I would honestly love you now,
But I would lovingly let you down.
He dreamed of Petal. Every night, as the stars blinked their way through the dense winter cloud cover, he'd close his blue eyes and will himself to see her. She was glowing, of course, grazing among the yellow reeds of the Prairie with their two girls at her side at golden hour. The sea breeze would whistle its way through her wavy blonde locks. She'd snort, delicately of course, to rid a pesky, long piece of forelock from her view. And then her gaze would settle on him. Her eyes would widen before he'd see her smile, in a bashful way, the only way Petal knew how. And he'd feel that familiar sense of butterflies in his stomach.
It was a scene he'd played over and over again in his mind, dozens of times, since he'd been banished to the Lagoon. And it was the only way he could lull himself to sleep.
But Jabari hadn't had a restful night's sleep in months. Instead, slumber came to him in angry fits, lasting only minutes at a time. He felt exhausted nearly at constant. He'd wake before the sun with blood shot eyes. Some days, the exhaustion wore so heavily upon him he thought he was hallucinating.
Lately, the painted stallion found himself drifting farther and farther from the Lagoon's borders during the day. He'd hobble around the meadow or the falls, just to pass the time and honestly, to smell something else other than the putrid, sickly-sweet musk of the bachelors and the filthy Lagoon. Jabari hadn't been successful in meeting too many others during this captive period away from Luthien. Sure, he'd talked to a few of the bachelors, but most seemed to avoid him. He was the enemy's son, after all. Cullen even, seemed not to care about what Jabari did day in, day out, as long he still checked in every so often. The young son of Shamwari just didn't understand this arrangement at all. He thought he'd be put to work at least. Instead, he felt like he was going out of his mind.
So he dragged himself out of the Lagoon once more this morning, creamy plumes rising into the frosty winter air with every passing breath. The stallion still wobbled with a bit of a limp on his soft soles. His mud-caked legs showed signs of the painful abscesses that burst and bled in the weeks prior. But he kept moving. The stallion lowered his head to drink from the crystal clear pool at the Falls, and could barely recognize himself in the reflection. He shut his eyes tightly then, so he didn't have to look at himself in the face, and kept drinking.
Stallion | Brienne x Shamwari | Chesnut Overo | 15.2 h| Photo © Carina Mailwald | © Vinyl |
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