Oathsworn to Ylva
His name was lost to him. Even after such success as he’d brought his people, he’d been so long Errant and was only Errant to his Ylva, so he’d rejected the monarchy tribunes when they offered him it back in full. He was, he’d told them, now truly Errant - where before he’d been falsely accused and condemned. He was not so arrogant as to say to their faces that they’d never have truly taken the name given to him by his beautiful chestnut mother or his handsome black father. He was choosing a life on the outside of their brotherhood willingly… and therefore it was only right to retain his moniker and his title and his name. Errant. No identity, one of many who’d left Service before him and would have done and would still do after him. He did not regret or miss it in this choice. He could never have grown used to the world at large knowing him as anything so personal as his birth name.
Perhaps this is why the heathen desert beasts back home, neighboring his homeland, never handed over those names that had been given them on their first contact with the earth outside their mothers. It should be kept by those who loved you. He once fancied himself one of those Princesses, dished faces and bannered tails, small and delicate in appearance but more fiery than the deserts they inhabited. But he had come to this place and learned at once that those desert women were nothing to the women of the northern breeds. Fire that survived in spite and despite the cold, rather than softly supported by the sun. That was where he could settle his heart.
As he exits the rinsing anointing of the falls, he sees the mirage of her, exactly as his nightmares had warned him. Waned and worn, the fire dying low and barely embers. She soaks, and while if he had known the reality of her presence, he would have never, he approaches his mirage. He moves to her to heal his nightmare of such a daunting image, to stop it from tormenting him with the image of her left desolate and alone.
He approaches her in a way he had never done awake, aware, and puts a nose into her shoulder. Instantly his nostrils, burned from salt washed into them from the ocean, smell what his mind had not believed. He pulls away instantly, a sharp yelp of a whinny marking him quite surprised indeed. "My Lady!?" His red tipped mane flings, the curls pulled heavy by waterlogging, slapping against him and sticking in place in strange loops. "Ylva???" His voice is choked, pained in the sheer yearning that makes his chest flinch visibly for the inner clench of his heart.
OF THE LOST ISLANDS’ WILDS
▻ fifteen years - friesian - heterozygous black - 16.1 hh ◅