He expects an answer.
What he doesn't expect is that @[isakov] might show him that answer instead of stringing along the words to explain how a boy could conjure a star. The star-marked yearling takes a deep breath like he might speak that answer that Tarian is waiting for. But instead, the boy looks to the broad silver of his chest and the older stallion can feel the crease above his brow.
Tarian looks down, as if there might be an answer where Isakov stares. His neck flexes with the motion and the pegasus tilts his head to the side to better study where the yearling concentrates. (He tries to keep one eye trained on the boy; Tarian can't bring himself to trust a stranger, even if that stranger is just a child.) It's an odd angle but even at that tilted disadvantage, the older stallion knows the moment that his world changes. Where it had been Isakov standing there a moment before, instead stands Orani. Slowly, Tarian raises his head and looks to the illusion. There is still a rational part of his mind that knows it isn't her. It couldn't be.
Orani was his past. She stayed behind in Liridon. She had wanted to return home to the stars. She wanted to rejoin her mother and father and brother. She had wanted to take Jacob and ascend (because what place is there for a star but the heavens?).
There was no place for Tarian in her sky.
And yet this illusion is so like her. (It lacks some of her vivacity but Tarian thinks that not even a Magician could capture starlight and replicate the way it shines.) The breath hitches in his throat and the gray stallion takes a step forward. He knows it's not her and yet when he says her name, it comes from the parched lips of a man who has been thirsting for her in the eons that they have spent apart. "Orani," he says.
But the moment her name is wretched from him, the disbelief in his fierce gaze turns to accusation. It is like the shock from saying her name out loud brings him back to this moment, to the present. That reminds him that this is not Orani but Isakov. And where he struggled with her name, he is forceful in his threat to the yearling. "You will return her to where she belongs," comes the shockingly low voice (Tarian can perhaps forgive the sin of accidental Magic; to have Orani so blatantly used by another is another crime entirely). "Or you might not have the opportunity to conjure again."
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.