The Grove is picturesque and peaceful as ever, the ground carpeted in a multicolor tapestry of grass, flowers, and moss. The willows around its edge create a thick curtain of hanging leaves and tiny buds with their limp and lightly swaying arms, corralling the mildly fragrant air and preserving its sweetness from the heat and humidity outside. The scent of water and the abundant vegetation it feeds keep the atmosphere here from thickening, from choking like the heat of Tallsun seems determined to do elsewhere and the cheep-cheep of spring frogs mixes with the buzzing of insects and intermittent singing of various birds to create a soft, cheerful soundtrack.

Incongruent to this lightness, an old, worn looking stallion stands restive among the trees, a smudge of filth on an otherwise beautiful portrait. His ears lay slack on either side of his head and his eyelids hang low over emerald eyes. He stands dozing, one hind leg resting on the toe of a cracked and crumbling hoof, his tufted tail swaying lazily around his hocks. Piled in front of him is the stained sling of wool he wears as both scarf and satchel, the few valuable items he’s collected still swathed in its odorous material, and rifling among these tiny treasures is his companion, Strom.

The young python looks infinitely healthier than his bonded, his limbless sides smooth and well filled with muscle and fat where the stallions skin seems to sag and fall into the spaces between his ribs and hip bones, though the furrows don't reach so deeply inward today as they have in the past. While the snakes evenly scaled skin is blemish free and gleaming, the stallions is patchy, his winter coat only half shed out and dull, but for all his decrepitude the stallion appears momentarily worry free, his face content in the way that all creatures are when hovering between sleep and wake, withdrawn from the real world but not yet enfolded in the pseudo-world of dreams and nightmares.

There's no good reason for the old stallion to stir from this almost sleep, lazy and comfortable as he is, his companion wholly absorbed in pushing some of the excess dirt and debris from his favorite hammock, but stir he does, opening his eyes and clearing his nostrils with a breathy snort. He yawns, lifting and shaking his head, groaning loudly as he bows down into a catlike stretch, his joints and tendons popping and crackling in complaint.

At last he glances around, surveying the little meadow for any signs of change since he'd last bothered to do so hours earlier, and there, half hidden in the shadow of another massive willow is a splash of grey and white he recognizes, or thinks he does, his eyes still fuzzy and blinking with sleep. "Tang?" He calls softly, the usual bite of his voice absent.



"Talk."
OOC // @Tangere <3

Albrecht

If all is fair in love and war, I can't do this anymore