Ni'Srilan: The Desert: This sounds eerily like Brokeback Mountain, Kinh. Except I'm immortal.

The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

“Nah,” is the only answer he gives, the tips of his mane clinging around his neck where they got wet.

In the sun, he glows, almost like a jewel lit from within, rising starkly from the red-yellow dunes. Here, however… here it is wet, and lush, and desert wildlife scurries around the tall grasses and trees, a rare spot of life, and he appreciated it even if he did not, exactly, waste time watching its many beauties spin around him in a dizzying colorful dance.

As many young ones born of a sophistication wholly unnatural and thrice sweeter for it, Alerion is utterly blind to everything beyond his navel – and some few things of interest.

Do horses even have navels?

“I’d eat you first,” he remarks with a quirk of lips. In this light, his eyes are shadowed – perhaps by pain or a simple snare of light in mahogany-brown; when he speaks it’s absolutely seriously, voice soft. “But I wouldn’t have to. I’m immortal.”

Sure you are, darling.

Because he, much like the young and air-headed, has no fear of death. To him death is a non-issue; he has eternity before him, and all the fabulous prizes that come with being blessedly young and blessedly beautiful. Death exists, but doesn’t concern him.

That isn’t to say he wouldn’t eat this fine stranger if needed. He probably would.

Mm, pony.

“I’m assuming you aren’t from here,” he snorts; not from here is an understatement. Ignorant though he is in his youth (and, therefore, absolute disregard for everything no concerning his whims), he would have to be blind to not see the unlikelihood that this one – muddy brown, ordinary and oh-so-alluring to Alerion’s rather strange tastes, if the way his eyes scan him are anything to go about – is a child of the elements.

He isn’t. It’s written in the way he bears himself, the way he moves, the shyness that is almost unheard of among his peers (not that Alerion has many of them), at least among males; but Alerion knows very little of females, and has no wish to. “And that your life was so very different from mine,” he considers in an afterthought.

Then again, Alerion’s very existence is pretty remarkable in and of itself.

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of eros and of dust