 Oh, if he’d known he was being watched, Charlemagne would have been mortified. Such a display would have earned him a thrashing at home; that kind of foolishness was only permitted in foals. His people were for sparring, not for dancing - lucky, then, he does not know; it might have made it difficult to meet her eye. Instead, her presence reassures him. She looks lovely and kind and best of all are the flowers that curl in her tangle of hair. Nothing about her looks made for war, and this makes the unicorn bold. He wrinkles his nose at her response, casting his green-eyed gaze at the world around them. “Nobody else is here,” he says, quite certain in his words (though perhaps he oughtn’t be; he hadn’t seen her for hours, after all) “and besides, morning is coming.” Indeed, the sun was a promise about to be kept, and though he is bleary-eyed and weary and coated in sand and salt, the young unicorn feels eagerness strike in him anew. It only builds when the young mare speaks again, and validates the hope that beats in his breast. Far from disappointed, the stallion grins and tosses his head, the golden horn catching the first glimmer of morning. Novus! His loneliness washes away like a wave and it takes him a measure of restraint to keep from kissing the girl. “Thank you,” he tells her instead, and his voice is much less coarse this time around. “I was beginning to think I was lost. Now I only have to find the Dawn Court…” But it seems an easy thing, now, near as the sunrise, just over the horizon. Already he wants to go to it, to see Delumine spread before him, bathed in its namesake. To run off now would be impolite, and he turns back toward the flower-crowned mare and ducks his chin. “I am Charlemagne. Are you hoping to become a scholar, too?” |
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