the path to enlightenment
A R I S H O K
is paved with ignorance
"I do not lead."
Arishok cuts across the mare's words, his deep voice jagged again with the serrated edge of irritation. His expression is mulish, his lips curled in distaste as he is forced to repeat himself; there is nothing he dislikes more than ears that are, for all intents and purposes, deaf to the world around them. Next to sight, hearing was the most vital of their senses; the knowledge that could be gained through an attentive pair of ears was vast, perhaps infinite. Arishok's own red-tipped ears point towards the ashqaad female, though his gaze has long since left her. Staring out across the landscape with a stubborn set to his jaw, the stallion huffs a sigh of resignation. Very well, then - he would have to explain the way of things.
"Like you, I follow. There is a path that each of us is destined to tread, and my own has led me to help others find their purpose and path. But that does not make me one of your ashqaad kings; I merely show one their purpose, I do not choose it....and I am as much a servant to the whims of fate as any other."
Perhaps, if she had truly been guided here, then this was a concept that would be understood. In any case, the speech served to ease the tension in the air, and Arishok allowed his brown gaze to drift back to the basran who had wandered into his lands, his eyes warmer than they had been. It could not be simple, he knew - any more than it was easy for him to understand the ways of the ashqaad. They were like two different entities; sun and moon, sky and earth. Occasionally they would touch and coexist, their habits overlapping, but generally the talsaad were an isolated people who protected their own fiercely. It was fortunate for Galaxia that his years of travel had worn the roughest of his edges down; for all that he had been irritated and blunt, Arishok was not unkind.
"The desert sings only to those who are worthy. It is not a forgiving land, and few can see the beauty of it."
The stallion responds, gently, to the mare's statement of fondness for the Dunes. Now this is something he can comprehend; Arishok, too, has always been a creature of the desert. There was beauty in its simplicity, in the way each dune curved gently to form the ribs of the land. Surely the heart of the earth beat below the very sands that they stood upon - it was a steady rhythm he could feel thrumming through his own veins as his eyes dip closed briefly, his ashen skin enjoying the tingle of a whimsical breeze that stirs the glittering sands around them.
a bloodstained gray stallion
standing proud at 16.2 hands and
following the ways of his warlander ancestors
for nine years and counting
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