The fact the other stallion is so smug he could well melt into a puddle of self-satisfaction is hardly even noticed by the mammoth colt, so piqued is his curiosity about the answer to his question. A people of dragons. The ruby-red dragon snorts his derision at this comment, before flaring his wings again and boosting off from the monolith's scarred back. He circles once before disappearing into the canopy, bored of the testosterone-fuelled conversation between the two young men. The shrill squeal of a flock of birds a short distance away tells Volterra what his bonded is doing, even without the thrill of the hunt that vibrates through their conjoined minds and into his very soul. He gives the smallest of grunts as his dragon's excitement becomes his own, welling up inside him with the urge to kill something. That's the downside of being mentally bonded to such a fierce and bloodthirsty creature - it is hard to find the dividing line between colt and carnivore. But Volterra erects mental walls around himself with the same precision he lifts his stone structures, and ensures his snippets of Vérzés' hunt are limited to images, rather than emotions.

These Qian seem mysterious, and would be of more interest to him if they weren't extinct. For Volterra not to have been told of them by his world-wise mother, they must be long since dead. The giant doesn't even know about the wall of glass, but he keeps that to himself. His only flicker of reaction is the idle twist of one ear, before the conversation moves on.

Your table is nice. The beast gives a small grunt of amusement, glad that his powerful and manly magic is also a useful household object. At the unicorn's question, his refined brow shifts slightly into a frown. Truthfully, he has no idea how long his magic can last. He likes to assume the hot-tub he made for Isopia is still standing tall and proud, an eternal sentinel in her little clearing, hard and strong inside her most private place - and doesn't the innuendo of that make the weight between his thighs throb with the sheer salacious thought? - but in reality he knows it could well have crumbled into dust by now. "Truthfully, I am not entirely sure. I always destroy the structure when it has served its purpose, like the one beneath the wolf, in order to conserve energy. I assume it would slowly begin to wear away the moment I stop controlling it." He thinks of his stone knife, crafted by Parelia; if magic isn't eternal, surely that would have crumbled to dust by now? What the beast doesn't know is that certain magics can outlast civilizations, but most cannot.