[private] take a look in the mirror

[Tarian]

He has no idea what they will do beyond tonight. Tarian adores @Altissima for all the ways that she is so different from him: for the way she so pointedly addresses their world, the way that she roams every corner of it without concern for protocol or borders, for the way that she is so completely free with herself.

And for the way she makes him feel now, that he is so completely free to be himself with her.

With her nestled neatly against him, his mind works in a similar tandem with hers. The Loessian imagines that perhaps she might stay there while winter blows through, where she can enjoy the warmth of the hot springs and they might enjoy the warmth of their mutual company. (That thought becomes more fervent as he presses another heated kiss against her pale skin.) Come spring, Altissima might return to wandering the lands again but this is where the Champion thinks that their differences might work in their favor.

Tarian knows he can be a thick-headed, stubborn brute.
And he decides that if he has to wait an entire spring and summer and autumn for her to return to Loess, then he will.

She nearly drives him out of his skin with her teasing. But he enjoys its, embraces the familiarity of it as he continues to embrace her. That damned leg, he thinks and he moves his mouth nearer to hers again. Tarian had enjoyed the shiver that his touch had evoked there before and the sound that escaped her lips. "Nothing a little rest and relaxation won't cure," he murmurs again, placing another heated kiss on the skin of the woman he is coming to worship. Nothing that can't be healed within a day or two of their return to Loess, he wickedly thinks.

"You mean the night you called me a pest?" he says, smiling despite the name Glow Warm she had given him. (Not that he will ever admit that he has grown a little fond of it). Tarian almost tells her that he has replayed that a night a hundred times since she left, that it was the memory of her shining in that spring that kept him company during the darkest hours of his patrols in Loess. Altissima brings out a different side of him and he is happy to play this part - happy to laugh and banter and to just feel... content.

The pegasus has never felt this way before but as the feeling continues to unfold in his chest, he relishes the way that it lights him up; the way that she makes him feel like the moon makes him glow.

"Not tonight?" he whispers and ever-so-lightly, rakes a small path of shining skin with his teeth. His injury might hinder other activities but Tarian doesn't mind the challenge of the other ways that he might make her sigh. Tarian has to steady himself and presses his silver head into the crest of her neck, exhaling a long breath. "There is something you should know about me," he finally tells her, pressing his face into the moon-spun strands of her mane. "Before this - before we - go any further." The pegasus decides, because there is something burning brighter than his need for her. Because before they get tangled together, he would have her know about all the things that could snare that wild spirit he loves.