She let him speak without interruption, ears twisting to keep track of her son's energetic attempts at fishing, eyes focused on the stallion beside her. What was being said drew any number of emotions from the well inside her, splashed them into the space between them.
To be captured by duty and obligation, in a loveless marriage and with the weight of rulership thrust on him at once. It seemed a living death for the boy she'd known before. She hadn't thought it was possible for Pteron to meet a horse and not instantly be enamored with them, but it seemed she'd been proven wrong. If she'd needed any more proof of this, then she need only look at the half-healed wounds that lay across his skin.
"That bitch," she exhaled softly, horror growing in her belly. "Pteron, has she done this to you?" The nereid asked, lips brushing with the lightest of touches against one such mark on his neck. Utter bafflement wrote itself in the lines of her face, the tension of her spine. Nostrils flared with dismay, she fought to keep her voice level so as not to disturb Hal's carefree fun.
"I can't believe your mother would force you to stay in such a... a bondage, if she knew you were being torn apart by it! Besides that, this Reia has no business being married to anyone if this is her idea of... I don't even know. I don't know how anyone could hurt you like this." One hoof stomped viciously into the mossy ground, cutting the green to reveal humid black soil beneath. The worst of it was that she knew Pteron. More to the point, she knew that he wouldn't retaliate against someone he was charged with protecting, even if she seemed to be doing her best to shred him.
The translucent sheet of her tail snapped as she flicked it sharply. There were many reasons she had let play through her mind as to why Pteron didn't want her in Taiga anymore. Somehow, this reality was worse than anything she had come up with on her own. Amethyst eyes hard in the green jungle light, she pressed her head to his wing with a groan of impotent anger.
Her voice was calmer after few deep breaths, the scent of Pteron filling her with his steadying presence. "I don't know how she could be possessive of someone so very clearly not hers." She commented, gazing out at the now-soaking wet cub by the river's edge. "You're too noble by half, you know that?" She asked with a sad laugh, then shook her head. "I'm not, though. I can't just stand by and know my best friend is being treated so badly. You can't just kick her out, I know that. She thinks she's getting away with it, but she's got another thing coming."
His words of warning, the obvious signs of damage on his own body, washed over the seamare with little effect. What did she care for personal danger when a loved one needed help? Her only source of hesitation was her cub, and that he would worry for her. There was the obvious solution, of course. If Pteron needed a break, and he surely looked like he did, perhaps the two could mind each other while she took care of business.
@[Pteron]