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Slender's typical home is among the gnarled branches and the long shadows, where he recedes into the patterned light and shade to the point of invisibility and where he can listen and observe without being seen.

Slender does not like being seen. The weight of the reactions of others has grown heavier still of late, in a string of successive bad encounters.

But today Slender is standing in an open grove, fully visible; he stands over a huddled, quivering foal that is just rising to its feet, and motionless, like a sentinel, the buck is alert for any intrusion. This is the time when a foal is at its most vulnerable: when they first rise to their feet, their eyes barely opened, vision blurry and just tottering off towards freedom and danger for the first time. Slender can't accompany them forever, but he can stand here, watching, while this one rises to its hooves.

After a long few minutes the foal is stumbling about on its unsteady limbs, and its lengthy legs mimic its guardian's shape, far less graceful but just as strangely stretched. It, however, will grow into its body; Slender is trapped in his.

By the time that it is moving freely, apparently oblivious to its protector--mistaking him, perhaps, for a copse of saplings, too young to realize that it is another of his kind--there is a sound in the trees, and Slender's head snaps around to sightlessly watch for danger. His nostrils distend, his ears perk, his body stiffens; beneath him the foal pauses mid-frolic, suddenly terrified.

When the cracking sound is followed by the yowling of an owlcat, Slender snaps into action. Without hesitate he starts off towards the disturbance, and the foal, startled into a bleat by the realization that his little grove of trees is in fact another of his kind, dances backwards, still unsteady, and falls onto his rear. Instinct—and perhaps a hindbrain trust, as Slender has been watching him for days, since he emerged from his sac—roots him to the spot, and Slender barely pays him a backwards glance before investigating the potential danger.

With his nose extended and his ears sharp, he catches only a whisper—no words, just the sound of a voice on the heels of the owlcat’s hissing. And so he ventures to speak, and his voice is vast and heavy as a lake, primeval, vaguely terrifying. It does not threaten, not only because it does not need to, but also because Slender is gentle at heart. He strikes out only when it is needed, which given his appearance and his innately frightening charisma isn’t often.

“Who is there?”

He steps again towards the trees; towering over the underbrush his legs move like they have too many joints, as though they were made of old wood, or stone, as though they ought to creak when they lift and step. Like a spider cautiously feeling its way across another’s web. When his face swings into view the glow of his eyes is clouded behind sealed lids, a thin membrane that gleams pinkish, like sun streaming through a hare’s ear. He is blind.

"While perhaps the most honest answer," that rumbling voice replies, "it is not very informative." He relaxes, though, and when he moves nearer his steps, although still strangely-jointed, are somehow less intimidating. He is attempting to make his presence fully known, always a tricky thing when he cannot see who his audience is. The foal lets out a tentative noise.

"My name is Slender," he offers to the permanent, smudgy darkness before his eyes--the things he can never see.

"Are you hurt?" It may take a moment to realize he is referring to the screech of the owlcat. It isn't unusual for an angry one to lash out at a Kimeti in the wrong place at the wrong time. The foal continues its plaintive noises, and one of Slender's ears swivel back, clearly keeping the little creature close to his thoughts.

Slender hesitates; why goes unsaid. But he does answer, in that long low voice like thick ice breaking. "Inasmuch," he replies, "as a new foal is ever all right."

He half-turns to go and tend to the little one, but his body language invites her to join him. His feet feel his way in front of him, like the antennae of a spotted thing crawling on a riverbed.

"This one," says Slender, "has chosen a poor place to take his first steps."

And indeed it is: exposed on all sides and close enough to some shallow pools, although he is on dry land here, that might harbor gar or some other danger to a tiny newborn. And the owlcat that's stung Frost's feet.

"I do not know how he came to be here alone. Perhaps his siblings were hidden elsewhere. Perhaps he is the only one." He sounds troubled, perhaps even guilty, inasmuch as that cthonic rumble ever conveys any emotion. It is indeed unusual to find a foal entirely by his lonesome. "Maybe some ill befell them in the cold. I hope you are not in any pain, from the owlcat. It is well you frightened it away--I had not heard it, or smelled it."

Such expressions of pain are lost on Slender, whose blind eyes can be discerned swinging to and fro beneath their ever-sealed lids. The foal lets out a little nervous chirp at the arrival of the doe, but seems comforted when Slender, a stiff-legged sentinel, again takes up his post sheltering the creature. When he has assumed watch he falls very still--so still he seems nothing but a strangely-shaped tree for a moment, motionless, until he speaks.

"Indeed he does. He has--us." The word is awkward in his mouth. It is not one that he, with his strange appearance, has frequent cause to use. And indeed, here in the center of the clearing, all distractions past, that appearance is the more marked: the weirdness of his elongated limbs, the strangeness of his tailless form, the twisting shapes of his spines like gnarled, stunted, fire-scorched branches. And that eerie, smooth, eyeless face, the sockets gleaming with a backlit glow. "You are not frightened?"

"Very few," he says after a long, long pause, "give me the opportunity to prove that. I, of course, do not know whether the people I meet are beautiful or monstrous of face. I know only voices, and words, and actions."

The foal is attempting to rise to its feet again, but Slender nudges it gently back with one of those tentative, crawling hooves. "Your voice is kind," he says, awkwardly. He is clearly unused to conversation. "I would be sorry to hear that anyone was hurt, but I am especially sorry, because your voice is very kind."