His wings are pale and wide; if there had been a moon to see by, its glow would have danced off the graceful arch of his neck and the steady beat of his wings. Would have trickled over the slope of his noble shoulders (where the weight of a kingdom might have rested if this were another life).
But he is a shadow.
Tarian could be another monster in this starless sky.
But the silver pegasus lands with a loud thud and shakes the scent of the lackluster clouds from his skin. The dust of Loess has long been washed away by the wind and so the former Heir wanders the Common Lands - searching, seeking, looking - for something that he doesn't have an answer for. All he knows is that since his return to the Southern kingdom, his mind hasn't settled as it had ought too.
He keeps thinking about her.
She had been lovely. Lovely in the way that all their ancestors were. He doesn't know where she had been going. Her slender head had been tilted up, her throat exposed like an offering for a God that Tarian had yet to learn the name of. No matter where his blue eyes roamed, every inch of her was lovely and the stallion couldn't take his gaze off her. Her beauty was designed to ensnare; there was no part of her that wasn't intended to take a man's admiration for beautiful things hostage.
The worst part had been that she had known it.
What he had been looking at though, had been familiar. Familiar in the way that a waterfall still flowed and resounded through his thoughts. He knew her imperial gold; a coloring that had been carried on the skin of so many of family members. He doesn't know how he had known her. The palomino had glanced back at him and smiled, a half-curved thing that had held the edges of a warning. Tarian - who had stepped on many battlefields, who had passed through different worlds, who had fought for Loess in the Alliance - had approached her and felt an inkling of fear
Despite the emotion that was thick in the air, he came closer. She hadn't discouraged this but she hadn't come closer to him. She had let him approach her; as if she was used to this. As if strangers came to her all the time and the confusion in their stares was nothing new.
It was as if she knew all this before.
She had smiled and Tarian knew.
He knew without a doubt that their paths were meant to cross. "What are you doing here?" The silver pegasus asked, confused how one of Legado's line would have ended up in the atrocity of a place called Pangea. There were subtle differences from the family that had been lost but he looks at her and he thinks he sees the shades of that flickering fire-gold that Tarian had known in his youth: there is the blood-red palomino of Ruth, the general of his grandfather (and as valiant a war hero as Valerio had been). He catches the glean of Arwel on the shimmer of her shoulders and he is reminded of the sparring sessions when he had still been the Shield of his homeland and he was learning to protect it. There is a pristine prettiness to her, one that reminds him of his Aunt Elena and the fabled Cherish, who had never failed in her kindness to others.
When he comes closers, he thinks he even catches gleam of the Guardians of old coming from her soft glow: of Ichiro and Legado and Appasionado.
"Perhaps that isn't the right question," he says, as he approaches; oddly repentant.
"How are you here?" he wants to know of this stranger, of this one who he knows that his blood is tied to. The winds are roaring in his pale ears. The waterfall is rushing through his veins, flooding his senses. Tarian - who has no word of what has happened to Paraiso since it fell, who has had no news of family since he left the Cove and his Uncle behind him - is suddenly starved for it. He knows her and he assumes that she knows him.
The palomino tilts her head and her brow lifts, as if she waiting for him to answer the questions that he comes seeking.
The silence is infuriating.
Tarian draws closer and closer until he notices the shift in her expression. It is no longer expectant but wary. Her dainty ears have flicked back and though the girl does not yield her ground, her stance changes; defensive. She lifts her head and if there had been any doubts (which there wasn't, even if the stripes are unfamiliar, even if the glow is misplaced) of who she was - of where she belonged - the stallion is now only more certain. She gives him an iron-eyed stare that is full of warning and Tarian knows it. He had seen it many times in the way that his grandfather's face would harden, in the way that he had seen his father become storm-eyed. The pegasus draws his wings in closer, trying to convince her that he is not a threat.
He is only trying to convince that she is in the wrong place; that she shouldn't be here.
She doesn't step back and he is suddenly so close that he can see something flickering beneath her skin - something that alights in a warning. Fire. He realizes and his blue eyes widen, shadowed by the sudden realization that she was prepared to harm him.
But she is a daughter of Summer.
How is she here?
The flames had licked her skin, had flowed from her instead of where the winds might of have whispered and Tarian can only wonder if this is Beqanna on her. "You don't know who you are, do you?" He asks, suddenly aware that if she had any understanding of him she would have said so. She would have said: 'Blessed be the Winds,' and smiled. She would have welcomed him instead of warned him.
And then because he hadn't expected it, it comes.
An onslaught of memories.
Of horrible things. Of terrible things. Of places he has never been and the sense of the unknown is overwhelming.
(Tarian thinks he hears her speak: 'I am Aela.')
When Tarian lands in the Meadow, he is alone with his memories. But he has carried her with him for weeks now. He knows who she is; but she has no inkling of who she is and he wonders how a catastrophe like that happens. How had she been denied her birthright? (And more than that: he wonders if she is his key to what happened. If she is here, could others be? What of his parents? His siblings?)
There is nothing for him to find here. Not this night.
But there is plenty to wonder and so Tarian does, wondering about the girl with the golden skin and the fire that burned beneath it.
Wondering if she might be the missing piece to an answer he has long been searching for.
this is basically a meeting I've had stuck in my head for a while of Aela and Tarian meeting in Pangea. here for plot reasons and also because I am done describing Aela as an almost-palomino.