Fell slinked back to the Bay in the early hours of the morning, exhausted and bristling with frustration. The Lagoon stallion had caused him to lose that black mare, a slight he would not soon forget. He didn’t even really care about the woman — he had been drawn in by the chiseled lines of her face and body, and the unblemished black of her coat, but he would probably forget about her in a few days — but the rage he had felt when that roan colt had interrupted him would be burning in his throat for some time. He stamped the boy’s face into his mind, and used the anger to fuel his swim home.

There was no chance of sleep now, he knew, as the rising sun glittered off the shallow waves that parted around his inky legs. He shook the bitter seawater from his coat, but he did not yet ascend the beach to the snowy forests and mountains of his home. Instead, he plowed through chest-high surf, allowing the efforts of pushing his feathered hooves through the tide to slowly erode at the monster that frothed and writhed within him. He had to get it out somehow; Fell knew it was fruitless to be this enraged, but he couldn’t help it, and he didn’t want to risk taking it out on any of his small herd. He worried that his resolve might weaken if one of the mares stood in front of him, so he kept himself out in the shallows, where he was less likely to be approached.

In any case, the pacing was doing its job well enough, and soon the Marwari stallion was not so much crashing through the waves as simply wading through them. His body ached with fatigue, and his eyelids grew heavy even with the rising sun. He could still see the Lagoon stallion’s face behind his eyes, but he cared a little less about him with every wave that rushed around his thighs. His breath still came heavily from flared nostrils, but it was no longer purely from ill-contained fury. He was just… tired.

Fell knew that he would not have made such a mess of things if he had only been able to speak. Even if it had all gone wrong, he wouldn’t feel this trapped if he could just say the magical words ‘fuck off.’ He felt like a failure; like an animal.

He was an animal. Nothing more.

The waves did not stop their relentless battering of the Bay’s beach, but eventually, Fell stopped fighting them. He slowed to a halt, and his head dipped until his velvet black muzzle nearly touched the seafoam that swirled around him. His golden eyes began to close, and he drifted into an uneasy half-sleep, lulled by the sighing of the ocean.

FELL

stallion. 16hh. black. marwari x. Rougaru x visurix.