Desert

’You didn’t.’ she murmurs, her voice strained and tight as though there was more lingering just beyond the reach of her tongue. A wolfish grin tugs at his whiskered lips as he continues to keep pace with her, watching as the painted mare tenses under the realization that he had no intentions of leaving her to her own devices for the time being. Her backward turned ears are not entirely filled with rage, (something he has seen more than once when chasing down the likes of Titania and others across the islands) however, neither is she pleased. Instead there is a sort of steady medium she tries to keep, as if fighting an internal battle to keep her displeasure and disappointment from surfacing together or separately.

’What is there to say?’ He had expected at least a little fight from her, some fire or hell at this point he might not have even minded the tears. Yet the game of cat and mouse he tried to taunt her into is met with indifference and well… nothing. It is a curiosity that reminds him greatly of Zjeena and the way the pretty Fjord mare washed up on his shores in paradise with dignity and poise despite the obvious displeasure. She had not burned him with harsh words or lashed out with blunt hooves and teeth. Instead, Zjeena had merely accepted her fate and made the best of it, something that had eventually brought them closer than he ever expected they might be. She had merely been a conquest in the beginning, a way to teach the damned Liland a lesson. How was he to know that her sensibility and calm demeanor would manage to contain the fires that burned within him? ’You have not asked me anything.’

For the first time in years, the silver beast finds his steps stuttering beneath the illusion of his lost lover. Though the pretty painted mare shares no resemblance to his Zjeena, still, it is her words…. Her voice that falls from his captives lips. ”Zjeena.” the name lingers like a long dormant prayer on his lips, the beast cowered into submission beneath the power of her memory. Ice drenches his soul, freezing him into place beneath the resignation in her green eyes, eyes that he remembers as the deepest rich chocolate brown.

Then she turns from him with a shrug of her shoulders and like that the spell is broken. Feeling exposed, defenseless… the beast snorts a hard breath. Large head shakes back and forth to rid the all to real memory from his mind and eyes and once more, the white and rust splashed mare meanders before him. Unnerved, he tries to focus himself in the present and force away the all to real memory back into the shadowed parts of his mind where he kept them under lock and key. Instead of Zjeena, it is only the painted mare of Temblor’s who scents the wind now. The ghost or manifestation, whatever it was that plagued him only moments ago is gone.

Relinquishing a quivering breath, the silver bay stallion takes a step forward, closing the gap of space between himself and the girl. It did not take a mind reader to figure out that she was searching for water to drink. The way her lips pressed together and the flexing of the muscles in her cheek told him that the same thirst that had begun to grow more pressing in his own throat was present in her own. ”Come on….” he growls, attempting to regain the almost cocky composure he had lost only moments ago. He trots towards her, snaking his neck forward to allow his gray peppered muzzle to bump against her ivory hip in encouragement. ”The oasis is this way.”