Desert

The painted stranger smiles in response to her brusque greeting, and her eyes narrow into slits.

Like the beast contained within their flesh, she knows that grin. She herself has worn it, though her most recent memory brings up flashes of emerald green and silver. It might be pretty, and it might come packaged with pretty words, but it lies, dangling a shining bauble to distract her from the knife pointed squarely between her shoulders.

Titania has learned the hard way not to trust a smile like that. It comes with a price, one she has paid several times over and will not any more. Her expression holds throughout his plea for mercy, slightly sour and extremely suspicious. After the first unspoken red flag, she has decided that his body language contains more truth about his intention than what he says ever will, and is paying less attention to what's coming out of his mouth as a result - until something catches her, snagging in her mind like her inkjet tail on a bit of desert brush.

More than a season? "And yet," she replies soon after, her words cracking in the air like a whip, "when I first came upon this place, your scent was stronger here than anyone's," even that of the mare who'd come before her. Titania scoffs.

Rougaru might not have tried to ply her like this, but he was still a far better liar.

The Desert Queen lets her words hang in the air for a moment, knowing the implications under them will fill the space between, and stews. She could chase this mongrel out now, expel him from her sanctuary like the poison she assumes he is, but she has been here for some time already, covering the ghosts of his hoofprints with her own, and they have had no issues. She won't let herself underestimate him - for all his age, and her youth, the wolf-king still beat her in their struggles for dominance, more than she cared to admit. But her thoughts, of late, have drifted far afield, and her concerns have shifted from her immediate safety towards a loftier goal.

However, she can't let this stallion have everything.

"Fine." Titania's voice is curt, but she cocks a hind hoof on its tip, relaxed even as she leaves no room for further negotiation. "I will be traveling, soon, to fetch my three children back," she continues, "from where they have been stolen to," the last words bitter on her lips. "You may stay until then, as long as you do not make trouble for me.

But when we return," she says, "be it midwinter or a year from now, you will leave my Desert peacefully." Her chin lifts, a glimpse of the roiling darkness inside her flashing in the flint of her stare upon his white-masked face. Again her silence says it all, finishing what her words will not. A promise, hidden in plain sight. Go with peace, she commands, or I will chase you to the ends of the earth, and make you regret every single slight you have committed against me and the ones I love.

"Do you understand?"