Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you The golden stallion is streaked with blood, but hardly any of it is his own. A piece of rabbit hide still sticks between his molars, and Gale picks at it with his tongue as he winds his way along the path up the mountain. The glow he emits from each inch of his perlino hide is hardly visible in the clear light of autumn’s last full moon. His belly had been full of rabbit when he’d been a stoat, but as a horse he finds himself hungry still. He passes some clover, dry and brittle, and turns up his golden nose. Despite his equine shape, there is nothing in the blue-eyed creature that is herbivorous. There is no time to hunt again, he reminds himself. Straia’s pine had told him of this future, and it was too perfect an opportunity to pass up. What Mazikeen doesn’t know won’t hurt her, after all. He raises his head, and pauses between one step at the next, his hoof a few inches from the ground. Someone is at the border. Or rather, someone is almost at the border. The Alarm that the entity provides has not sounded yet, but standing so near to it, Gale recognizes the feeling without fully understanding how. He finds the intruder with a single thought, appearing in front of her with a curious tilt of his handsome head. The smile he gives her is charming, if a bit bloody, and he says to his Loessian niece, the one whose visit he had foreseen with the flaming tree: “I’ve been expecting you, @Kamaria.”