So its not her face, or the overwhelming desire to see more of her curves up close that reminds me of who she is, but her voice which sends her name to me, a name that arrives alongside a memory of being in a much smaller body alongside that woman as I stared up at this pretty thing, newly come home from some place.

A first crush, some might call her, though those feelings I have now are much larger, the titanic fathers to the small and piteous being that was a child’s attraction to a pretty girl. With water dripping down my chin and ears at full attention (some other things threatening to make their way there as well), I drink in her saucy smile and the addition of our names – as if I’d forget either.

"I remember," I say with a smile, though her name is what little I do remember of her – mother had tried to tell me her lineage after we’d parted ways with Rhiannon all that while ago, something about both her parents having been important among the Basin’s people at one point or another, but I was too busy thinking of how pretty the amber eyed young woman had been to hear much of what mother had said.

As my words close on the chilled night air, I leap up and over the cold water in a sporty bound, my tail drawn up around my side to avoid any unnecessary contact and to be nearer to her while we converse, having found this branch of the delta an annoying nuisance chattering between us, making me have to shout in a most non-seductive fashion. Closing the distance with an easy trot, I pause alongside her, extending my muzzle in hope that she would exchange breath with me as I had with Tiamat (an experience I remember as being oddly erotic and which I desire ever so desperately to share with Rhiannon). Regardless of whether the embrace is given, I withdraw in some seconds to continue on with conversation, not wanting to linger too long in any case and coming across as weird, or overly desperate.

Such a stag as myself is never desperate.

"You are an outcast again?" I ask with interest (suave, I tell myself, with a mental high five), having gathered from the lack of the familiar odors of the North and the myriad scents of the wild upon her that she is much as I am, wandering, perhaps disenchanted with the notion of that little patch of green hidden in all that stone and snow, "was the mountain not to your liking?"