[open] i will not speak of your sin; anyone

[Tarian]

Tarian tries not to think of Lepis often.

He doesn't mean it a sign of disrespect. It's just the oppositive for the silver pegasus - he holds a great deal of it for the former Loessian Queen. But there was an old proverb he had heard once when he had been small, from a story that his grandmother told when he and Liam had still been boys. (Where Tarian had always been quiet and solemn as a colt, Liam had been wild and defiant. Where one brother took his lessons earnestly, the other fidgeted and looked to the horizon. Their parents had learned in those early days to keep both boys still, all it took was a story and who better to tell them than Malachi's mother? The silver mare who had supposedly traveled to a hundred places and told tales such as these: of lands where the world went so frozen and white, that even bears and foxes shed the colors from their coats. Of a place where horses lived on peaks so high - so close to the heavens - that on deep nights, one could hear a star fall and clouds sigh during the day.)

There are many stories that Tarian knows, thanks to the sterling wanderer.

But this proverb has stayed with him from those first days after Paraiso fell to his first battle, when he came back from the fray and a friend did not.

Think too often of the Dead and you invite them to linger.

It's a foolish supersition, he tells himself and his gray ears flick back before coming forward again. It's one befitting of his bloodline - a dynasty of windtalkers and healers and storytellers - but it isn't fitting for serious Tarian who leaves Ashhal with nothing but a few words that he will return and a nod. The gouge on the other pegasus stallion heals but the Champion of Loess would feel better if more experienced eyes would look at it. His knowledge of healing extends only so far as the Eucalyptus leaves that he had found and he can't quite imagine that the grizzled gray would enjoy Tarian wreathing him in its branches.

His thoughts move to the present - on the request that Lady Oceane made of him to journey to the Pampas soon and even spotted Altissima - before they come back to Lepis again. There is much of her story that he does not know and had he not arrived at the end of it, the pegasus would have scoffed at it all. But Tarian was here for the dragon flames and witnessed the death of two former monarchs. It was a story so fantastic that even Aletta would have appreciated it and carried it with her, he thinks, to some far-off jungle or deep valley. To wherever the wandering go (because does a searching soul ever truly stop?)

With the light so newly returned and the dark still too close for comfort, it is easier to consider Lepis and then banish the thought. From what little he had learned of the former Queen, she deserved her peace.

A sound distracts him and then Tarian (unfamiliar with projected magicks, with the way that the joy prickles against his dappled hide and glows against his mind) abruptly stops.

Turning his pale head towards the lake, a blue-and-bronze horse cuts through the surface. It surges to life and this alarms him. His dark nostrils flare before he approaches, allowing the stallion the time he needs to find his legs and the shore. Tarian considers the stranger just as murky as the depths that he has clamored from but his blue eyes don't give that away just yet. Settling his white wings against his broad barrel, he comes to stand directly before the dunskin with a disapproving stare. "Not some kind of kelpie, are you?"

@[Tiercel] <3