Tornados from a butterfly's wing
Concern riddled the ebon mare, for reasons that grew more apparent as days went by. Yanhua, stalwart fulcrum of their family, had been acting out of character lately. Borderline had been ill, they said. And Leilan had intervened. That had been all, she'd thought, but her mate's behavior following the event had spoken differently.
Touching on his emotions, she found Confusion muddled everything else. It was so deep and entwined with everything else that the little mare was having difficulty suggesting anything new. Whatever emotion she tried was quickly contaminated with his overarching bewilderment. She didn't know what to make of it, and halfway to making up her mind to pay the ice dragon a visit herself, if only to sort out exactly what had triggered this change.
That half-mind made itself up when she stumbled on the scene of her golden mate rambling almost incoherently to a trio of others. Bolder, she recognized. The nephew was of an age with Saturnelle and Wit, children of the tight knit forest family. The other two, grown horses that she knew by description only, felt less certain in these woods.
"Gale, isn't it?" She asked offhanded, her attention focused mainly on the fuzzy-minded Yan. Her shoulder butted up to his, her stained-glass wings shuddering briefly at the contact. "And... Mazikeen, if I'm not mistaken?" She smiled faintly at the pair, lovers from what she knew. And yet... Something nagged at her, a tightness in the air that belied any romance. Sadness, Fear, Revulsion... Something cold stroked Ama's spine.
This wasn't right. Not in the slightest, and her crystalline eyes narrowed slightly at the realization. And it was worse than she knew. Carefully, carefully, she stepped back internally, trying to unweave the threads of emotions and walk them back to their originators.
They all lead back to the starkly colored woman. Of the striped stallion she could feel nothing. No emotions, no feelings of any sort resonated from him. She could have gotten a better reading from a rock. Whatever he was, he wasn't a horse. Not really.
A hard swallow forced its way past her throat. There was no counting on Yan, not how he was right now. And there was something deeply Afraid in the horned mare, something that had shaken her to the core. Ama was beginning to feel a bit of that herself. There was something bigger at stake now, however. She could sort out the who's and why's later, for now:
"Bolder, does your mama know you're visiting?" She asked, putting as much motherly consternation into her voice as she could. "Foals, I swear, they'll get into trouble the first moment you take your eyes off them. Bolder, go run along and find your cousins, Saturnelle has been going on non-stop about the spider-pup she thinks she's gonna tame. Maybe you can talk her out of it? Do you have any children?" She asked switching between Bolder and the adults with concentrated breeziness.
It was all babble, just to keep them taking while she sorted out what to do about this. First things first was getting the colt away from the quietly bubbling situation. Next was figuring out what had made the stallion so empty, the mare so afraid.
...Amarine
Edit: Ama is also attempting to block