Kheldar’s Prince of Thieves
It had been hard on him, lying without lying like he had done all the time back in their homeland. He had lied for purpose, of course, but he had done so without the weight of his heart braced beneath a guillotine. He could protect himself from anything and anyone that wasn’t Kheldar. It was hard to sleep, but it was also hard not to when the man beside him slept so soundly at his side in a place of almost no interruption or stirring beasts. The Lagoon was the realm of stallions and the beasts of this swampy jungle knew just that. Blood was no stranger to some of those who lived here, killing even an option on their various platters - from what he heard.
He had found Kheldar and him the most unintrusive positions in the most uninvested herd kingdom he could find tale of. The Lagoon, named for one on it’s most western shore that had blue-glowing tides, was isolated and dense with foliage and swamp. Much like it’s neighboring island to the east that the locals called Atlantis. Psychedelic had welcomed them, Rosto had notified Kheldar a good place for home base in which they might learn the locals ways and blend in.
He does not wake when the Prince of the People did, instead caught up in his dreams he toiled with the fight to come. Telling Kheldar that his family was eradicated, his sister was now the PrinCESS of Thieves, and that his own Lieutenant had offered his life and body to bloat in the river and curb any who might seek the Prince as collateral damage in the uprising. At least he could tell Kheldar that his sister had survived. While Kheldar loved him, he knew well that he loved his sister with a savage protectiveness that could not be stifled with logic. She had been the one to hand down the order of exile as the newly risen Princess of Thieves. She had done it to firmly grasp the power Rosto had offered, the reprieve from a life on the run or death at the hands of the masses.
The crooning voice of his soulmate is what finally makes him stir. It is a sound that one might question, raise an eyebrow at, almost as if waking a lover and not a Captain of the Guard. The lips against his jaw flutter his eyes open, their color like the mist of ghosts, as he rumbles a nicker of awareness back to the one who could never be replaced. "Time is short for dreaming, Thief; Darkness has fallen over us like a blanket." The touch tracing down his crest results in the flexing crane of his neck, a brush of lips skirting the coronet band. "Let us roam together, quiet and careful, as we have done countless times in days gone by," the hot breath on his ear is enough, "while the night is still good for hunting."
His ears perk, his blue-gray eyes open fully, and he is shoved to his feet by stern muscled hindquarters and caught by long thrown forelimbs. He was not always obedient, Kheldar would know it best, but there were times that he seemed so compelled as to be entranced. No matter what command he had been given - he had taken it and succeeded. Kheldar’s father had hated him from the first and had spoken evil commands of passive-murder color to the messengers that forced Kheldar to do the speaking. It would have been death to withhold those commands, so instead, the Prince of the People himself had gone on each dangerous venture beside him until his father had been too afraid to lose his heir to keep up the farce and risk his son.
The night was dim, but green; there were parts in the canopy here that allowed the silver of moonlight in but the green of the moss and the grasses and the algae and the duckweed… it all shaded that light till even he was tinged that freshened color. Life pervaded the whole of this place and when he turns to Kheldar to rake a few careful brushes of his teeth through the stallion’s mane, he took the quiet moment and reveled in it. "It has been many nights since we partook of peace, Prince." But it was all the defiance that he would offer tonight. The blackness that Kheldar was ate a hole in even the surrounding night, Rosto taking a minute so that with a few steps forward, he was aligned barrel to barrel in much the same position they adopted in war. "Perhaps night is no longer our hour of hunting, more and more arriving to this place and milling about hunting for votes or the escaped mares-- wretched business that. All our girls in the Underground had been there of their own mind and were kept safe. You would not think that this place, so sure that it was civilized, could misuse a creature so bitterly."
OF THE LOST ISLANDS LAGOON
▻ stallion - iberian mutt - sooty bay tobiano rabicano sabino - 16.1 hh ◅