Ahimsa felt dormant.
It was a word he’d learned from his mother, one quiet evening when the sun had turned the Prairie into a sea of gold. He’d long forgotten how it’d come up in conversation – nor did he really remember much of anything they’d spoken about (to Ahimsa, there’d never been much substance to it, and he knew, he always knew that where his mother’s heart truly lay was with her sister), but he remembered this one word.
He’d only been in the Desert a short time, and he’d drifted, a largely silent observer. What may have come across as shyness was really just introspection. He knew the names of all those living here. Ahimsa had even learned the name of one who was absent, taken from this place that was her home. The black and white boy was always listening. Darshan had told him that there was much to be learned if one were open to it.
(It was the trees! The trees fell dormant in the winter, sleeping through the bitter cold, coming back to life again in the spring.)
Whenever Cain seemed at peace, not busy attending to any of his family, Ahimsa would approach and trail alongside his father, eyes wide open, taking in any knowledge shared with him, more often than not accepting it all in silence. He was not so much a creature of questions as he was a wondering soul. His mind often turned to all that he had experienced in his short life – lacking a paternal influence for much of his foalhood, watching as what was meant to be a family was torn to pieces from within and scattered to the wind. Ahimsa thought about this a lot – about what had happened to the old herd in the Prairie. He wondered about the why.
The independent wonderer also did a lot of wandering. Today, he was looking for Akello (because he’d found something, in his contemplation in the early hours of the morning, that he wanted to say to his brother, and he was quite ready to say it now), but before he found his brilliantly coloured kin, he came across one of his half-brothers, racing across the sand. Before he realised what he was doing, the piebald boy found himself launching forwards, scattering sand behind him, and he surged across the distance to meet up with the shadow colt – Carbon - turning to run beside him. But running across sand was a whole lot harder than it looked.
Ahimsa squealed in alarm as one of his hooves gave beneath him and sent him tumbling in a sand heap. As he coughed the dust from his lungs, the young male found himself largely unharmed. Slanting a sheepish look towards the other colt as he drew near again, all Ahimsa said to Carbon was: “It’s different here. In the Prairie, the ground is solid beneath your hooves. But the grasses hide much, so even when I raced across the plains there, sometimes I still fell.” A hint of a smile pulled at the corners of Ahimsa’s lips briefly at the memory, of frolicking with Akello and his friend Jordan. Reminded of his brother, Ahimsa felt his focus drifting, and gently reined it back in. There would be time, later, to find Akello. For now, Ahimsa would do his best to be present in this moment, and hopefully learn a bit more about Carbon.
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