She is, to put it simply, beautiful. Far more beautiful than Nyx, with her battleship-grey fur, brutish muscles and plentiful scars. She's pale, flecked with radiant gold, petite and attractive, a stallion's wet dream. The silver's eyes narrow, assessing the woman as she waltzes up to Tembovu and....oh.

Well, then. Save for pissing up the poor man's leg, there's not a lot more this new mare could have done to say he's mine, back the hell off before I claw out your eyeballs.

Nyx allows a sardonic brow to curve as she coldly examines the woman. Sure, the other unicorn is certainly more attractive than she is, but Nyx fancies that she could kick her ass in a fight. Jealousy has thoroughly erupted in the grey's heart, even though she cannot quite place why. Tembovu isn't hers - the extent of her relationship with him is an ill-advised one night stand and a healthy dose of sexual tension in the resulting discussions. She'd tried to swing him to the path of polygamy, but his heart belonged to one woman and one woman alone.

Nyx is not the betting sort, but she assumes it's this woman.

Yet Tembovu carries so many could have's along with him. Could have been the father of her children. Could have been hers, had nature deigned to bless her womb with his seed instead of Deodat's. Could have become polygamous, if this damn woman hadn't firmly grabbed his balls in a vice.

"Hello," responds the silver to the other mare, her voice slightly stiff. "You must be Tembovu's special ladyfriend. I'm Nyx." And I diddled him too, she's dying to add.

It’s a pleasure to meet you, Nyx. I’ve heard many things about you. That's a backhanded compliment if ever she heard one, barbed wire disguised as roses. The ironheart blinks once, twice, trying to compose herself - she loves her wordplay, does Nyx, but the vast majority of things she could possibly say would have Tembovu's precious porcelain princess blushing. "Oh? Do tell." She injects honey into her voice where she wants nothing more than to spew venom; she's pleasant and civil to the point of being sickly sweet, but her pale eyes remain as hard as iron. The faux-warm smile that lifts her lips does not reach those frigid blue orbs, which glimmer with diamond-sharp edges.

It crosses her mind to channel her full inner bitch and place a caressing touch upon Tembovu's shoulder, just to show that she can. Oh, how she'd love to see Rexanna's darling little face shrivel into disgust at the sight of another woman touching the stallion she'd tamed! She wonders where on that pretty little body Rexanna keeps Tembovu's balls. After all, she seemed rather keen to keep her vice grip on them. But Nyx resists her urge, deciding that such an action would be a tad too passive aggressive.

Her stony gaze narrows a fraction at the mare's question about her children. She hunts for a hidden meaning, a hint; she's sure there's one there, lost below layers of unsaid things. "They're faring marvelously, thank you," she says pleasantly. "After all, I do have the best taste in men." Her first bullets are dressed in velvet as she fires them; her tone does not change, remaining entirely sweet and innocent. It is up to Rexanna what she wants to take from Nyx's words.

Alas, that momentary lapse is quickly smothered. Dominus continues to glower dangerously at the polecat, and Nyx knows he is certainly not fooled by this display of niceness. It appears we both do, doesn't it? Rexanna remarks, and Nyx's eyes flash for a moment before she regains her composure. "It certainly does." She injects pleasantness into her voice again, although her tail swings against her flanks with rather more force than is strictly necessary. Her blue gaze shifts over to Tembovu, wondering if he's worriedly listening to every word or whether he's attempting to tune out the potential catfight he has on his hands.

The woman asks her active number, and Nyx's eyes flash again with the tempest that rages inside. She fights aside her natural instinct to attack, realising that this is to be a battle of wits, not bodies. "Oh, I've lost count," she says casually, her brow furrowed as if genuinely trying to count. In truth, she hasn't had a man near her since Gaucho, and she's so sick of getting pregnant that she rather thinks she is going to abstain from stallions for the forseeable future. Rexanna doesn't need to know that, though. Let her think that Nyx is a rampant whore, bedder of anything with a pulse. It's better than being an uptight, frigid bitch, after all.

At the final comment, Nyx's jaws slip into a cold, yet pleasant, smile. "And what a magnificent one he is," she croons, looking over to Tembovu and scrutinising him openly with her gaze. She runs her eyes along every inch of his massive body, careful to school her face into a wistful, lustful expression. A sigh, as if to say ahhhh, memories, slips easily from her lips. "It's a dreadful shame somebody's clipped his wings and trapped him in a gilded cage." Her voice is edged with false sadness, as though remarking sorrowfully on a dead friend. "Isn't it a sad state of affairs when a woman has to keep a man's balls in her pocket rather than letting him act like the stallion he is?" A wicked grin spreads slowly across her face. Shots. Fired.

