Meadow

Her laughter is like music. Foreign and strange, but comforting and beautiful. It fills the air as the golden head of the stallion reaches out into the rain, the wetness surprising him and pulling him back under the cover.

It had been so long since she had laughed, and it made her head swirl. There had been a sort of solemn seriousness that had swallowed her up, and she felt as though she would never see the sunlight again. She welcomed the rain, it would wash away the snow before the freeze made the ground slick with ice overnight, and for the time being she relishes the way the raindrops hiss against the ground.

It’s like the world is waking up, and like it’s singing to her.

She stops laughing as he joins her under the tree, and there is an awkward apprehension between them, like some kind of a static electricity that threatens to spark between their wet bodies. He seems uncomfortable, afraid he might make her flee, like a bird that has temporarily alighted upon a branch. “Thanks.” She offers him, her voice barely a whisper.

He can’t know the black clouds that follow her have not lifted in some time.

Her sadness matched the grey of the clouds beyond their sheltering brand.

“You look like someone I could know.” She cements her earlier observation, still eyeing him sideways, now that he is closer. His bones are not right- he is not as delicate as the peoples in her bloodline- but he’s close. “If you were someone I could know, I’d say your colouring is wrong. Like me.” Born into a land of blue and white and black, she had stuck out like a sore thumb. Her brothers and sisters were often the spitting image of their father- their skins forever dipped in white and their faces wearing vibrant and rich colours.

They did not wear white legs and strange face stripes like she did.

She snorts a little snort, like a little chuckle, or perhaps another little laugh. “But then, if you were someone I could know, you’d probably be a lot angrier-” There was revenge in the blood of her family. “-or much, much sadder.” There was no happiness left for her and her kin. Their blood ran cold like the winds in the Cove, and some were angrier than others. The children of her father resented being forgotten.