Even moving slowly, his sheer mass makes his footsteps audible. The girl’s head swings up from the water, ears swiveling forward, raising her eyes so that she can find his face. For a moment she simply blinks, taken completely by surprise. She’s used to being little, standing several inches below most strangers she meets, but this stallion is nearly a foot taller than she is at the withers, and large in mass as well. Her silver eyes widen at bit as she takes in the spiraling horns protruding from the man’s skull, but there is a smile on his face and a friendly tone in his voice that puts her at ease anyway.
She steps away from the water, towards him, not closing the distance entirely but the quiet of night seems to call for hushed voices, and she wants to be close enough to facilitate that. He offers a name, a home she doesn’t recognize – but he smells of heat and sand and rocks. “I’m Sloene,” she responds, lips curling into a quiet smile. He is as bright in the moonlight as she is not bright – white and red and large. “I’m of…well, nowhere, but I guess you know that since I’m here in the Field.”
Orange Country – she is enough of a Beqanna child that she knows it’s not a Kingdom. A herd, then. She turns that idea around in her head, knowing that it won’t be the same as where she grew up. Nera and Branka had been two mares, raising a flock of children – no stallion involved. A traditional herd was a stallion instead, with a flock of mares. Could that define her, she wonders – a small sisterhood and a stallion to protect them? She supposes she won’t know unless she tries it, since she knows nothing about herds. She knows little about herself, even; she doesn’t know if her mother and father served a Kingdom or lived in a herd. Some days, she can’t even remember their names. “Your herd – is it large?” She was one of a mess of children once, and a part of her wants to know something smaller.