11-16-2019, 08:32 PM
----------------kiss me until i can't speak
Boys like to startle her, Ori tells him with a smile. Pteron would frown if he didn’t want to ruin the moment. It’s all well and good if he startles her, the stallion thinks, but it’s not right that others do. Who has been jumping out at her lately, Pteron wonders, and will he need to intervene? The emotions that idea summons is a tangle of protectiveness and pride; she is not only his (slightly smaller) friend, but also his responsibility to keep safe as a Southern soldier. Oriash is closer to him than any of his sisters (Marni too transient, Eyas to bound with her twin, Celina too young), and he thinks of her that way as well.
Or at least he had, until he admits to himself that a bit of the offense he’d taken at the idea of someone else startling her was that it was another boy and his mind had immediately place the unknown strangers as rivals. It was a little embarrassing, if he is honest with himself, and he is grateful that his spotted companion does not have the ability to read his thoughts. She’d have laughed, Pteron suspects, or worse been offended. But probably laugh, he decides, amused by the idea that he’d thought there was a possibility of romance between the two of them. Pteron knows he is a flirt – has been told so more than once – and that it might cause troubles for him in the future. He has always been quite sure that Oriash knows that his true intentions, and is sure that if he ever pressed too far she would rebuff him. He trusts the antlered mare implicitly, and never doubts that she does the same
If she’d known that, perhaps his refusal to answer might have stung less. He cannot tell anyone, but if he could, she would be the one he told.
Pteron realizes this just as she glances away from the burn a second time. His breath catches in his throat, and he coughs the words down as she speaks up, telling him that she wants to show off. Yes, yes, that is good. A distraction, and one he has been looking forward to for quite some time. Oriash mentions the trees, and Pteron casts his olive gaze up at them with a faint frown. They do inhibit flight, and the idea that they are something like a cage has occurred to Pteron more than once. This is not a place made for creatures of the open sky. As a result though, flying Pteron knows the nearest clearings, and leads her toward one with a playful kick of his heels. The cantering pace he keeps is safe along this well-traveled path; he’d not risk Oriash through the root-heavy forest, not in the night.
He breaks into the meadow and his pace becomes a gallop leading to a single extraordinary leap that launches him into the sky. The broad white wings that flare out pump rapidly several times, and then the pegagsus is soaring over the treetops at the far end of the meadow and circling back toward her. The noise of his flight is all but soundless, and the slow speed at which he circles overhead is further evidence of the resemblance of his plumage to those of an owl. Pteron’s wings are not built for speed like his mother nor agility like his father: instead he wears wings capable of silence. They are the perfect compliment to his invisibility, which he dons as he soars overhead. His position is only identifiable by his voice, which calls down:
“Now you can pretend you don’t have an audience!” he jests, the laughter audible behind his words. “Now come on, and show me what you’ve got!”
@[oriash]
-- pteron --