Sharing Roisin’s companionship reminded the pale stallion of what it’d been like to live in the Ridge. Peaks of joy and valleys of sorrow. Warmth and life and the brightness of the sun that her crooked smile was to him. Seeing it there again— knowing that he had put it there, that even such a small thing was in his power— it made Iscariot’s own lips tug upward in response. But hearing the unspoken promise in her words (then we find somewhere else to go.) and feeling the resolve beneath the bay dun’s gentle touch…it moved him in ways that were too deep to show. Roisin would stay with him; they would stay together. And for as long as she wanted these things, he would not be alone. Exhaling his breath in a gentle huff, the perlino leaned into his friend, the rigid lines of his body softening again.

Ever since Faolain and Rivaini had found their soulmates in one another, Iscariot had felt...not abandoned, perhaps, but afraid. And it wasn’t that he thought that either of them cared about him less. It was just that— even in the silence of his thoughts, the gentle-natured male couldn’t explain. Things hadn’t changed, not truly, but somehow they were still different. Somehow, that place he’d always taken between the two creatures who formed the nucleus of his family felt smaller. And he couldn’t bring himself to force his way into it again, to tangle up the bright threads of their happiness with his loneliness. To risk destroying something so beautiful and baffling and enviable that it left his own heart aching.

He’d never been so desperate to have something that he wasn’t even sure he wanted.

Roisin was a blessing in many ways, but it was the ease of their interactions that the Andalusian stallion appreciated when she spoke again. Smoothing over the edges of his thoughtful silence, and swinging the pendulum of their conversation back to lightheartedness. Laughing warmly as he fell into step at the young mare’s shoulder, Iscariot rolled his pale blue eyes in a parody of the expression that his companion had used countless times before. "Roi, I’ve been your friend long enough to know what that smile means. You’re not going to let them turn us away. You’ll just out-stubborn them until they give in, just like you do with me." Though the words might have sounded harsh from another’s lips, in Iscariot’s warm soft voice— a note of laughter quivering just beneath it— they were nothing more than another good-natured jibe.

Like a mask built from words, he concealed how deeply he cared with his teasing.

The ground began to slope gradually upward beneath their hooves, and the trees thinned out until shafts of sunlight speckled their coats. It wasn’t the same as the Ridge, but resembled their old home just enough to coax a nostalgic sigh from between his pink lips. "You almost expect to see it here...the bright feathers, the flowers everywhere. The mob of foals ready to terrorize you." He chuckled again, memories briefly flooding his mind. But after a moment he banished them, focusing his attention on Roisin instead. On the one piece of the Ridge he could still claim to hold— besides the sun-faded feather that still clung to his mane. "Do you think this’ll feel like home to you someday? That maybe, someday, we’ll go back and—" Iscariot fell silent for a moment, swallowing the strange tangle of emotions that had caught in his throat.

"—and while we’re there, we’ll see this place everywhere we look?"