Moonsong Glacier Snowdrops

The panther was a good listener, even if he was a much better speaker. The look in her eyes sobered him further, and his expression was calm and grave while he turned her words over in his mind.

She asked after his own mind before he'd put his thoughts together, and his eyes were clouded momentarily with thoughts of both their situations.

"I feel foolish," he admitted after that beat of preoccupation. "But hopeful. Foolishness can be cured."

He had more to say, but he had finally processed the thoughts and feelings she'd shared with him, and so he spoke on that instead.

"I do not think your dreams are too big," he told her, his expression serious once more. "They have not yet come to pass — but you are on the path, Simbelmyne. Happiness does not come only in the culmination of dreams. We must find it too along our paths."

He looked toward the coast, though he could not see it from where they stood.

"I think," he said, and then he stopped, his ears flying back. Eventually, though, his burnished gaze cut back to her face. "I think that I should have tried harder," he told her. "Many things got in the way, but there is a part of me — a part that has been reluctant to see you with another man. Even knowing I could not be all that you dreamed of."