a new world hangs outside the window
beautiful and strange
it must be I've fallen awake
I must be
Wasp was inquisitive enough to notice how her mother was questioning this stranger, in a polite, friendly and delicate way, but in an effort to gain more knowledge about her. Macabre's motive, however, was sorely lost on the filly. All Wasp saw when she looked at Cherish was a mare not unlike herself. She looked to be a little too old to be as willful and playful as someone more of her own age, but that wasn't perturbing to Wasp as it may have been to her mother. Wasp was happy to have a new friend, and now to know someone who lived somewhere else besides the Peak. Cherish was far less scary than that painted stallion she had met here at the Falls before, on a secret trip she took her alone and never told her mother about. But oddly enough, Cherish and that stranger smelled kind of the same....
The Lagoon. Wasp had been drilled by her mother and the other mares of the Peak day after day about not ever stepping foot into the murky, forbidden Lagoon. It was dangerous, or so she was told. "But I though the Lagoon was a bad place. Full of bad stallions?" She asks curiously, her dark eyes studying Cherish first, then shooting over to her mother. Macabre stood frozen in the shallow waters, as if she was holding her breathe. But after several seconds, she offered her daughter a stern look and Cherish a sheepish smile. "Cullen is your son?" Macabre asked bluntly with the flick of her blonde tail.
What Wasp couldn't know was how fast her mother's heart was racing now, and how fear prickled along her spine in the form of a foreboding chill. Cullen was dangerous. He was the stallion who had attacked Macabre. Wasp would never forget that name. She swallowed hard and trudged through the water some more, still pawing and splashing even though she wasn't feeling very playful anymore. "Wow, you've been a lot of places." Wasp said with renewed interest. "Do you like living in the Lagoon?"
Macabre wasn't watching the pair anymore. Instead, she her gaze was strick and hard on the outskirts of the terrain, watching the wood line and open pasture, monitoring for signs of any other horses lingering in the distance.
W A S P