If she could speak a single word, it would be her name. She hasn’t heard it since it last fell from her mother’s soft lips. It lives somewhere deep in her chest, unreachable and buried deep with every other word she has never screamed. She no longer reaches for them. For the past few years she hasn’t needed to. Solitude lends itself to silence, and she often lends herself to solitude.
She doesn’t know why she came here today. Perhaps it was a feeling of nostalgia that drove her through the halls of an old story and spilled her into the Meadow where it may have all begun.
For a moment she can see Rodion in the distance, but the wind shifts and she realizes it is just a melding of shadow and memory somewhere there along the tree line.
The sound of his approach catches her ears, and her cool blue eyes find a stallion set aflame by an orange autumn dusk.
Suddenly the evening seems just a little bit colder as his words bite deep into the air. She needs not be warned of the dangers of being alone. She is more afraid of the dangers of company. Still, she will not be cowed by a line she’s sure he’s muttered to more than a few unaccompanied mares.
She watches him carefully, but cooly as he draws a neat circle around her, eyes dark with her scent. There are only a few days left of her heat, and while the urge to reproduce taunts her every year, she is not so sure she wants the life of a herd mare.
She shakes her head “no” when he asks if she has anyone waiting for her to come home, her forelock falling the veil the brightness of her eyes.
He smells of Tinuvel, and this intrigues her enough to offer her nose to his. She wonders what her old home has fallen to since she left.
lyrae.
mute daughter of chronic & verse |
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