Lonely from their years of humidity and quiet as the trees they came from ;;

Visitor, of course. Cavalli bobbed his head in a miniscule nod as if he suspected that all along, and she was just confirming his assumptions. He barely had time to process the information before the girl fell into motion and, before he could possibly react, she did the unthinkable: she invaded his bubble. His head jerked back with an abrupt snort, his dark eyes narrowed in protest to her sudden proximity. As much as he yearned to flinch away from her and leave her to face-plant into the muddied undergrowth, his pride forebade him any notion of movement—to evade was to show weakness and Cavalli considered himself to be rather strong-willed, to the point of being stubborn, some would say. A grisly sneer snaked its way onto his face as she spoke, small cracks formed on the ground beneath him indicating that the brindled boy felt more unsettled about her contact that he otherwise exposed. He stood frozen as a gargoyle as she mouthed at his navy locks, scarcely able to repress a shiver in response to her warm breath on his nape.

Finally, the buckskin girl scampered away from him leaving his skin chilled and tingly where she had touched him. He heaved a deep breath to calm his disconcerted nerves, his dark glare fixated on her with an ominous intensity. “Never do that again,” he snarled, his lips curled back to reveal his grass-stained teeth. He stalked forward, circling the mare much as she had circled the little group he had been in when they first met. However, Cavalli knew that where hers had been a light-hearted inspection of a gathering, his would appear more like a predator stalking its prey; his eyes, black as a sharks and just as sinister, remained locked on her as he rounded behind her to draw parallel with her body, his lips raised to her ear. “You may be no monster, Serafina, but I am a stranger to you. Just because you do not bite does not mean I would not; only fools mettle with that which they do not know. For some reason, I expected better than that from you; I will not make the same mistake again.”

He sauntered away from her, careful not to bristle with his eagerness to reconstitute his personal space. He stopped at the edge of the miniature lake that encompassed the waterfall, it waters made turbulent by the concussive pestering of the rain. Truly, it seemed to mirror his predicament, that lake. Just as the storm personified the buckskin girl who seemed only too pleased to try to press his buttons, but she too would pass. Cavalli stared intently at his own reflection in the lake; his blue brindled coat wriggling and rippling, its reflection as much alive as the stallion that stood stolid on the bank. “My name is Cavalli,” he snapped without prying his gaze from his makeshift mirror, “Not ‘Cavvy’. You would do well to remember that.”