He’s been in the Dawn Court for nearly a year now, he realizes when the snow begins to fall outside. Raum has been vanquished by the very monster he had made, and Day Court had become considerably safer to return to -- except he stays within the halls of the library, tucks himself next to Sam at night, skulks about the shadows and watches the fox-like staff go about their days like this has become a home to him.

Has this become a home? He doesn’t know -- what makes a place a home? He knows that should Sam move on, he would follow -- and yet, he thinks he might miss the quiet peace of an early dawn, the way the birds have begun to flock to him whenever he ventures out to the courtyard.

Some of them have gone missing, recently, the ones that look like flying jewels with their bright feathers. Perhaps they had begun to migrate? It seemed rather late for that, however.

He shifts in the padded windowsill, his legs tucked neatly beneath him, and rests his head against the side of the window as he turns the page of the book he’s reading. It’s a short book, likely meant for children still learning to read, and yet he still struggles to recognize some of the words found between the pages.

Before, he might have grown frustrated, or perhaps even bored, flinging the book away to go find entertainment in the form of a fight. Now, he simply sighs, taking a brief moment to admire the way his breath fogs up the window before continuing with the task of teaching himself to read.

At first, he doesn’t pay any mind to the stallion approaching him -- not until the person approaching gets close enough to breach his bubble of personal space, however. His eyes lift from the page, teeth already beginning to bare towards the stranger, and he cannot help the way every line of his body screams his discomfort, screams for the stranger to back off out of his space.

“Clearly,” He grumbles at the stallion’s apology, one leg shifting to rest on the pages of the book -- perhaps hiding that the book was meant for a mere foal just learning to read, perhaps simply to keep the book open, and he shifts his body so that his good eye can be focused wholly towards the stranger.

(The boy with the strange wings on his feet is unmarred except for the ivory splashes across his pelt, and the outcast cannot help but wonder what the younger stallion might see when he looks at him -- he, who wears scars across much of his neck, he who bore the sharp mark of talons over where an eye should have developed, he who will never be able to wash the blood from his hands.

He wonders if the boy can see the monster inside him, gnawing at his ribs.)

“You’re the king, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be paying more attention to where you walk?”

(Truthfully, the only reason he knows this is the king is because there aren’t many horses walking around with wings on their feet and flowers in their hair. He isn’t even entirely sure where he’d picked up that information from.)