Had the wind not picked up and blown a shadowy ashen ghost across the corner of his sight, he'd have noticed her sooner. As it is, he sees her only when she speaks, in a voice rich with the same auburn hues and riddled with the same lush textures as her fur. She's red and copper, and in the sun she would gleam like old gold, he's sure. Here, freckled with ash, lit by an overcast, dim sky, she's all speckles of fresh blood dripped over old, and her eyes shine with a witchlight green cast. Everything about her looks out of place here, where Aulerion blends into the scarred, charred nothingness- her silhouette all but vibrates with colour against his eyes.

"Why do choose this side and not the other, titan?”

He leans his sleek head toward her on a lowering neck, pale eyes grasping for her green, as he slowly shifts to face her, his nails gouging groaning wounds in the soft char of the tree as he prowls in delicate steps along its trunk. Weaving himself into the brittle upended roots with a creaking crackle of snapping dead wood, he comes to a stop only when they became too few and too thin to support him, and nests himself there in the dark tangle. Wagging his tail in low, slow swishes, he watches her with a sweet, submissive smile and a quiet, hungry stare beneath his silver lashes as he replies, the tips of his bright teeth glittering in the sooty smudges of his face as they test themselves around a soft, low voice, clear and gold as honey.

"Perhaps for the same reason as you? To understand." The red of his tongue slides across his nose in an abrupt line like a seeping wound, leaving his skin pink and shining as a fresh scar. "In the mind, beauty is ephemeral- the flowers are pretty, but even before they wilt, your mind grows accustomed to them and they begin to fade into the background of your perception. But pain... The memory of pain can be eternal. You never ask why a blossom is pretty, but your mind can't stop itself from asking why you were hurt- to the point that even seeing devastation is... Enrapturing." For the first time since she made herself known to him, he looks away from her to trace the bleak horizon with an empathetic glance. "The field is lovely. Lovely, and thriving, and those who bask in it are blissfully capable of focusing on the beauty of this world. But this... Ruination... Stole my breath away more than the most spectacular sunset on the meadow could've- if for a different reason. And so I came." His pale eyes slide back to her, and crinkle in a tender, conciliatory smile, as if sharing a secret with an old friend.

"...Aren't you the same?"