The past weeks had been a whirlwind. Çiçek had kept herself pretty busy in the Ridge, wandering the many footpaths and secret trails. Though this wasn’t the actual place of all her parents’ stories, she saw them anew in her mind’s eye, and her imagination ran wild picturing their golden hides ducking in and out of the undergrowth. Their courtship weighed even more heavily on her consciousness as the season turned to autumn, marked only in these tropical lands by the reappearance of her estrus. With her cycle, too, returned thoughts of the whitesplashed stallion from the Cove. Surely he had been kept busy, what with his many aforementioned progeny. She didn’t hold him in her mind constantly… but in brief moments, between flirting with soft spoken Faolain and chasing Rivaini up and down the coast, she found herself puzzling time and time again over the mystery that was Solomon.

Even now, as she picked carefully along just inside the edges of the trees along the rocky coast, she was contemplating making the swim to Tinuvel. The palomino was chewing over the logistics of such a trip when a call reached her fluted ears, deep and masculine and -

Olmaz. Çiçek rose her head in disbelief, a smirk breaking over her pink lips. Speak of the devil. The mare angled her steps towards the source of the noise, wondering at the odds. In truth, she hadn’t thought Solomon would come to the Ridge, not after his sudden coldness in the Meadow. It had seemed, at first judgement, that Solomon disliked the company of the land’s black guardian, once learning of her title, but perhaps she was mistaken. Çiçek was smart enough to know that anyone coming with ill intent would move in silence, instead of announcing their presence so blatantly. What - or, perhaps more appropriately, who - was he after?

She saw him before he saw her, shrouded as she was behind the undergrowth. He was different than when she’d last laid eyes on him, all hard muscle and strong lines, and her amber gaze raked hungrily over his form with nobody to watch her do so. The heat of the tropics enveloped them, yes, but a different sort of heat stretched its long fingers within her gut. It saw the stallion on the beach, smelled his piney musk mixed with the salt of the ocean breeze, and reached for him, craving something only his touch could provide.

Without another second’s hesitation, Çiçek broke free of the trees. Her golden hide glimmered in the warm sun, bright against the verdant backdrop of the jungle. She trotted down the slope of the beach to meet him, making sure to bend the bow of her neck and sway the curves of her spotted hips just so that they might catch his wandering eye. Her platinum white mane and high-carried tail spilled over her skin like waterfalls, catching the light and studded pink with petals from a recent roll in a patch of plumeria blooms. The wind shifted, bringing the heady scent of flowers, and of her, out towards the sea - and to the stallion that awaited her, standing politely as the surf tickled his fetlocks.

“Well, hello, yakışıklı,” she called, her sugared voice high in her throat. “Come to see us so soon?”

Her eyes sparkled - with mischief, flirtation, or both, she wasn’t sure. When the ocean brushed against her hooves and he was finally within reach, she extended her slim neck to offer him an exchange of breaths.

“I thought you had grown tired of our antics, what with how quickly you left us the last time.” She was teasing him - verbally and, she knew, in other, more instinctual ways - but her comments held truth to them, along with a subtle probing question. Çiçek thought she had the King of the Cove pinned, but his appearance in the Ridge took her by surprise. She would have her fun today, this she knew, but if she could see a bit more of the complete picture of who Solomon actually was, well… that was simply a bonus.