in the full moon’s light I listen to the stream
“There is a comfort in that,” the mare inclined her head, allowing the deeper truth behind her companion’s words to sink in. At the request that followed;
‘Tell me his stories’, Lysandra drew in a short, sharp breath, hesitant and uncertain. It was not sudden reticence on her part, a hasty withdrawal of her willingness to share knowledge, but rather a self-doubt snaking into her subconscious, which she promptly shook out with a shake of her slender muzzle. A sudden revelation from the dark stallion before her casts a stillness over her, and for a moment, she flares her dark nostrils, a tiny diamond of white caught between them, and her pink lips part in awe. This Moonwalker that meant something to Rille, surely it must be her Moonwalker. How else could it be that they had both been drawn to these islands from across the sea? Surely it was no coincidence that they had found one another.
But Lysandra was soon to learn that whatever claim she had on this Moonwalker, he would wholly belong to another, even now that he was lain to rest. Until the end of time…
Lysandra listens with rapt attention as Rille spoke, and when he broke off in his telling to apologise, she found herself left wanting.
“There is nothing to forgive,” the bay mare interjected softly, and when there was a second pause in Rille’s speech, she took the opportunity to reassure him, hoping to set his mind at ease. Anything he told her would surely be of use, and help her to make sense of the great mystery of her life.
“All I have to offer in return are half-truths, coloured by one who suffered. I cannot know how much of what I know is tainted by a hatred that never had a chance to heal until it was too late.” With that, the lissom mare settles into a silence that seemed charged to her, the way the air felt before a great storm rolled in from the horizon.
Four times, Rille’s mother had spoken of this enigmatic Moonwalker. Lysandra found herself enthralled by the sound of Rille’s voice as he hastened to tell her all he knew of this mysterious figure they both seemed connected to. It was deeply moving, all that was told to her, and Lysandra found herself affected by the emotional intensity of it all, so that the muscles of her chest gradually constricted and seemed to squeeze the air from her lungs. Her eyes were misty, and moisture gathered upon her lashes. At Rille’s telling of his mother’s preference for the solitude of night, of shadow creatures, and the loving of a thing eternally distant, ever beyond reach, Lysandra felt a great swell rise within her.
For a moment, she closed her eyes, and imagined she could see them, a mare with her face upturned to the full moon overhead, bathed in its cool, pale light, and with her, a figure haggard in appearance, his scars and imperfections marking him clearly, but to the one he stood beside he was
beautiful. A cloud shrouded the moon at that moment, and stopped it from shining, causing Lysandra to lose sight of the pair.
“I am his flesh and blood,” Lysandra whispered, blinking her eyes open, and seeking to focus on Rille’s kindly face, feeling still so close to being overwhelmed by the rawness of her sorrow.
“But I never had a chance to meet him. My mother had no voice to tell me of him… But there was another. Ever since I was small, I’ve had a shadow, and he watched over me always. I never knew… Never knew who he was to me truly, not until the end.” At the faltering of her voice, the bay mare turned aside to gather herself, her lungs quivering for breath. And she drew the moist air into herself, focusing on the scents around her; water and vegetation, stone and soil. The dampness of Rille’s skin, and the woody musk of him. It was enough to help Lysandra center herself, and she turned back, her eyes downcast initially, but rising to meet the stallion’s warm, brown gaze as she laid bare her story, and how it was intertwined with that of this Moonwalker of theirs.
“He was father to me in place of that absent, lost-and-wandering soul. Looking back, I see now how broken he was, and how twisted. But he never did it to hurt me. He just wanted to save me…” Lysandra’s voice faded, and she thought back to what Rille had said minutes earlier. Destruction begets renewal. Life was not always beautiful, and the tragedy she had to tell made that startlingly clear. Life was cruel, and ugly, but like water, in the end, light always managed to shine through the places where hearts and souls were cracked, to alleviate the darkness, the way even the thinnest sliver of the crescent moon still shone enough light to see by upon barren desert plains.
