[private] I could take the whole world with me

[Tarian]

He doesn't even think.

Words are nearly impossible though they are there, simmering just beneath his granite-colored skin, warming it. It's hard to find them when she is so close to him instead. So his mind ambles and stumbles, really blurting out the first thing that he can actually think to say. It's only after he has said them - that he realizes Altissima might think that is Tarian is referring to their meeting during the Eclipse.

That isn't what he's speaking of; Tarian has just never been the most well-spoken outside of court manners or battle strategies. As he glances down at her, the Loessian highly doubts that she wants to talk about either topic. Perhaps, he thinks, it might be best to think of this conversation of the latter. Tarian understands battles (aside from the rampant Magic that seems to permeate into everything) and the former soldier knows when to acquiesce.

"No," he tells her quietly, still trying to keep aware of where the edges of his wings are. Tarian had found her close to death, but even then, dying seemed to be done on Altissima's terms or not at all. Even as weak as she had appeared then, her eyes had still shimmered a wild array of color. Every hue and shade had seemed like open defiance to Tarian - it had seemed like @[Altissima] was daring a world drained of light and illumination to try and take hers.

There is nothing about her that he finds fragile.

Tarian has seen broken before, broken bodies and broken souls. She is still very much in the fray of the fight.

One silver ear swivels towards while he keeps forcing himself to watch the turtles - still marveling at the endless cycle of life - but there is a force pulling on him that tugs relentlessly on Tarian. He is only painfully aware that her always-changing gaze is fixed on him and Tarian exhales, a slight flaring of dark nostrils. His gray brow arches but the pegasus doesn't move, can't move because he finds that there is something in him that doesn't want to step out of her sight. The expression on his illuminated face - from the moon, from his glow, from her glittering - does nothing hide the stoic way he watches her; the way that Tarian is trying to guard so much of himself and failing so badly at it when a wry smile quirks a moment later.

"You're just hellbent on proving me wrong, aren't you?"