El Aran’s eyes narrowed slightly at Taytim’s tone as she responded to the compliment. She glanced at the younger mare and wondered at the lack of confidence in her tone. "I think you are right," she said, and her voice was soft but strong. "That one carries a great amount of self-assurance. It will take her far."

It seemed the filly had already been afar. El Aran smiled, though her eyes were distant as she looked up the path again. What awaited her there? Cloud cover and rocks, perhaps. The peak of the mountain itself. But she would be no closer to Aşk at the summit than she would in the deepest valley of these Isles, and suddenly to make the trek to the top seemed a colossal waste of energy. Aşk lived within the hearts of her faithful; the seer knew this. Still, she appreciated Taytim’s outlook on the possibility of an existing shrine. Perhaps the mountain itself was the monument she sought. There was no need, then, to travel to the top unless she wished too.

El Aran flared her nostrils and focused on Taytim. "I think you may be right. But, perhaps the shrine is not at all what I thought it to be. Our stories cannot always be verified, for they are just that: stories. Perhaps they began based in truth, but over time and with so many retellings, altered with each successive narrator..." She twitched the rough hide of her shoulder in what might have been a shrug. "It is impossible to say what is truth and what has been fabricated."

The black mare caught her breath at Taytim’s question. She stood a moment in silence as she considered it, brushing her hocks with her coarse tail and blinking at nothing in the sunlight. Finally, "Yes," she said simply. Though she did not know where Iskelet called home nor what sort of stallion he had grown up to be, she believed him to be an honorable horse and knew he had grace in his heart. And although Orhan had expelled her from their Desert, she could not hold it against him. He had been a quiet colt. Fearful, even, although perhaps that had been her fault— he had witnessed her turn foreign stallions away on more than one occasion, and each encounter only became more violent than the last. How traumatized must he have been, growing up in the shadow of a war he’d never witnessed, observer only to his mother’s terror and constant anxiety as she watched, day after day and night after night, a horizon that remained empty of foes?

Encantador would be proud of him, too, she thought, and sighed.

Taika’s reassertion of herself into the conversation prevented the black mare from wallowing in her past, and she appreciated the immediateness of the young more intensely at that moment than she ever had in her life. "Impossible," she said, using the filly’s own claim against her, and though her lips were slow to curl into a smile it was a warmer expression than she had worn previously. "Your mother carries as much curiosity within her as I think you do. I doubt she’s been anywhere once that she wouldn’t go again with you beside her."

Her eyes flickered to the sky, gauging the height of the sun. There was still time for her to linger here, for a bit, before nightfall. She would not mind a midnight swim; darkness had brought her to these Islands, and it only seemed fitting that she return to her home, to her son, to beg forgiveness under the cleansing light of a new dawn.

"Surely you know of some special place on this mountain that your mother hasn’t discovered yet," El Aran teased, leaning forward to blow on the girl’s forelock. "Show me."