“He told me of a colt, who was deprived of love by his father, because his father was a coward. Others stepped in and took his father’s place, led him astray and turned him into a dark, bitter creature. And when he was grown, and crossed paths with his father again, he was rejected anew, because to his father he seemed a monster. It broke what was left of the boy’s heart, and he retreated for a time, allowed the hate within him to fester and spread.
One day, he’d had enough, and decided to put an end to it all. So he tracked his father down, found him ailing, and curiosity stayed his hoof. He followed his father up the mountain. Found him on his knees in amongst the grass and wildflowers and rocks. Put a hoof to his head as he lay there.
He would have killed him, I think, robbed him of what little peace was left to him. But at the very end, Moonwalker found his bravery and stopped running from all his mistakes. And this helped the boy to forgive, and to break the cycle. Moonwalker was many things, and hatred had driven him to kill his father. His Shadow was stronger than him in the end. But he was still broken. He lied, he lied to me, to my mother… All my life, until he was at the end of his.
Moonwalker was my father, and I will never know him. The Shadow was his son, Sandman, my brother. I was named for him – for who he was meant to be. Lysander. Lysandra…”
Lysandra paused a moment to catch her breath, but perhaps she couldn’t qute manage to, for the next words she spoke trembled from her tongue, as though they slipped bittersweetly between her teeth.
“Balthazar. His name was Balthazar.” Even as the words hung in the air between them, Lysandra shivered, as though struck by a fierce and biting wind.
“And if I am to trust what my brother said to me as he lay dying, at the very end, my father – Moonwalker – wasn’t afraid. He was speaking to someone that my brother couldn’t see.” It had frightened her at first, this cryptic revelation rasped in her ear by one she no longer knew quite how to love. Not father, but brother, her Shadow… But the fear was washed away by the water, purged from her like that which had made her ill.
“Jezibelle,” Lysandra whispered the name with reverence, and eyes shining with tears, she couldn’t look away from Rille’s face, desperate to know if this name was significant to her companion.
“There was one who became a Mountain to the Moonwalker.” Surely, given what Rille himself had shared of his own past, his mother had to be this one. And suddenly Lysandra felt so far away. Words passed down to her seemed to resonate through time, and there was such a weight to them; Lysandra would be forever changed by speaking them aloud.
“Rille,” she breathed, the syllable trembling in the air between them.
“Tell me a story, about the Mountain who waited until the end of time for her Moonwalker.” The tears spilled down Lysandra’s cheeks, and a sob caught in her throat, so that for a moment she struggled to breathe. But then something shifted; it felt as though the earth beneath her moved. And the next thing Lysandra knew, she was leaning into Rille’s comforting warmth, though she did not recall how she had come to be beside him. Had she moved to his side, or he to hers? In order to seek comfort. In order to give it.
Perhaps later, she would think on it more deeply, but right now, for the first time, Lysandra found herself able to grieve properly for all that was lost to her. She muffled her sobs in the thick moon-silver tresses of Rille’s mane, and once she was able to catch her breath, the white-spotted mare sought to fill the last of the puzzling gaps that so plagued Rille.
“And I’ll tell you the ending of Moonwalker’s story... He loved his Mountain, with the whole of his heart and for all of his life. He was broken and beautiful, and at the end of his days, my brother says he repented for the things he’d done wrong, and he never, ever forgot the mare who became all things to him.”
With a face dampened by sorrow, and a voice raw with grief, but eyes that shone with hope, Lysandra lifted her head to look towards the north, where the Peak stood, a great monolith, with its jagged point visible from all places.
“I believe he found peace there...” the mare murmured gently, and settled her chin on the curve of his neck for a moment, her lips twitching into a crooked, watery smile.
“As I have found peace in your presence. Thank you, Rille,” she croaked on the back of a fresh wave of emotion, tucking her muzzle to her chest as if to hold herself together.
“Thank you.”