Her fear was palpable, but it no longer made him hunger as it had the entire drive here. The exhaustion wore on him too and, as the girl collapsed to the ground, the Lagoon Maurauder yawned and shook his head, neck, down his body, hair rustling as it stirred in the air around him. He settled with a long, hard snort that just felt good to do, then softly pushed his air out in a sigh and glanced around them, mostly clueless to the crisis she was currently processing. This was what he had been taught to do (mostly) and with so much of his life having been so unstable for so long, finally succeeding felt wonderful.

His lazy gaze finally made their cursory glance around what he could see of his clearing and then he started trudging upward, slowly trailing in the direction she’d collapsed. Peyote mostly looked upward at the sky, noticing how the colors were turning, sundown must’ve been close. He wondered what she might think of the little glowing bugs that’d come out in the dark and flicker here and there throughout the depths of the swamp around them. When he was a foal he’d loved to chase them and try to snap them out of the air. It’d been so long since he’d done that…

Peyote’s gaze flicked downward toward her, envisioning the two of them like careless foals kicking their hooves up in the dark mud and narrowly missing colliding with the trees (or one another) as they snapped at the little light bugs. His heart stirred with a new kind of excitement. It was different from the one that’d made him transfix on forcing her here, but still was similar in some strange way.

It was only then he noticed her trembling and panting. His brow turned heavy with concern and he huffed gently at her, as if to ask: What’s wrong? The maddening thing was honesty was clear-as-day across his face. Peyote could not fathom her continued fear of him. Now that she was here she was home, this was what she was born for and doing what he had done was what he was born for. Slowly he lowered his head, hovering it somewhere near her face, breathing soft breaths of warm, tired sighs across her face. He smelled her, the salty streak of tears and the bitterness of fear and he rumbled somewhere from deep in his chest as if to soothe her.