[private] but its wonderful to see that it never phased you

[Tarian]

Tarian slows his pace when the young mare sighs, glancing over to make sure that the reason she had done so was not because of him. He does not amble and when the gray pegasus moves, it is always with a destination in mind. While is his mind is bleary from lack of sleep, his focus on finding @[Cheri] a place to rest is not.

And he looks down to the other Loessian to make sure that he has not winded her out.

But the girl surprises him and the Champion resumes his pace, a little more attentive to the appaloosa in stride as well as thought. Cheri offers Tarian a history lesson about the land of her birth and he listens, recognizing one of the first names she had begun with. It was common knowledge that Lepis had once ruled the Northern forest but it marveled Tarian a little as he recalled the former Loessian Queen. He had joked once with Lepis about Taiga being no more than a backwater bog and here he was now, strolling with a Taigan youth that might be a relation of his.

The mention of her grandmother - the one she had spoken of in the past sense - draws Tarian somberly back from those thoughts.

"Did you know the Comtesse was once Queen of Loess?" he parlays back to his young companion. Perhaps she did. Given the way that she had recited her Taigan history, she seemed an astute pupil. He doubted that her curiosity would have stopped at the Northern border. "If what I've heard is true, she ruled it not once but twice." Tarian continues, looking ahead to the proud rock formation coming into view. The first time he had learned, had been as a child not yet old enough to stand. The second had been alongside her husband, the man that Tarian would remember as the one burned alongside her.

He considers telling her more (and will happily do so, if she asked); that it had been the Queen who had intercepted him on a patrol, that she had spoken to him once about an Empire and the thought still kindles in his mind. But she asks for his own story and as he leads her through a narrow split in the canyon, Tarian finds himself unsure of how to tell it. Things were so different outside Beqanna, sometimes even the language spoken. "I'm not sure how it would translate here," the pegasus stallion tells her truthfully, "the closest name for it would be Paradise."

It's been over a decade since he has spoken his father's tongue and all those years rest heavy on his as the silence momentarily fills their journey.

@Cheri