Posted on September 1, 2020 at 11:43:44 PM by TAVAS
And the cold lonely air. On the rock restless seas. Nyimara had successfully gotten under her skin. Tavas stormed away from the brown and caramel mare literally steaming. A sudden heat radiated from her chest and shot out through all of her extremities. The palomino mare had never been the fighting type, but there was a moment when the two mares locked eyes where Tavas could feel the rage beginning to bubble over, tickling her to act. Luckily, Bjorn was quick to intervene. The golden mare experienced such a wide range of emotions in just the few hours since she'd returned to the Inlet. This place was no longer her home, it was merely her former one, much like the Ridge. Despite their lingering, albeit now stale scents, her dam and her step-sire were long gone. So were her brothers and sister. This place, the evergreen trees and the snow-capped boulders she'd grown up scaling, now belonged to Bjorn and to Nyimara. Tavas just still couldn't believe it. Her feelings for the Icelandic stallion were still quite complicated. She wanted so badly to hate him forever. That certainly would make all of this easier. And even though his hardened, cold stare had crushed her upon first glance, Bjorn had softened at just the right time, daring to suck her back in. Their heated conversation ended on a quieter and calmer note, but it lacked the closure she was so desperately seeking. Tavas felt like she was suffocating. She couldn't get out of the Inlet fast enough. With nowhere else to go, she set out toward the Cove with tears streaming from her gold-flecked eyes. Despair filled her heart with every brisk, two-beat trot step she took through the crunching snow. She wailed to herself, and she couldn't care less who heard or saw her on her way out. But her constant cries took away from her ability to breathe. So the mare's pace slowed over time, as her nostrils flared, begging for breath. She eventually stopped altogether, the sides of her yellow barrel rising and falling in shallow huffs as she tried to regain some semblance of composure. She was close enough to the border of the Cove that she caught hints of Solomon in the chilly breeze. But then a stranger's voice cut across the quiet sparce of land. Her delicately dished face rose high above her withers and she backed several steps in startlement. Tavas swiveled quickly on her haunches to face whoever called out, and was surprised to see a red, semi-familiar but heavily pregnant mare staring back at her. Quizzically, Tavas pinned her ears, but was quick to reverse them. She noticed the signs of frostbite on her body - clearly this was her first winter in Tinuvel. She snorted again, shooting a fleeting, creamy plume of carbon dioxide into the air around them. "Hi." She said sternly, feeling all too aware of the tear stains on her golden cheeks. "I- sorry... I didn't know anyone else was around." She said, her gaze flicking to the snow between them before settling back on the stranger standing before her. The mare then asked her a strange question, and Tavas parted her lips, but at first no words came out. She closed them and tried again. "I was." She said bluntly. "Some time ago. Were you?" She looked at her hard now, trying to strike some sense of familiarity in her own memory. "What are you doing all the way out here?" She asked, wondering why Bjorn would let her drift so far from the rest of the herd?
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