It was back.
He had been grazing sleepily in the long shade of the boulder that overlooked the oasis when he saw it. The serpent’s sand-colored little head had been poking out from between the grasses just a stone’s throw away, flicking its tongue to taste the air, though to him it was as if it was taunting him. Come catch me if you can, it seemed to say.
Orhan had been chasing this same snake for a full year now. It had first appeared the same fateful day that the Akhal-Teke stallion had arrived on his shores: the same day that the dynamics of his herd had been altered permanently, and not necessarily for the better. Sometimes, he wondered if it was the very same creature that was responsible for the death of his sire, but then he shrugged the thought away. Snakes could not possibly live that long.
But then, what did he know? It could have been the son of the snake that killed Encantador, just as he was the son of said stallion. Sometimes he worried that, because of the various Bad Things that had happened to his herd that were associated with serpents, that it meant such creatures were harbingers of bad luck for his family.
Sometimes he even worried it was his destiny to die the same way his father had.
Because of this, simply spotting the snake again was enough to make his blood boil. Without thinking, the stallion leapt into action immediately, hooves eating up sand as he threw himself at the creature. The snake, of course, disappeared into the tall grass as soon as he moved, and Orhan was not so foolish as to follow it. Heart hammering, he stood sweating in the bright sunlight and watched the spot the snake had disappeared like a hawk, determined to wait until it showed its scaly face again.
He could not say how long he stood like that, but he was beginning to doze off when he caught the scent of an intruder on the breeze: an equine intruder this time.
Strangers in the desert tended to be either wholly benign or wholly malignant: there was no in-between. In his experience, very few horses tended to come to the desert unless they were on a mission, and either that mission was to join his herd, or it was to threaten it. Thus Orhan tended to respond very quickly when he found evidence of an unexpected visitor – even on days like this, when he wanted nothing more than to feel the crunch of the snake’s skull beneath his hooves.
The buckskin stallion blinked blearily in the bright sunlight as he trotted up a gentle rise in the sand to gaze out in the general direction of the beach. And there, as he had expected, was a horse – a mare – travelling quite casually towards him.
Then movement in the sand between them caught his eye, and what he saw forced his stomach up into his throat. The creature was slithering in its terrible side-stepping dance across the ground, away from him and right in the path of the stranger.
Emitting a squeal, the stallion cantered briskly down the dune, tail flagged and dark eyes wild. “Stop!” he called out to the mare, though he hardly gave her a second glance as he came down upon the snake, which promply disappeared beneath a small boulder right as he lifted his forehooves to stamp the life out of it. “Lanet!” he swore, stomping with frustration and lowering his head to peer beneath the rock, though he could see nothing.
He breathed heavily as he stood straight and collected himself, his expression a hard mask of impatience. “Sorry,” he said to the stranger, and gave the boulder one last long, lingering stare before giving her his full attention. “Damn thing. It will be there for a while.”
She was, quite truthfully, the shortest horse he had ever seen. Yet she was not young – anything but. In fact, she was quite possibly also the oldest horse he had ever seen. Orhan felt his dark lips part in surprise as he looked down at her, taking in the details of her appearance and trying to make sense of her. “Uh, welcome to the desert. What brings you here?”
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