For the longest time, he had been certain that the trees of the forest had voices of their own, and that when the wind pushed through their leaves and branches, they were singing a great hymn. In the middle of the night, as the mothers and their children slept in the comfortable shadows of the thinner, less intrusive trees, the stallion had begun his rounds. First he hovered over each sleeping body, offering gentle reassurance to his disappearance with a small snipe of the upper lip across their foreheads. Some creatures greeted him with grunts of dismissal, and others slept on as though he had never even been there.

Vercingetorix does not mind the dark, for his night vision has always been well adapted to the trees. As the hiss of the leaves tear through the forest, his ears are driven mad by the sound. They twitch forwards and back, listening to phantom snaps of twigs and the rustling of bushes and leaves, searching for the ghosts that make them. They are only ghosts, but the stallion listens still. In his dreams, he saw his mother partnered with a filly, a small pale-bodied girl that had to be very young, by the look of her. In his dreams, they wandered through the forest like wanton souls, searching for his eyes in hopes of bringing him back into their family. Those were just dreams, but perhaps those had been the things in the night that frightened him most.

As he walks through the trees, there is a rustling and a sort of crackling of branches and twigs that do not belong to the unseen monsters of the forest. The sound is alluring and unnerving at the same time, bringing the stallion to move quickly and suddenly through the trees. As he goes, the same branches that had been screaming in protest to their latest assault were grabbing out at his skin and hair, leaving behind small remnants of their presence. Vercingetorix breaks into the clearing, finding the strangely coloured woman standing amongst a small clearing in the forest, illuminated by the moon in the sky above and painted by the leaves of the forest. Confused as to her presence, he pauses at the edge of the clearing, easily in sight and not hiding from her at all. Hesitant to approach, he notes her wide-eyed and panicked expression and assumes that she is being chased by a predator.

Turning his eyes to the forest behind her, he stares long and hard for a few moments before looking back to her, hoping to find her somewhat calmed and a little more sensible. “Are you alright?” Her breathless state still has him wondering. “Why were you running?” She is a stranger, and naturally the overprotective stallion fears for the worst.