What started as a simple curiosity had evolved into something like a game, fraught with mystery. It was a season or so ago when he first sighted the trail the stranger had left; the sands did not lie, but they were quick to erase any signs of life from someone traveling upon them. If one did not have the good fortune of being in the right place at the right time, the winds would wipe them away cleanly. Maslakhat was indeed fortunate, though he preferred to think of it as practiced diligence that could come only from being rightly equipped for living in a place like this for much of his life.

Each day the sands bore a new clue, and on more than one occasion he had sighted her—though only in part, a dark blur of a tail or leg. Her scent when she was close, was the strongest impression he could muster. That was so, until the day when he found the remains.

Even the brief memory of the shifting sands could not entirely erase what was left of the child—its small bones with shrunken, sun-weathered skin wrapped it tightly, a mummified carcass of a foal that likely never took a single breath. He knew none of the women of the Dunes to be carrying a child, and so this one could belong to no one else but the stranger.

The bay stallion bowed his head and mumbled a prayer, before turning away to allow the desert to forget. He gave pause to the game for a time after that, out of respect for the lost child and as a strange homage to a mare he’d never met. He never once imagined the mare lesser for the loss. In fact, his opinion of her strength only grew. The day where his long shadow finally fell upon her was one that was oddly satisfying, and he let a small smirk stretch across his lips as she stood at the edge the oasis, quenching her thirst readily.

“You are as elusive as you are strong,” he commended, drawing nearer to her and enjoying a moment to regard her shape and manner as his reward. “And I am glad not for the game, but for the fact that you remain,” he continued. “Titles need not burden us—I am only called Maslakhat.”

He paused a moment, looking into her eyes and past her coy smile to find pain—deeper than the ocean, and just as tumultuous and trying. The golden bay Akhal-Teke does not wish to dredge such awfulness from the depths, but he wanted to know the path she walked that led her here, and why it was laced with thorns.


MASLAKHAT

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