As far as Tarian is concerned, daylight has fallen eons away from them. This boy - this Isakov - was someone he wasn't and the gray pegasus wants to know how.
(And perhaps some distant star in his mind is asking why.)
For each step he takes closer to the constellation-cloaked child, he sheds away his own years. So goes the years spent in an eternally starlit cove, a beach by the sea where the sun never learned to stray, in one step. So goes the years in Liridon as a soldier, honing the skills that might have once helped him commandeer a kingdom, as an officer instead in another. So goes those few, sweet days with Orani who seemed to neither mind nor notice that he no longer had a crown waiting for his noble brow (but that has always been Tarian's problem; he had been the Heir, the Hope, the Shield since birth. With the trappings out a title, who the hell was he? Just... trapped?) in the next.
Angry. He is just... angry.
He keeps feeling like he has been robbed of something. The shimmer or the sheen (or a trick of fickle starlight), whatever it had been, had cracked something in Tarian's usually impassive demeanor. Cradling the last of his restraint, he recognizes the emotion: vulnerability. It hadn't been her. He'd known the moment after that first agonized heartbeat - in the echo that came after in the shadows - that it wasn't her. He had learned all those years ago that there was no point in chasing stars; they fell.
They burnt, they blazed, they streaked across the sky in a moment of brilliance and then, oh and then-
they are gone.
(Such is the fate of some stars, Orani had once told him.)
There is a moment where Tarian gives him a hard stare. He eyes the gold flecks shining up at him, watches the way that the youth doesn't seem to crumble or falter with the weight of his anger. The boy just claims to be who he is, that he has never been anything but Isakov and there is no (mischievous) gleam of stardust shining in his eyes.
He was just @[isakov].
Just as he was, "Tarian," he finally offers by way of gruff apology (it is the closest that the child will get and perhaps he didn't care to know the name of the gray pegasus. He hadn't asked but when had he given the boy a chance?). "I was tricked by a star, once."
Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength
which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.