[REE-gehl]
✮ dhaniya ✮
[ varajakshi ]
▻ mṛgaśira ♀ (x varajakshi) ◅
Those of the Sadim had only scarcely known the things that Caria and Yıldırım experienced. As for Rigel, he hadn’t even realized how much his not-son had experienced in loss before he had come to them in the Sadim. Another wife, and he wondered if there had even been children, in his young life out in the midlands.
Twice blessed. Twice finding love and there had even been talk about Hathor stealing Nepthys’ loom, sewing souls torn apart by unfated death to another so they might learn to live again. The new love would never be the old, but it could be it’s own. He looks at Yıldırım with a new kind of respect and sympathy. He had distant wives, yes, but they breathed in his reach if he sought them out.
"I cannot even begin to fathom how, Rigel, but I am convinced that if I were to break Nashira’s heart, I would be breaking my own." The confirmation, affirmation, in Yıldırım’s posture, words, tone - it makes Rigel warm in his chest. The tremble in the other male’s voice is valid - warranted. A Princess setting her sights on a man, much less a formerly married man who had been stripped of what was likely a whole family… no. Nothing to do with the former marriage, though in Miran belief it made him unsuitable as a Crowned Prince to have had any wife before the Crowned Princess’s marriage.
They were not Miran anymore. Love had as much sway in the eyes of this new form of a kingdom. Purity of soul no longer was viewed directly beside purity of body. It was of course hard to be rid of it entirely, but at least in this instance Antares had specified that judging Azalais for her former life was inappropriate and holding anything against Dhaniya for being un-Arabian and formerly a concubine was wrong… which meant that Yıldırım could not be held in contempt over a life he had lived before the Sadim either.
Instead he smiles at his Sobek, now more aware than ever that such protection would no longer be his in a matter of a year at best. "Nephew," he begins, warming his own heart by being able to address him so familiarly, "If your heart is truly with that wild niece of mine - then there will be no matter too great for my Brother or my Sister-in-Law, I think. No one has been more aware of her eye ever wandering to you..."
He truly laughs under his breath at this, "I do not know if you realize how many times she has been caught posing by the waterside, adjusting herself when you are rumored to pass by, eyeing you from afar and talking to Aldebaran… of all people… about how to woo your sister, if he’d help her woo you. The two have been in cahoots since she has been a yearling." He grins, amused by that alliance because neither of the two horses - even the full grown stallion - had been very mature to be advising anyone.
"It began very childish, only a crush, but I think that she has grown nervous at your continued distance." He looks calmly to his Sobek and tilts his head, "I cannot say that you ought to give in too swiftly, though… A woman must always be pursued, given a chance to be shy in the face of affection - otherwise in time she will wonder if you have been forced." He does have a knack, this night-cosmos splashed brother, for playing ‘the game’ of Love well. "One time, it would be interesting to see what she would feel if you came and plainly told her you would be taking her to walk chaperoned along the southeastern shoreline." He chuckles, a grown man nearly giggling at the imagery such a blatant interest from her forever-reticent crush would lead to in the usually overly bold Nashira.
Then he looks fully at Yıldırım himself. He searches for the stallion’s feelings, whether the tremble had gone or if joy had begun to leak in, or if the whole situation still left him dumbfounded as when he confessed he too felt for the brilliant red bay girl who he had drawn the fawning of since almost only a month after her birth.
OF SALEM’S EASTERN DUNES
▻ nine years - arabian - sooty bay rabicano - 15.2 hh ◅