[private] leave me here a little longer

[bolder]

She leans back against the knots of the tree behind her like she is comfortable and Bolder continues to grin.

The memory of his wolf is still recent, and it makes it too easy to look at her with a ferocity that is most certainly primal. The white grin he flashes at her lacks the pointed teeth of that shape, but there is something (not that Bolder realizes it) predatory in that smile. He would capture her in the handsome curve of it, if he could, as he would with any prey.

"What do you know of Hyaline?" he asks, curious. What Bolder knows comes from the explanations of his Aunt, Mazikeen, who ruled the entirety of the East. They are a pack; they are family. He understands that their gifts are powerful ones, and it is for that reason only shifters are allowed there.

He comes striding forward in a way befitting of his name, and tilts his copper face towards hers. Bolder nearly laughs at her mention of freedom, but he doesn't. Instead, he considers what that emotion must feel like. The young pegasus is certainly freer in Hyaline than he had been in Taiga, but even that had come at a cost. He had left behind his parents, his sibling, the rest of his family for the chance to be finally accepted.

To finally learn what (or who) he was.

What he is now is a still-growing stallion in the presence of a pretty girl, and his dark nostrils flare at the sudden awareness of how close Elliana was to him.

"Could you tell me?" he banters back to her, "Because that is a feeling I have never completely known." Bolder is still grinning, but something causes it to falter. "I could tell you what it's like to lose yourself," he then continues, "as a bird on the wing. As a wolf on the hunt." Stopping, he adds, "but I don't think it is the same thing as being truly free."

Was she flirting with him?

Bolder rather enjoys the idea and it shows with a devilish glint in those silver eyes.

"My mother would probably be appalled at how frank I am being with you," he murmurs to her, feeling the heat of her skin against his, and takes another step closer. "But I won't tell her if you don't."

@Elliana