this obscure light
that falls from the stars
A stallion as thickly built as they were lean had caught the mare’s attention. She turned her head toward him, curved ears pointed forward (tips brushing one another), and watched him in the same manner a doe might. Every muscle in her body was tense, ready to spring forward and leave at first chance it was necessary. The more the thick stallion did nothing to advance brutishly toward them, the less alert she appeared and the more curious.
The stallion at her side had lifted his head and now watched the stranger as well and when the stranger peeled hard flesh from his wounds and the small coppery sting of blood hit the air, his eyes widened. Whipping his head toward his sister, he muttered a phrase in a foreign tongue, a language established in a place as far away from these islands as one could possibly be. The mare snorted, her lips pulled thin in a grimace of distaste. The stallion spoke again, more of those hushed, strange, exotic words and earned a quick snap of the mare’s tail and a stomp of her hoof to silence him. His eyes had darted nervously to the stranger and back to her, clearly speaking about him, but the mare had never pulled her attention away.
She started forward, much to the stallion’s obvious look of dismay, but he scrambled to turn about and walk with her rather than linger behind. He stayed at her hip much like a shadow, while she walked gracefully forward, head high and eyes narrowed. She stopped a little closer to the thick stallion with the bleeding legs. “Why is this what you do?” Her words were tangled with a thick, heavy accent, and she jerked her eyes from his face to his legs. “This will not heal.”