Meadow

He cannot stop the call that passes his lips, crossing the strait to the deciduous island barring the horizon. It is out before he has even the conscious thought regarding his longing to see that young thing he’d met here in the past.

He does not know why here, why call out, other than his yearning to follow the lovely little dancer had only grown in the time he spent seeking other fulfillment. Naive, but not without a willingness to reach out towards newness and those things her spirit craved. It was an intoxicating combination.

That is when he heard it.

His ears track her first before his head snaps to look at her, noting from where her voice alights on the night breeze. His cream mane blocks her by strands and he tosses his head a single time more to get a clear view of her. He doubts it at first, but then the moon pulls past it’s shroud of clouds and there she stands. It feels like a dream, though not for the delirious romantic one might want to ascribe the simile. It feels that he called her presence into being and it should have been impossible. He doubts his eyes, if it were not for his ears - he might have thought himself run mad with the season.

"Lasy-- Pilar..." he almost calls her by his endearment from a year ago, but does change it last minute with the awareness that his own infatuation had left the print of that name on his mind. She could very well take such a name as to mean he did not recall her own. His hooves her hesitant, stunned for a moment that she was here - same time of year, same lost look … only now without the spirited galloping to give him excuse to chase her down.

"I had thought fate too cruel to let me see you again in the light of the moon," he breathes, "Perhaps it is you that it is cruel to." Sure, the self-deprecation does not fit him, even so far as coloring his grin as puckish, but the tone of his voice does not bathe in the same wild flirtation that came from the frat boy years he was so recently grown out of.

His body is thick, strong, and there is a slight quiver to one shoulder as he keeps himself from approaching as he might have with more assurance of reciprocation. "You look...." he starts, stepping nearer to her with a sudden halt to both speech and approach, "Lasya, you are troubled again." Now his face is pulled into concern and there is a small part of his instinctual self that looks for the cause of her dismay like it might crumple it beneath his hooves like an asp. "I am hungry for your company," he says, blunt and yearning, "give me that blessing and I will be the ears your spirit needs."

He is close enough now, having started his walk again before he made his request, that he might finish closing the space with ease if she cooperated - but he stops himself from reaching his muzzle out to her. It hangs in a half-life of affection, ready to perish without reciprocation if she desired nothing to do with him.

His chest clenches, his teeth grit a denial of the thought, but still he has learned that not all sadness or trouble may be fed to lust to ease it’s passing.