There are few things in the world that he found to be more beautiful then when the sun set or rose from behind the mountains. The sky would be painted the most breathtaking of oranges and purples, sometimes with clouds that were stained those very same pastel colors. It seemed that he had found one of the better vantage points within the forest in order to observe and enjoy the sunset as best he possible could. From here, he noted how the sun would peek soundlessly through the branches. The light almost made his eyes sting, but he watches still silent, blinking against the brightness, eyelashes brushing against the rays that find his skin and his face, warming him for a short time before night would be upon the land.

For all the silence that there was to be had, there is a sort of presence about, the sound of another creature that moves through the trees. He would have ignored it, had he not been so sure that there were eyes in the trees, that there were animals and ghosts watching him all at the same time, judging him and breathing down his neck as though he were a demon for them to rebel against. It was with suspicion and a hint of fear that the stallion turns his red face towards the trees, ears lacing back into his mane as he faces the monsters inside the trees. Come and get me. He silently dares them, begging the beasts to appear before him and to take him into the darkness as though he were one of them…

Instead, he sees the painted mare.

Had she not been swollen to the point of bursting, perhaps she could have been beautiful, for Vercingetorix did not see the lovely glow in a pregnant woman as other men did. Perhaps his opinion of her was shaded by the thought that she carried another man’s child, and perhaps he had yet to discover emotions that were not at his behest. As a child, he had always been carefully kept in check, as a child he had frolicked at his false mother’s side and played in the ocean, but he had never been happy. A boy that was born into the world at the hands of murder could not possibly pretend to be happy when there are nightmares plaguing him.

Inching forwards off the small rise in the ground that had been his perch in the forest, he moves towards the mare, more interested to know why she hated him so instead of wanting to make frends right away. Vercingetorix was carefully leery of the women that had come with his hand-me-down home, certain that they could cause problems for him in hopes of the return of their ever absent lover. Approaching the heavily pregnant woman, he stops a little far off to her right, giving her a larger amount of space than was needed, but perhaps it was still too early for the stallion to be familiar still. “You often wander in the forest alone?”

He only now realizes he still doesn’t know her name…