[private] I could take the whole world with me

[Tarian]

Tarian is usually as cool and polished as the smooth marble that his pale hide resembles (or so he likes to think). And yet with her - with Wildling - she seems to make little work of finding every little crack and flaw. It unnerves him. It should annoy the Four Winds out of him and yet as she comes to stop beside him, Tarian's smile reveals a small glimmer of accomplishment. He can hear it, as slight as it is, a peaking curiosity like the rising steam before them.

A little crack of her own.

She moves away from him and towards the spring with a quip that almost makes him laugh.

"We have others," Tarian calls after her, as if he half-expected any water source he presented wouldn't be quite enough for Altissima. His mind even wanders a moment, drifting back to the shore that they just came from as he spies the lovely way her mane has started to curl. Perhaps fearless, bold Altissima sensed a kindred spirit in the sea. Tarian imagines them both much the same way; wild and untamed. While he is thinking of that, his mind isn't on what he quietly says next: "I could show them to you."

When he realized them, Tarian can only hope that her abrupt entrance to the warm water drowned the words.

@[Altissima] submerges herself in the pool below him and it seems as if the air surrounding Tarian has become as liquid as the spring that she was immersed in. That... that sound she makes threatens to ignite something within him and the Loessian fights it with a tensing of his shoulders. For a moment, the sight of her is dazzling. The way that the moonlight bathes everything in silver, the way that very air surrounding her shimmers, the way she looks at him - for a moment, it's too much and Tarian has to look away.

For all his monk-like tendencies, he certainly isn't one.

He swallows when he looks at her again and moves towards the edge of the water, guided only by the opening that Altissima leaves beside her and the smile on her pale lips. When the hot spring laps at his knees and skims the edges of his tightly-held wings, Tarian stops a few paces away from her.

This was close enough.

"Well, don't Not-Die again." His voice is harsher than intends, if only for the reason because he finds it hard to speak at all. His blue eyes meet hers - a pretty shade somewhere between indigo and violet - and Tarian is torn between keeping his guard up or threatened in losing it entirely. "It's not... good."