Her body has the grace of silk, twisting like a petal on the breeze, pirouetting away from his impending danger with ease. She is like the wind itself given form and his awe is apparent in his naming her Beautiful One. It is perhaps a little forward of him, betrothed as his heart should have been to the long lost princess of the mighty ally of his homeland. She was reputed to be of good breeding, of good form, of good mind-- but all three of those told him nothing of how she was of good heart. It had itched him to betroth to someone so utterly absent of mention in heart. Could a stifling First Wife truly have helped him rule? Would she have understood this stallion galloping across the dunes with so reckless an abandon as this.

Surely, well-bred and well-minded and well-formed princesses cared little for wildness and freedom.

But this, this wild desert rose with the enchanting eyes and the veil of nighttime depths whipping about her legs and face, she might -- or so his hammering heart still high from the race says. She looks ready to unleash a maelstrom on him for his impudence, and she’d be right to, but his words soothe the flex that might have meant bared teeth from her lips. Immediately she knows what he is, what his color would mean to his people - and hers if she were raised as her looks implied (though he does realize since coming here that not all who bore the Desertborn figure were truly of The People). Immediately she recognizes his words and her face turns to something like surprise - had he truly found one of His Kind?

Friend, she calls him, and his heart soars with the familiarity - though her tongue was a younger one he only knew as part of the Common Tongue in his home and the dialect of his home’s dearest Ally. He had been taught it early, had used it freely as his own Noble dialect had been denied him for use among any but the royal family and the highest ranking of his court.

Shu be blessed, though, she was beauty beyond dunes in starlight. The desert fell away from him and only her rosey color and honeyed voice held him still to this earth. He would have traded all the freedom in the world for her in those first moments. “ailtaqaa jayidaan! It is rare to hear my own tongue from the mouth of strangers these days!” He shares in her exultation and greeting.

She is overt in her admiration in the way many mares were known to do, most often when safe from advances under the protection of their fathers and brothers and uncles, though he hadn’t seen anyone to have given her such an ease with him. He values it, takes it to heart to mean that she senses his goodness and that he was not a djinn to make away with her to some ill end or another. He rather thought he’d geld anyone who might have, in fact.

"I miss my old home less when my feet skip across these dunes." He smiles, mirroring the brilliance of her own countenance. "I hope I did not disturb your run. I know what it is to run free across the sand and I would not wish to deprive you of joy.” She is well-spoken, even-tempered for one of their kind, and he wonders if it is because she had come from a home like he had - coddled and fed from the very teat of Hathor herself. She does not speak of them, though, and so he remains silent in sharing the Mother Tongue.

Her approach is met with a sidling step of his own to bring them broadside to broadside, an extra crane to his arched neck offering a subtle gift of exchanging breaths very much as though those invisible fathers, brothers, and uncles had been looking on. In their proper language, he speaks, “Nothing the night could offer me would be so refreshing as a walk with you might give..”

It is overt too, offering her familiarity for the familiarity she had offered first. “The Desert could steal the mirage of your splendor from me and I would simply be grateful for witnessing it’s wondrous canvas given form.”

There is a part of him that whispers that he had a betrothed to give such lovely words to, that his First Wife would scorn his giving such adoration to another, but then he remembers she is far from him and that he might never have to trouble himself on her account again. They were too far from home, he and his brothers, for that past to find them here.