Falls

Faolain found herself struggling to leave the Crossing. It was unlike her, a mare who was usually gripped by wanderlust and rarely satisfied with a place for more than a few days. She had been here for months now, and knew of the other islands; they drew her to them, called to her need to explore and keep moving, yet she remained on the central isle. She knew to some degree what it was that kept her, but tried to tell herself that it was the richness of the island, the abundance of food and the generous landscape.

To the eye of an outsider, that might seem true, for Faolain’s build was slender to the point of a malnourished appearance, but it was just her ancestry. Truthfully, she could not care less for the plentiful grass that carpeted the entirety of the Crossing Isle. Faolain had been raised in scarcity, and spent much of her adult life similarly, but she had seen bountiful landscapes and knew to appreciate them when you found yourself passing through such good fortune. Still, it was not the grass that kept her here.

She would have to confront the inevitable at some point, but Faolain was procrastinating. She could not stay here forever, but if only she could wait a little longer, it might be better. She should wait for summer, when the weather was more favorable, anyway. Faolain had never procrastinated in her life until now, and she constantly had to distract herself from this fact before she eventually went insane, or stormed off and ruined the thing she specifically did not want to ruin by leaving too soon. Today, the distraction was the Falls; more precisely, standing directly beneath the cascading curtain of water until the muscles of her back were locked up from the cold. She couldn’t think of anything then, which was exactly the point.

She could, however, hear the yowling of a mountain lion, a sound no horse wanted to recognize, but every one did. Her head shot around to look over her shoulder, out of the pool beneath the Falls; she could see nothing. It had not been close enough for the call to be directed at her, but it was alarming nonetheless, and she darted out from beneath the water and listened without the crashing of the Falls directly in her small dark ears.

It was very close, and she could hear the calls of an equine presumably battling with the predator. Faolain stood still for a moment, observing with her ears, before curiosity drove her to seek out the source of the commotion. She took off at a compact, fast canter, sliding to a halt when she was close enough to see the offending cat and the brave soul with which it was battling. Before she could decide whether she wanted to step in and help, the cat tumbled to the ground before her, flung from the shoulders of the brindle mare. Faolain watched in fascination as the taller woman stomped the creature into stillness. She proceeded to go about as though she had not just defeated an apex predator, and Faolain let out a gentle snort of admiration. "That was magnificent," she said out loud, though it was not necessarily directed at the brindle mare, and she wasn’t sure if the other had even heard. She stepped forward to inspect the carcass, her nose wrinkling at the sharp iron scent of blood and bile from the cat’s mangled head and neck.

When her curiosity was satisfied, she raised her slender black head to gaze up at the other mare. "It’s a good thing they don’t live in packs," she said, partially in jest, her tone light. "You two made quite the racket."