Desreal: renata -- there's nobody else but me.

He stutter-steps away, head thrown aggrievedly to the sky and the leafy branches canopying above them; this, he thinks, won’t be much fun, as he sees her eyes flutter down to the scars across her chest and the wariness she holds: I’m sorry, she thinks, but he can’t hear, and even if he could, it wouldn’t matter. There is the eternally pained line of his lip, black and smoky, that he turns to her, grey eyes solemn, as his crest bends and flexes like the stallion he is and one ear flicks towards her. A frown crosses his lips deftly, replaced by a wry and exaggerated smile: “my father,” he says, “was a scholar too.” What he doesn’t elaborate on – that he hates his father, or, that he hated him, doesn’t need to be said; it’s there anyway, in his mind she can read, and burning in his star-fire eyes. She has hurt him – she hurts him even now, simply by being, simply by making him into the beast he likes to pretend he is not.

But he softens like he always does, stepping away from her and to the trees that blossom beneath his touch even in cold winter. Thorns grow like thickets in his mane and flowers blossom from his lips to fall, ice-hard, to the ground. For moments he stands and sheds his elements, all bracken and moss and dandelions, ice and water, and the congregation of them, before turning a sober expression back to the over-curious mare. “I am quite mad,” he says suddenly, inclining his head, and for the first time something like an amused smile dances across his lips, teasing – but it is gone quickly, replaced by the frown of an overburdened child.

“It,” he tells her, “is like nothing, at least not now. What is worse is the burden others,” you “put upon me because of it. I think it was difficult for my father. I think it spoke to him, and he was usually too old and too weak to disobey it. But I hear only silence.”

A shrug ripples across his shoulder, delicate. He’s telling the truth – she will know this, and he offers the fact vehemently and openly in his mind; he is used to this, the one-sided conversations others have with his subconscious. What he doesn’t know, what he doesn’t think he wants to know, is just how long that truth will last. “Any more questions?” he asks, perhaps bitterly, but there is still something of a gentled smile on his lips. “Something, perhaps, that actually matters?”

But he doubts it, and bitterly turns his lips back to the bark of the aging trees.