Vaingard moves with languid ease through the dense foliage that settles over the lagoon. Even in the dead of winter, thick green grasses can still be found packed beneath the dense shadows and near the warm waters of the lagoon. Large hooves slosh through the mired mud and brown leaf litter that painted the terrain in colorful hues and brown and gold and red. Though he had spent his entire life here in the lagoon, the young princling still found it amazing that such a variety of colors could result from the same trees and every year change in some small way to paint an almost new landscape. Like the ebb and flow of the tides, each day what was nothing more than miniscule grains of sand piled onto one another by the ocean’s draw could mold and change the shoreline until even he found himself having to stare back into the distant mountains to make sure he was where he thought he should be.

It was these little things that he found his mind wandering to when Cullen had duties elsewhere. Often, he longed to join the gold splashed stallion, longing colored his own silver blue eyes as he watched the muscular stallion charge into the oceans and return time and again victorious. Though he knew Cullen was only his uncle, still Vaingard could not help but to beam with pride and his own chest puff a bit. That was his bloodline.

Thinking now of his uncle, Vaingard found himself turning his gaze towards the loosely gathered stallions that grazed in companionable silence. Most of them he knew on sight, Tyr the black splashed pale stallion but none were of any real concern to him. The only one he had any wish to impress was Cullen. Paper thin nostrils release a sharp exhale of breath, forelimbs drawing up beneath him as he charges through the yellowed grasses and skeletal trees. Muscles tense as weight is shifted to his forelegs and hind legs kick up at the invisible opponent at his heels. Though he himself had never tasted battle save for an occasional sparring here and there among strangers, still he imagined the feel of his hooves connecting with his opponent’s broad breast. Valiantly he gives his proud head a toss, creamy white mane flopping haphazardly down the broad curve of his neck. Whiskers twitch along his maw as the stallion snorts and once more shifts his own weight, pivoting in a tight circle around an offending unturned root to charge back down the incline with which he had just sprung from. His joy was not devoted to anyone in particular, nor did he intend to harm any of his fellow brothers at arms. Perhaps if Cullen could see him now the golden stallion would chuckle in amusement at his boyish display but for once he did not care, he had been cooped up too long and he relished in the freedom that whistled through the dusting of snow and fierce winter chill.