The jungle curves suddenly across Shararat’s path and she pauses at the dark fringes. Already the sky is bleeding off its orange cast into a duskier hue as the sun sets deeper, and beneath the canopy it will be all shadows. The fastest way to the bare and windblown cliffs that await her is straight through, however, and so the black mare shakes off her reservations with a toss of her dished head and leaves the rocky fields behind, slipping into the muggy undergrowth with little more than the sound of broad leaves whispering across her soft hide. Its vibrantly colored inhabitants are no longer so easily seen but they’ve yet to let up their choruses: the echoing cries of the big-beaked birds and chattering shrieks of the nimble-footed tree-climbers resound around her. Shararat glances around her even though most shapes are indistinct. She is comforted by the familiar cries and misses, fiercely, her jungle home. Salem feels a dead place in comparison.
The cries hush, and movement ahead draws her eyes to the shadowy figure of a horse, dark and almost undefined in the dimming light, as it steps onto the path. She halts and draws in a deep breath, ears cocked, but the other offers a whicker in greeting and steps forward without any apparent malice. Shararat extends her nose to meet the other, recognizing the scent from when she crossed the border and noting the other’s slim conformation in the inconsistent light. Had she not just traded breaths with this mare in the dark she might have mistook her for Ak Burun even without the tell-tale pale muzzle her friend wears.
"Faolain, hello," she replies, smiling as the vowels bounce from her mouth. What a pleasant name. "I am Shararat. I’ve come to see the cliffs, if you don’t mind. I grew up in Paradise, you see, and it was a favorite game of my kin and mine to climb all the way to the top of the Ridge. I thought I might give it a try from the other direction this time." She flicks her tail as she recalls those long afternoons of her youth. She is lucky she had Ailill for company. "Have you been down them at all? I suppose it must look like a more arduous task from the top than from the bottom; as a filly I never could wait to reach the heights and see the land spread out so far below me— oh, and the ocean past it all," she adds, her voice wistful with nostalgia. |