As she stepped towards him, he moved to instinctively take a step back, a pale forehoof lifting and hovering, undecided, before shakily pressing back down in the same imprint it had started in. He wasn't good at being perceived, and the weight of someone's eyes on his mutilated body felt like leaden weights he could not shake, more claustrophobic than the closed canopy above his head.

She was not afraid of him, which he could only attribute to the fact that she had not seen him properly yet. And would not, if he was careful.

"Wulfric." He said after a moment, having had to actively remember what he had been named back when he had been a boy, full of promise. The favored son of Paradise's leaders. A potential heir for the might of Rougaru's legacy.

A sick joke to pull on a boy.

"You?" He asked a moment later, his pale muzzle flaring as he drew in a breath saturated with the sweet scent of her. She smelled of the mother jungle, of the sand she'd slept upon, of the wind and the sun and the sky. And she smelled of her sun. The memory sobered him, and he swallowed, letting the play of vines across his fetlocks remind him that he had his own home to return to. One that could not leave or stray away. One that would never promise not to hurt him, only to knife him in the back.

The jungle was always brutal, but she never hid that fact about herself.

Stallion - Young - Mutt - 16h - Silver Black Overo - Rougaru x Vanya