Desreal: putting to sleep a lion;

Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.
She cringes against him; his clamor shrill and indignant and she can feel the hurt behind it - a hurt that bids her lips to touch the base of his knee as she bends her head beneath his strident hate. She cares for him as one cares for a bird wounded and unable to fly; her lips press here and there - to ankle, to the shadowed flesh of his armpit and her lips smooth back a patch of fur gone awry as though to soothe these parts of him is to soothe that hate that festers, an ugly wound in him. “You are - you still can be,” she insists quietly as her mouth rises to his barrel and nips there, lightly.

“Not friendless… not alone… you can overcome this.” she is careful to not further spark his ire but she is firm too, learning of herd and home even as he insists in a hate for these things. She cannot understand the hurt that plagued him - betrayal, she knew of that but in a different form from his and she tries to communicate to him that a rogue’s existence can be a lonely existence too. She has gone days before without seeing the face of a horse - always deer glimpsed and bear too, never horse, but owl and fox and boar. Acacia quiets and lets him tire and free himself of it all and all in the same breath.

She smoothes tangles from his night-sodden mane and tastes the mountain-musk of him on her tongue; still a subtle flavor of belonging that she thinks cannot be easily shed and forgotten and she knows all about forgetting. “I have all that I need and all that I want,” she answers with an ease unbecoming of her, an oft-uneasy creature. But there was truth to it for she had love and a lover, and she had a friend and the beginnings of herd and home though she recounts his caution against such and asks of him, in return, this question: “Tell me why you warn me to be wary of home (and here, her question becomes two) and tell me why you seem so ready to forsake this Andarin and the hierarchy of it.” That word - hierarchy; she does not know it but it moves across her tongue as if she should and thinks that perhaps, it is a form of herd.