Common

VaLkA

mare / six / chestnut pangare / yakut / 13.0 hh

For Valka, sleep was as elusive as the skeins of morning mist that drifted into her home from the sea.

Tinuvel was a land of dusk and dormancy throughout its long winters, but its summers were as vibrant as they were brief. After being all but absent during the coldest months, the sun suddenly became the arctic climate’s constant companion—leaving the Bay’s residents with only a brief interlude of darkness as a respite from its glare. Yet somehow, it was these nights that felt endless to the red skjaldmær; the brief hours that were filled with nothing save for silence and reflection that were her greatest bane. If Valka’s consciousness was a rock in the sea, then slumber was the ocean that crept slowly up its sides with the shifting of tides—but never buried it. No matter how close she might come to the sweet escape that dreams offered, the dark waters of oblivion always receded before she was carried away.

Finally, she could not bear it any longer. The Bay had always been the Yakut’s point of pride; a physical representation of the hard-fought freedom that she’d won. But lately, it was beginning to feel a lot more like a prison—as if the stone walls of the Cove’s mountains and the dark, pebbled shore of her home were pressing in upon her relentlessly. And so Valka retreated from their suffocating grasp and into the waves, embracing the buoyancy the saltwater lent her small body.

Without a specific purpose in mind, she swam south until the Crossing loomed on the horizon—a great leviathan with fangs of rock jutting up into the heavens. The pony-sized creature clambered ashore with a grunt of effort, her stout furry body made sleek and heavy with the weight of the water that clung to her coat. But beyond a perfunctory shake of her body, Valka took no pains to escape it. As brutally as the sun beat upon her back, she would be dry soon enough—and if the ember-colored hairs clung together in irregular tufts, then she would tolerate it with the same resigned patience with which she had come to face any other trial.

For now, it felt good enough to breathe air that was not her own, and to move without feeling the weight of countless eyes upon her.

Following the line of the shore, the chestnut traveled at a steady lope until she was well beyond the Peak’s boundaries. Only then did the last remnants of tension ease from Valka’s expression, and her short limbs veer to carry her inland. Not long after, she arrived in the midst of a well-populated meadow—but here, at least, the memories that arrived in the wake of its recognition were not muddled. Here, she could claim a sphere of earth as her own and stand with one hind leg cocked and both ears drooping contentedly out to the side. Here, she might have even embraced true sleep at least—were it not for the vaguely familiar shape that approached her from the forest’s shadows, the broad plane of white that marked its face forcing a gasp of recognition from her lips.

“Bjorn?” The short mare breathed in disbelief, vulnerability peering briefly out from dark eyes that were normally unfathomable.