Common

Emhyr is never sure what to expect when approaching a mare in the Commons. Some are kind and quiet, others loud and eager, and others still express fear at even the softest of greetings. This one simply pins him with her glacial gaze, the delicate cups of her ears buried beneath her mane.

The silence between them stretches, seconds passing into minutes, his words lost to the breeze that ghosts across the meadow. Emhyr stares back, wondering if he had fumbled somehow. Was she so uncomfortable with his presence? Was she sizing him up, assessing his potential as a threat? Or... oh, gods, could she even speak? The dark stallion shifts his weight, his expression tightening as discomfort begins to bloom within his breast.

'I am fine,' she intones at last. The tension that had been coiling in his gut melts away instantaneously, only to seize him again when she says, 'be on your way, stranger.'

Emhyr's lips press into a tight line, his expression briefly calcifying into something more akin to consternation before he schools it towards neutrality. The stubborn part of him - the side of him that was courtesy of his father and his own pigheadedness, the side of him he had tried and failed to outgrow - reared its head. "And if I don't?" he countered, the corner of his mouth twitching minutely upwards. There was a coolness to his voice, his ochre eyes gleaming with a mixture of mirth and defiance.