If the other mare is caught off guard, she doesn't show it. She responds in kind, and Nyx feels her carefully-controlled temper beginning to bubble underneath the surface. Maybe it's the silver who will reach her limit before the gold, which would be karma at its finest. He does always comes back to me. "Yes, emotional blackmail is a wonderful way of getting what you want, isn't it?" That's what Nyx has always imagined Rexanna did to Tembovu to get him to heel. Threatened him with leaving, used his own feelings against him - perhaps she's wide of the mark, but somehow she doubts it.

She fixes the other unicorn with her fierce blue gaze - a gaze that can be so gentle when it wants to be, so kind when it looks upon the faces of her children, yet can also become the storm itself when necessary. Right now, it leans decidedly towards the latter. "Why is it that you demand he beds you and only you?" she questions pleasantly, as though asking Rexanna's opinions on the weather. "Is it insecurity? A fear that another woman might pleasure him more than you can?"

Nyx casts a sly, sidelong glance at Tembovu, as though sizing him up like the beautiful piece of man-meat he is. "I certainly didn't get any complaints," she purrs.

Of course, Nyx may be making quite a lot of assumptions about the golden mare. Tembovu has never outright told her that Rexanna made him give up other women - the way he'd painted it, his main reason for staying with her was so that he knew it was his children inside her, nobody else's. It is Nyx who is making the link - Nyx who is assuming that Tembovu chose to give up other women to please Rexanna. That doesn't mean she flat out asked him to, but the silver assumes there were enough hints or barbs to make him think he wanted to. Emotional blackmail at its finest, making him think he wanted something just because the love of his life did.

That train of thought brings her to something else. A memory from her first meeting with the elephant, some of the first words he ever said to her, smothered under the delicious recollections of what happened after. A mare of the Basin lied to my face, with her back still warm from my gods damn barrel! And the colt, Alexander, to have the- the depravity to force a mare- my Rex- to be his whore...

A cold smile flashes across her face. Time to take that dagger she's rammed into the other mare's flesh and twist it that little bit deeper...

A little voice in her head tells her to stop. To shut up and leave it, to walk away, be the bigger woman and cease this idiotic bitch-fest. But she can't. Rexanna has needled her temper, and although Nyx is generally a calm creature, once the beast is out it's hard to rein back in.

"I cannot think of any man who would willingly go against nature unless the woman he loved made him think that he had to." Her voice is cold, but suddenly that cold smile reappears - it does not suit her, twisting her features into a disgusting grimace of tangled steel and shattered ice. This is not her. She is not this bitchy, vicious, spiteful creature....deep down, she's sickened by herself, despises what she's suddenly become. But it's too late, the words are on the tip of her tongue. "Or perhaps," she says, ever so sweetly. "It's because swearing that he would be yours and yours alone is the only way he could ensure that the children in your womb were his." She flutters her eyelids and glances thoughtfully upwards, as though trying to retrieve a memory. "Tell me, who is Alexander?"

It's a low blow. To imply that Rexanna - apparent paragon of purity and purveyor of monogamy - had cheated on her beau is quite an accusation, but it's one that Nyx wields like a knife.

And she hates herself for it.

She shouldn't be doing this, and she'll almost certainly end up apologising for it. Although Nyx has quite a good control over her temper and her impulses, once the beast is out of the cage it's pretty damn hard to stuff it back in. Like in the herd meeting when she'd spoken out of turn in the heat of the moment and then had to make a series of grovelling apologies later on, Nyx can feel that she's doing the wrong thing, yet is powerless to stop it.

The silver's words about Alexander have the desired effect, and underneath her growing sense of shame she feels a great spasm of joy that she's managed to weave such a web around the golden mare. The satisfaction is hollow, however, and she knows it. Most people will do anything to protect themselves when their lives are at stake. Those words make the ironheart's blood run cold; could there be more to the story than Rexanna simply taking a fancy to the dick of another man? "Oh?" She raises an eyebrow, valiantly trying to insert sardonic faux-interest into the gesture but finding it hard because she's actually interested. All the fight seems to have sapped from Nyx as quickly as it arrived; she just wants this confrontation to be over, wants to get away before she says anything she might regret, and it shows in the sagging of her shoulders and the softening of the sharp lines of her face. But not before she hears the rest of the story, if the other woman is willing to share it.

If the tale goes in the way that Nyx thinks it might - that perhaps the golden one had been forced to offer her body in exchange for her life - then it will only compound the fallen General's guilt that she's used such a traumatic event as a weapon to harm the other mare. Nyx has had her fair share of men - a few people's fair share, to be truthful - but it's always been consensual, and it's often been initiated by the randy grey herself. To have something so personal, so private, be forced by another, or to have to use it to save your life....it doesn't bear thinking about.