Take what the water gave me; Heda, Ivar

[Ivar]

I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take While he had known changes were coming, he had not expected them to arrive so quickly. Ivar is still coming to terms with exactly what has come to pass in the last day. He’d taken Isobell back to Nerine, made sure she was safe. She’d be safer here, he knows, but the tobiano mare has a frustrating ability to stand up to Ivar. The scaled stallion had given in for reasons beyond his own understanding (she’s probably a witch, that Nerinian princess), and he had come back to find a distraught Heda. For one long breathless moment, Ivar was sure he’d been discovered. But no, it was not a tongue-lashing that she had ready for him (Heda was surely too sweet to raise a hoof against her lover), but rather a confession. The buckskin mare had never been cut out for the harsh world thrust upon her. Best that she retreat while able, while undamaged. Ivar did not argue her decision, though he selfishly wants her to stay. She has given him something that no one else can, and Ivar is reluctant to let go of such a valuable font of emotion. It is priceless to a creature without many feelings of his own; there is a reason he had so willingly promised to be the sole defender of an entire kingdom. If he tells himself that this is no different than any visit before, he can handle it. He is Ivar, after all – prince, kelpie, general, king. This is what he, and his kind, had been bred to do. “Do you?” He asks curiously, the smooth rumble of his voice colored with amusement that matches the glint in his brown eyes. “Seems more like Ischia – or had you just been visiting recently?” The knowledge he’d gained in his youthful forays across Beqanna seems all the more valuable now. He knows the difference between the humid salt air of the islands of Ischia and the cool mountains of Hyaline. This green mare with her flowing navy mane smells more recently of the islands, but the salt hasn’t yet sunk into her skin the way it has with Kylin. “I’m Ivar,” he tells her, knowing that her nose is probably proving her with information as well. The sweat on his well-muscled figure from recent exertion, the not-so-long-ago lover’s embrace with Heda, the bitter salt of a recent brief jaunt to Nerine that he has not yet washed off his piebald scales. “What can I help you with?” kelpie mimicry | dragon scales | tactile hypnosis