He barely had time to see the stranger appearing through the doorway than the person was nearly passed him. Feeling rushed as he stammers his hello, the former warrior is glad when the golden coated fellow pauses to take note of Stavros’ presence. That gladness does not truly make its way to his face, however, which remains on the verge of frowning, his richly dark eyes lacking the enthusiasm that is present in the young man’s expression.
Lean and lithe, the young man is still shorter than Stavros, despite the way his body seems to be stretched out for height, and there is something delicate to the way his bones are put together that reminds the old fighter of the mystics who guarded the sacred caverns back home. That he was unclothed was also not all that peculiar; those who wore chitons or robes had earned them though service to Luca’s people or armies, and most of its populace was bare backed in the sun drenched streets of Stavros’ home-realm. The resemblance to any sort of being that the man knows from his life before now ends there, however; while Vadim might have found the somber attitudes of his herd mates droll, Stavros would likely find them to be very like the stern but noble mare and studs he’d grown up with in the warrior’s sect of Luca.
His frown grows all the deeper when the cheerful boy’s question meets the stallion’s ears. The Day Court is not a place in Luca which he knows or has ever heard of, even though he’d spent hours studying the surrounding communities and cultures, and their buildings. Despite the obviousness of fact that there was a city before him, and that it certainly seemed old enough to have been included in the dozens of tomes on the subject, Stavros did not recognize the architecture, either. Aside from that, he was in a desert, which was not a place he should be.
Trying to remember where exactly the closest desert was to the rocky, high altitude sun-lands of Luca, he recalls, in horror, that it was some hundreds of miles away, and several weeks by hoof. While he certainly had turned his back to Luca and its never-ending wars for taking his beloved Perrin from him, he had only been gone several days. It did not account for his loss of memories of making it from the forests on the outskirts of the great city to the far deserts. In fact, the more he thought about it, it seemed all the more clear that he was unrealistically far away from Luca, and the more disgruntled the man became.
"There is no Day Court or desert in Luca," replies Stavros, his eyes narrowing with suspicion, and his head lifting to a proud height. His voice is calm but stern, with a firmness to the consonants, and gentle length to each vowel. Inside his chest, his broken heart beats harder and faster, the sudden worry that he was in danger growing with each passing moment. Though he was relatively sure, already, that he was no longer in Luca at all, he still could not help but cling to the notion that he had simply become lost in his mourning and had lost track of time in the process, or that he had been absconded with by unwarranted kidnappers of some sort, and escaped. "What kingdom is this? I did not believe I have traveled long enough to have reached the great sand seas of the south."
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