Any.

[Ivar]

I V A R i'll use you as a makeshift gauge of how much to give and how much to take Each time Ivar leaves Nerine, it is with an ever-increasing weight of frustration atop his shoulders. First she had told him to wait, and now she has told him that she won’t be coming after all. The damn piebald queen of the cliffs can have her important responsibilities; Ivar will go find his own. (The black and white stallion bypasses more legitimate responsibilities (running his own kingdom, for example) and skips straight to the Field. The inexplicable sense of propriety that they both have; it has grated on him. Kylin feels the same, he suspects, but Ivar has never asked her outright. The dark creature would simply rather not know. Neither of them are here today though. They’re both safe up north, Isobell in her kingdom and Heda in his. Ivar is alone here in the field, surrounded by strangers dozing in the warm spring sun. Few of them look up as he walks by, but those that do seem to have trouble looking away. For all the stallion’s brooding expression and heavy scowl, there is no disguising the attractive curve of his muscular neck or the way the sun glints off the opalescent scales of his pale shoulder. A never-failing lure, the bait of the kelpie’s good looks are tempered by the darkness in his brown eyes and the heavy trod of his hoofsteps. He’d been sure he would have found someone by now. Yet none of the faces he sees calls to him, no appealing sound or scent draws him in. The farther he goes into the common land, the more frustrated he becomes. Ivar goes so far as to nip at the flank of an older mare that bumps against him in passing, but the sudden sight of sharp teeth is enough to startle her into an apology before he draws blood. The black horse he brushes into is about to elicit the same reaction, but the breath he takes in to speak is filled with something he does not recognize. The bald-faced stallion stops short, half-way into an inhale, and twists his head to the side to look back at the stranger. She is small and dark, lacking wings or a taste of the water, but Ivar’s dark eyes trace her figure as though the young kelpie does not have those preferences. “You’re not from around here, are you?” Asks the smoky black stallion, his soft tenor voice more gentle than his boldly masculine figure might suggest. His curious perusal of her finished, Ivar meets the mare’s gaze squarely. Defintely a stranger, he knows, and from a place he is not familiar with. Ivar, who has been to each land in this new Beqanna, is rarely lost when guessing the origin of a native. Yet this flinty-eyed female is different; she is from elsewhere, from the beyond where he has never dared go. king of loess minimal smoky grullo tobiano | equus kelpus