Talk is easy; it comes easy from his black lips, grey eyes set dazzling and amused in the deep facets of his face. He looks down upon the female--Anzanie--and keeps the scoff of her name from his face. He is interested. “I belong to no herd,” he says, and grey eyes cast over the frozen pond, contemplating the frost that licks the waves into a solid whole, “I was raised by my mother, in the meadows…she first brought me here as a foal, to learn the ways of her warrior heart.” It does not pain him to speak of mother, not anymore; her name and image flow from his mouth almost thoughtlessly, and his heart barely bucks with it anymore.

“…however,” he decides to pour insignificant things to her, because talk is easy, and it soothes, “I’ve resided in the Dragon’s Throat for some time, to care for my sister there before she travels to her father’s side…and I’ve grown fond of the desert, there. I plan to offer myself and my services to the Throat, if they should have me.” His heart had indeed settled firmly in the fire pits of the south, and it soars and aches and longs for the summer heat to burn his back once more.

*"How did you come to find yourself in the forest?"*

He smiles at her, careless and simple, taking note of the false steel creeping into her voice. It must be false—she has grown no bigger. “I love the Throat,” he says simply, and his voice is ever soft, a cultivated whisper since the days of his boyhood, “but sometimes I love my solitude more. I come here to remember my mother, when things are quiet….”

The voice trails; the eyes go back to contemplating the frosted glass of a frozen pond. “Tell me, Anzanie,” he says the name, caressing its nasty commonness with a forked, sultry tongue, “do you have any family that you like to think of often?”

”Watch for Circe.”

*"And did you... learn the ways of a warrior?"*

His reply is a calm one—sure in his bearing, for he’s not the mouse who squeals in the shadows. “Yes,” he breathes, memories of mother suffusing his sight for moments, images of her on this very shore, teaching them how to move with grace on the battlefield. He sighs, and his chest rumbles with stone. “But I have never been tried in a war.” Wars are for groups and societies, and he has ever belonged to the wilderness, where your very life is a war from the moment you breath with brittle lungs.

Her questions become many and her voice trails from her maw more and more, to the point where she has become tedious; he abides by her, and keep his sights set on her tail. “I would be a warrior for them,” he says—then, smiling lightly, she asks about his sister and his breast warms at her thought once again. “I do. Her name is Macaria and she will be a yearling when the winter thaws…she is my youngest sibling.” He pauses and the snow is cold against his fetlocks, the wind brutal on his back. “Our mother died just after giving her birth,” he says, the words falling frankly from his mouth. A mystery solved for the vexing little mare, even before the question was uttered.

She continues with the thread of thoughts he has planted within her, speaking of things he truly does not quite care about—although he welcomes the ease of her voice and the tension that had drawn her spine taut. It is soft flesh he aches for. “They probably think of you too, you know,” he says, and his voice has become lower, quieter, something husky rumbling just there behind his tongue, “Of their lost sister and daughter. Perhaps you will find family in the Edge that will come to love you in the same way…”

He shifts his weight in the snow; he shakes his mane, and his dark tail curls idly behind him. Ka’Ora watches; she is ever an attentive acolyte. “Aren’t you cold, Anzanie?” he asks her, and the curve of his voice is a warm one, even if there is still a trace of a husky thing that clings to his throat. Ka’Ora can see the fangs for what they are as they begin to emerge from her master’s teeth; and so, she watches her master hunt.

”Watch for Circe.”