Khajiit is a one-in-a-million creature - and oh, how he knows it. His stark white tail flags in a silken banner above thick-muscled hindquarters, and as he hears the telltale signs of another’s approach, he halts, drawing his head to its full height. Standing like this, motionless but for the flare of his pink nostrils, he could have been a statue, carved from shining marble, given hot desert breath and a soul with an unquenchable thirst for more. More influence, more trickery, more women... more of all that and then some. His looks had gotten him plenty, and - as he swivels his curled ears to catch the whinny in his periphery and turns his elegant face to meet his fate straight-on - he would continue to use them to his advantage until time and age gradually drained them away.

How fortunate, then, that his charm and cunning had taken him to heights his image could never hope to reach.

His gaze drifts appraisingly over the golden stranger, sliding unhurried down the scar-riddled planes of his body. This stallion, too, sticks out against the Lagoon’s deep emerald backdrop, adorned with splashes of ivory and long, creamy, salt-waved locks. His striking jewel-blue eyes grab hold of Khajiit, locking him into place, and when the wind shifts, bringing his scent forth, realization hits him like a bolt of lightning.

“Ah,” he murmurs, his grin widening with satisfaction. “You.”

Khajiit was no fool; he’d clocked the stallion’s presence almost from the moment of his arrival. It was the one that stuck, that never faded, that oozed unabashedly out of the Lagoon’s every weeping pore. How could he forget a scent like that? The Marwari hadn’t tracked it - whoever it was, they held no small measure of importance, and in the interest of remaining under the radar, he wouldn’t take that risk. At the time, he had all he needed to know.

Now, it wasn’t enough.

The Lagoon might have looked, on the surface, to be a wretched place, a place of rot and decay and one’s certain end; but Khajiit knows better. Under the peat, under the muck and the moss and the bones lay the promise of more, the self-same promise held in both the proud swell of the stranger’s chest and the taut bow of his sun-dappled neck. The black-spotted stallion meets the other’s electric blue gaze, suppressing a shiver and the urge to smooth the tangles from his knotted cornsilk mane, and dips his chin in greeting, his voice sitting light on his silver tongue.

“I was wondering,” Khajiit says, innocuous, “when you would come to call.”