Hideaway Strath he walks the field at night

whoops, i wrote you a novel. :0 no need to match the length! ♥

her whisper-tell, inadvertently confirming winterbane's own contemplations that saying he'd rather spent the time with lotte than without her was easier said than done. the tundrian has the ability to be able to take a objective step back and see that even if he would have had the time with lotte that it wouldn't have ever been enough. that her untimely death would still be just as unfair as it was to him now ...if not more-so. perhaps, as she says, he is a lucky one. lucky because he'd been incredibly young and he hadn't been present for anything but the aftermath here and now.

wintersbane looks to her once more, glacial gaze assessing but more gentle than they'd been in some time as he contemplates her. she speaks as if from experience and the tundrian is undoubtedly curious. he shifts his weight and draws in a soft breath of air to inquire but catches the words last minute before they can slip from his tongue. asking her would be incredibly invasive and though the tundrian's manners are often misplaced most days he doesn't wish to pry. if she wanted to tell him, she would ...but he reminds himself that they are ultimately strangers despite this moment shared between them.

it takes wintersbane a long moment for her words to truly sink in, and when they do they are processed with a twitch of an ear and a soft furrow of his brow in quiet contemplation. if she calls his mother beautiful based off of his appearance does that mean, by proxy, she is calling him beautiful too? wintersbane has always been a vain beast — strange, he thinks in those rare moments he contemplates it at all, for a warrior whose guaranteed to bear a few scars in his lifetime — and he can't help but preen in acceptance the compliments she offers him.

pride and vanity have always been masters of the tundrian and they control him now like a puppet on a string as he steels his shoulders in an attempt to humbly accept her compliments while the slight puff of his chest gives away that he enjoys hearing them more than he's presently willing to admit ...though her eyes are averted from him ( as to which he's almost glad for ). he contemplates offerings words of gratitude for her compliments but decides that it might sound like something an a-hole might do ( not that he can't be a certified a-hole™ because he definitely can be ) so he accepts them further with a soft noise of gratitude.

on the topic of his mother, however, he offers simply: "she was a queen among men." in a quiet muse. wintersbane'd always held lotte in high regard and her death merely made her something of a patron saint to him. he will tell his children stories of her; of the legendary soturi, the queen of nightingales, matriarch of their family. in this way, she will be immortalized and with any luck she will never be forgotten ...by the children of his loins, at the very least.

whether her gaze returns to him or not, wintersbane offers her a soft smile then, appreciative of her presence. there is an unexplainable sort of kinship he feels towards her. any discomfort he might've felt at the beginning has slowly been ebbed away. of course, caution always remains, to some degree: he's a warrior, after all — and though it's been quite some time since he's brushed up on those skills he was a pretty damn good one, if he said so himself — but he doesn't feel the pin-prickle of hostility that has lingered within him for so long. "i'm called wintersbane." he offers her his name first, a rare occurrence. he had an unspoken rule of thumb that he gave his own name after the other(s) in the conversation gave theirs first ...if he gave it at all.