Fire and other magical elements rage about them, forcing the more narrow strands of his dark hair to drift in the super heated air, the smoke making each breath hurt as entangled particles of incinerated tar, flesh and hair meets with his nostrils. Fear, instinctual and deep, thrums through his body, bringing every fiber of his being alive, the same dark waves that had undulated in the fight that night in the willow grove rising in answer to that terror which had held him on the sidelines as he watches Ranjiri leap into the fray fearlessly, her hooves slamming down on the paw of the Tigress with a ferocity that surely had surely splintered the bone within.

The sight of her fearlessness, of God’s blood upon her brow, stirs some masculine sensibility within the stallion, who grows ever more stalwart in his drive to defend the small healer from whatever danger may come close. Even when the ground roils beneath his hooves, the painted stag time and again keeps persevering to stand between the gathering herbalists and healers, the flame and threat of the Tiger.

He does not see the child thrown aside like a cloth doll, having superimposed himself between Resplendence and the flames at that very moment, his legs burning with the heat of the fire which seems to come from a hundred magicians and black lacquered sources. His shout of pain as he stomps the fire out joins with the screams of the meek and the wounded, cut short when the shimmering form of Erthe appears at Resplendence’s hooves.

His own minor wounds forgotten, the stallion catches the tailing end of his friend’s words to a dark stag (who seems odd in some way Dragomir cannot place in the frantic pace of everything going on). That she may never walk properly again makes the stallion feel suddenly angry with the world, a sadness layering over it until the battle becomes a drone about his mind, which is lost on the abysmal truth that children were fighting in Helovia’s wars.

How blessed that Mirage was not here, he thinks again.

Her thank you is answered with a smile, one that is brief and lights the depths of his blue eyes from the shadows that had stolen them at the sight of the child and her mangled leg. He nods, following alongside her, between she and the flames, as she tries to reach and help Archibald, trying his best to focus on what he can do to help – rather than the child who is past any, or his Ranjiri, who fights too far away for him to protect.

Dragomir