I watch the same vibrant curiosity which has flooded her green eyes time and time again come to life as she looks out upon my home, her eyes wandering from the bronze behemoths to the dapples of color with enliven the emerald meadow, the ring of old pine forest which meshes it all against the grey stone walls of the mountain. When I’d described it to the Priestesses of the Nightwalk, they had said it was surely, at one point, an active volcano, long since sent to sleep by the touch of a God.

I am more of the thought that the Time Lord built it this way, for us. Never has such a lovely, chilled haven been a place of fire and destruction.

With the sound of her gentle sigh and stilled hoof beats alongside me, I am pulled from my thoughts of the beautiful women, young and old, who watched the Starwaters so far from this place.

Her words draw a smile to my lips, because I agree full heartedly; in my youth, Erebos, Aithniel, and I (sometimes Adelric, when he had ventured into our lives) had often travelled the wilderness of Helovia. I’d been just about everywhere, and no places were as wonderful as those to be found in the north; the water walker hadn’t even got to see the blue arches in the Steppe, yet.

"I was," I say with a smile, a bright one that tries to hide the sadness ignited by the inquiry (poorly, I might add), not wanting to get into who all I am supposed to be related to here (which is no one, unless one counts Erebos through the bonds of long since forged friendship), "though the winters can be rough, Birdsong always makes up for it."

Parroted, from the lips of my elders – I have only seen two winters in Helovia and barely a month of them each, though the one I returned to this year was indeed terrible. I had nearly been unable to wedge myself through the stone slit hidden in the mountain face, so packed with ice and snow had it been, and if I had come a single night later, I’d have found it all locked tight with the fierce blizzard that had come the evening of my return.

But the snow had melted, and the entire Basin was alive with the nourishment the melting snow had given.

Her next inquiry makes me turn to her with a cheeky smile, an impish light sparkling in the depths of my gilded gaze; I am a prince of this land. Let any of the three Lordships tell me I can’t walk a lady where I want.

"Oh, they won’t mind," I say, my right hoof rising playfully and my lion’s tail curling behind me in wicked delight, taking a single prancing step inward, "besides, we’ll probably run into one of them on our way through."

[ OOC: Needs a leader type fellow/lady ~ ]