Falls

She backs away, and for a moment his steps falter. Her words roll off her tongue cooly, collected - and he is not asked to leave as he expected. Perhaps his social skills aren't as rusty as he thought, he pondered internally, glancing in her direction once more and pulling his body out of the calm of the water to let the sun dry his pelt slowly.

He listens as she talks and when she mentions she'd never seen this place before his attention is piqued - "You're not from here?" he enquired politely, biting his lip before he could cross her invisible boundaries and ask more than she was willing to share. Asche's own complicated past was like a many layered spider web sprawled across this cluster of islands - memories of Tinuvel danced across his mind momentarily, icy and unforgiving, before darting to the humid climate of The Ridge and the women he'd had there in his adolescence. He'd been a boy king, a teen leader - what was he now? He held no lands and, essentially, knew nobody anymore. For the first time the only ties he had to this place were the tethers in his heart and the people he'd left behind.

"Forgive my nosiness - these islands have housed so many, it's not often I've met someone who hasn't visited these famous falls before." He smiled and tossed his mane over his muscular neck with one swift movement, hoping to lighten the mood and appear more nonchalant. He didn't mention that, for a brief moment, he'd wondered if they perhaps shared blood - if he was not so dominantly pale their coats would bear a similar colour, and that one glassy pale eye they shared reminded him so much of his fathers - and it was no secret that Array's gene pool was spread far and wide. But no, these traits weren't rare enough to only belong to descendants of the famous king of the cove who died as he lived - fast and hard.

Quietly and tentatively so as not to provoke the mare, he took a few strides towards her. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" He added in hushed tones, "I always end up coming back."