The girl had been content to stay in Tephra, exploring the places around the volcano and in the tall grasses and strange-smelling waterways; but her twin had insisted that if they were going to take advantage of Tephra’s hospitality for nine months at the least, they needed to at least try to do something for the Kingdom in return. And so they had left the land of brimstone and sky, and come instead to the Field. Olivier had an idea that bringing home a real recruit would make up for Dagny and Olivier basically using the volcano as an incubator, and this was the place to find one.

He is only a little different – a natural all-over creamy gold that shimmers just faintly due to the hair’s own unique properties, and a simply horn spiraling from his head. He walks, ground-bound, stuck in the same mud and muck as everyone else as spring is upon them. She, on the other hand, is quite different. A chestnut base but marked with blue and yellow, and the wings that carry her above her twin are bold blues and yellows as well. And she does fly today – typically she would shed the wings and walk alongside her twin, but she is in disdain of getting that messy and gross today, so she spirals above the world.

So it is up to him to find a conversation and the gold twin settles on the duo seemingly at random – the winged boy and the colorful girl. He approaches slowly, plodding his way through the deep mud, and realizes he will be stuck speaking since she has yet to land. He doesn’t usually introduce them – the talkative twin is the one in the air. Still, he steels himself and offers a tiny little smile and a nod to each. “Hello, I’m Olivier.” At least without her, he doesn’t get introduced as ‘Ollie’. But in their typical inseparable way, she is only a moment behind him, landing as close as she dares and walking up with only a small mue of disgust at the mud present on her face.

When she comes up alongside she brushes against his side, leaning into her twin, and peers at the strangers out of a face that’s almost too intent in its curiosity. “I’m Dagny,” she says right away, grinning widely. “Curse all this mud, right? It’s so gross.” And she laughs, totally unselfconscious (unlike the rest of them).

It has always been Dagny the bold, and Olivier the cautious.

“Nice to meet you, Mask,” the golden stallion answers in response, ears of both of the twins flicking forward to catch her words. He snorts and nods in agreement to her comment about horseflies, because they are certainly a nuisance – there were rarely horseflies in the Tundra, but he had experienced them traveling with their mother, and been less than thrilled. “That’s the one nice thing about mud,” he continues in his deep voice; “it discourages flies of all kinds.” The summer heat is upon them now, and he has noticed that there are few flies around his legs while he is covered in mud nearly to the knees.

“Are you looking for a home here, Mask?” Dagny speaks up then, bright blue gaze curious. “There are many to be had here, in Beqanna.” She flicks a gaze to the other stallion, wondering from where he hails; she does not know him, and he does not smell of her father’s Ischia or their own home of Tephra, but that leaves many places to tick off that she knows very little about. “Usually we refer to our lands as Kingdoms; there aren’t a lot of traditional herds here at all.” Actually, Dagny can’t remember the last real herd she heard of – they simply don’t split into groups that small anymore, and society has left the idea of a man and his women long behind.

“We could tell you about our homes, if you like,” he chimes back in, tilting his head. “We come from a place called Tephra.”