She was quiet all the way home, which was fine by the equally stoic stallion who escorted her – he spent most of his time in silence, and so was comfortable with it, even when his company was normally one who seemed to almost shun the notion of quietly existing. Steadily his large hooves plod into the soggy ground, his ears listening to the soft song of the wind and the rain, pale eyes occasionally glancing over at his beautiful Ranjiri, disliking the strange moroseness on her usually smiling face.

Ranjiri was very brave, Dragomir had decided some time ago, even before she had shown up baring marks of battle and disease to greet him on his return. No matter how dark the realm of Helovia grew, no matter how bleakly dim hope lay on the horizon, she always seemed to be able to find the will to carry on. As he walked alongside her, replaying what he had learned while standing in the drizzle in the Threshold, determining, after much of the walk was through, his thoughts and memories categorized and neatly filed away, that he would not mourn the severed ties to his past.

How could he? So many he knew in this land had survived worse than their friends moving to another herd land, even if it had been at the cost of every ideal he had thought they’d held above all things. That he can no longer trust fully in the golden light of those he had lived his first, adult years with, is a notion that he still finds bitter, outside of his preferred flavors, but his resolve that it cannot be changed, that it can only be accepted, grows with each step to the south.

Surely it was much harder to accept that the strong, concrete figures in your life were now only ghosts.

The painted stag does not ask her for the story of their kin, does not wish to see her cry or watch the pain relived in her crimson eyes, not even when the sea appears in the horizon, an unbroken steely line. He accepts what little she has said and lets it slip away with the rest of his dark thoughts, trying his best to be in good spirits when she at last turns to him, explanations on her lips.

That there had once been a bridge is news to him; he’d never been so far south as the Throat, and had only the slightest of notions that there was a herd land in the region (gathered from herd meetings and conversations with those who lived there). As she describes it, however, he narrows his eyes and peers across the wind tossed ocean, seeing in the distance that there is, indeed, an isle out there.

The notion makes his heart flutter faster, memories of the island of his youth coming to mind – yet the sweet memories are quickly dashed away by the thought that someone, this Gaucho, had blasted the stretch of land binding it to the shore away. Wide, his blue eyes move away from the shore and back to his friend.

"He won’t mind I’m here?" he asks – not truly willing to incite anger from a guy who can blast such a vast stretch of land into smithereens. The name, one that is surely famous throughout Helovia for his deeds (the same man having been brought up in the Threshold), is unknown to him, and the stallion is ever wary of strangers since his encounter, long ago, in a willow grove.

However, the idea of a magic bridge, and keys which activate it, is interesting enough to make whatever wariness he has about pissing someone off slip away into the back of his thoughts; the worry that had lighted in his pale gaze is now replaced with a curious interest, the fervent glow of discovery soon leaking out onto his usually unresponsive features.

"How does it work?" the intrigued stallion asks, looking to his friend with hope that she might have some idea as to its mechanisms.

[ OOC: Yeah I'm not excited or anything. xD ]