Tarian and Isakov are alike in that regard.
There is not much that Tarian trusts. He has long learned that his eyes can betray him, as they clearly have with the colt. He knows that Magic can misconstrue an image. He knows that a true wielder of it can easily alter reality. It takes the tangible and leaves room for interpretations that have always left him uncomfortable.
Tarian has always enjoyed the certainties.
It is why if asked who he is, he says ‘I am Tarian. First son of Malachi and Kalina, of Legado’s line.’ That couldn’t be changed. There was no amount of Magic that could strip him of his ancestry. Nothing could change where he had been born or the places he had traveled or the things he had done.
(Or so he assumed. To wander down this trail of thought could be an endless and dangerous path.)
In that past was where Orani lived. She wasn’t in this future - she didn’t exist in Beqanna - and that had been the source of his anger. What Isakov had done was take something concrete and suddenly make it imaginable. What would he have done, if it really was her? It even tempted him to think about what a life might have looked like with her if she hadn’t chosen to go back to the heavens that she had been created from.
The older stallion tries to warn the boy about gravity. He tries to give Isakov some warning about the stars. Even if the boy only carries them on his star-strewn pelt, it is better that he knows they can take shapes and walk amongst them. They exude their own sense of gravity and if a horse is merely mortal, it is easy to get caught in their pull.
But Isakov might be more than merely mortal. Tarian suspects that there is more to him than just the galaxies that color his hide. When the pegasus shares this with the yearling, Isakov’s expression changes. The boy looks troubled and it makes Tarian raise his own head, drawing up and away to better study the shadows that dance across the angles of the colt’s youthful face.
"What are you?” he asks again, "do you not know?”
He can’t presume to know but Isakov knows that he looked like someone else. How he knew to look like Orani is still beyond Tarian. It was Magic, he now knows. His facade is serious and his eyes darken as they glance down at the boy. "You took a shape that was not your own,” and struggles to keep his anger from emerging again as it clips his words. "Before you were Isakov, you were someone else.”
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.