Autumn was a season of opposition. The sun still shone cheerfully, stubbornly fighting the approaching chill, but the clouds tried desperately to obscure it; for they were allies to the rain and the snow, not to the fresh warmth and optimism of spring and summer. By all appearances the trees were dying, and death was not often a beautiful thing. As such, it was more a comatose state that they entered rather than death, and it was as though they did not want to be forgotten in their scheduled time away from life. And so the colours of their gradual loss of consciousness were stunning, especially spectacular when viewed from an elevation; and the scent of their shed skin rotting in the cooling dampness worked to calm Evanthe into a comatose state of her own.

Numbly, almost blindly she continued to follow Arcus, as she had for the past couple of days. They had already covered a considerable amount of ground in a short space of time, mostly in complete silence. The ease of their journey so far was almost unusual enough as to be suspicious, and it was as though the stallion picked up on these unnatural circumstances, mirroring them in his own mild state of agitation. Evanthe too had been uncomfortable with this, as it seemed like her body was acting on its own without permission from her mind. But the recent lack of sleep and bombardment of new locations, sights, smells and sensations had soon counter-acted her anxiety, and at this present moment she was thinking and feeling nothing at all.

If she thought about it, she might have realised that she couldn’t remember where she was before she had found the company of Arcus. Those days were gone now, and all the days before them, lost to the murky water that filled her mind. It appeared as though all the spirit of her previous purpose had been lost and replaced with this mindless submission, until they neared the top of the steep hillside they were climbing. Her heart quickened in pace and her steps followed suit. She didn’t know why, but reaching this crest felt like it should be significant. Perhaps it was that old undefined flame of hope re-igniting, reanimating her steps. This was the destination that they had been heading for, and maybe what she was looking for would be waiting for her here.

She noticed Arcus next to her again as he spoke to her, temporarily drawing her out of her mind. He spoke of another horse, an unfamiliar name, but familiar in her loss of a true place of belonging. It was uncanny, she thought, how lost souls banded together. They might wander, flit through worlds that were not their own, but they usually came back together again, so that they might have some company in the process of being completely alone. She acknowledged him with a shy glance and her closest ear pointed towards him to catch any following words. They startled her in their abruptness, not so carefully considered as the ones before. So startled, in fact, that she halted in her tracks and looked at him directly.

“So I am not alone in having been thinking this since we have been together,” she replied softly, relieved to be able to express her tangled thoughts. She continued to observe him curiously, less guarded than before, and a gust of wind blew through them then, lifting up her mane and raking it towards the sky. She looked truly wild for a moment then, leaves and twigs being dislodged from her hair as it snaked wildly about her face. She turned her head in its direction, and it was then that she realised that she had chosen to stop on the precipice between incline and decline. They had reached the top of the ridge.

"Arcus," she breathed with what little breath had not been knocked from her lungs in shock at the landscape sprawled out below them, and asked him a question she knew he did not know the answer to. "What is this place?"


Andalusian; mare; bay; 4 years; 14.3hh