My, my, she was an angry thing, wasn’t she? Lior blinked his blue eyes innocently at her, knowing well enough how to pretend to be kinder than he was. He imagined the way his father would react to an angry mare, the simp that he was, and designed his own expression after it. It very much read as: Oh goodness me, please, I never mean any harm at all! Unfortunately, too, given his golden and cream colors with his big, lovely blue eyes, Lior managed to pull the look off rather well. Angelic, almost, in his beauty.
Micah’s approach complicated things further. Despite the many milling bodies in the Prairie, there was little doubt his father’s long-standing Guardian would know Lior was beginning to behave in troubling ways. He would have to do an extra good job at pretending to be innocent if he wanted to keep up this little charade which, for right now, he decided he did. Maybe Micah would report to his father what a gentleman Lior was, and Zevulun would be dumb enough to be hopeful that it was a permanent change of character. Maybe it’d even get his father off his back for a bit, so he’d be free to test some boundaries he’d been curious about poking at…
The opportunity almost made him want to smile, but Lior now understood how imperative it was he not act suspiciously. He tried to think of brothers, Jasper and Ramiel, or even his father to emulate as the perfect example of what Zevulun expected of his sons that lived in the Prairie.
The child moved closer to him and Lior lowered his pale face, glancing briefly back to catch the way the blond-haired red mare pinned her ears as the foal came closer. Because of that, he kept his hooves planted firmly where he was standing, pretending to respect whatever boundaries she had by not crowding closer to her curious daughter. At any point she was more than free to bully the girl back behind her rather than on him. Still, remembering how she hadn’t appreciated him looking at the girl before, Lior only spared the child a glance before his attention returned to the mare.
“Well, you came to the right place,” he replied with a rather gentlemanly smile (man, he was so good at this!) and a charming light to his blue eyes. “The Prairie opens its borders for any who will not bring harm to it or its current inhabitants.” Lior had overheard his father say that particular line so proudly a time or two, it was easy enough to match the candor. Really, he would have rather told her not to bother, this place was an absolute snoozefest.
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