Falls

For a fall afternoon, the day was beautiful. The sky above was clear and blue, the sun bright and warm. He walked quietly beneath the ever-changing leaves of the color-changing leaves of the Crossing with a half-smile on his lips. The leaves reminded him of the girls he'd grown fond of over this single season. The reds were Silka, vibrant and bright. The oranges were Raksha, warm and elegant. And the browns were Skogsra, rugged and fierce. He wondered who he'd find to represent the silvery poplar leaves, with their pale undersides and fading yellows. It was perhaps… childish, to ascribe such characteristics to fallen debris, but he was so overwhelmingly happy that he had fallen prone to seeing meaning where there was none.

A nearby crash broke him out of his reverie and he startled a half step sideways, his gaze probing the forest for the source of the noise. Nothing was immediately obvious so he crept toward the origination of the sound, his curiosity overriding caution. As he got closer, her ragged gasping overrode the silence of the forest in the wake of her crash and his pace quickened until he could finally pick out the strands of her tail against the forest floor.

"Hello?" The rest of her was hidden behind the same boulder that she had crashed into, but now that he was sure that the source of the sound was equine, his caution abated and he rushed forward to see if they were hurt. His gaze trailed up the length of her body - up the jet freckled hind leg, over the moonstone dappled curve of her hip, past the heaving slate of her ribs as she struggled to draw in breath - and landed squarely on her sweet, panicked face. The thought of the leaves - silver underside up - flashed in his mind but he pushed it aside and dropped his head to her level with concern. "Are you alright?"

His gaze backtracked - down the cloud colored length of her neck, past the star studded swell of her shoulder, and down the slope of her milk-white underbelly - to look for injuries. Finding nothing obvious - at least to his untried gaze - save the clutter of dirt and debris that clung to her from her fall down the hillside, his gaze flicked back up to her face. It made him feel helpless to not be able to find anything that he could obviously fix. Just like with Silka's ailment, he was useless.

"How can I help?" He asked nervously, his muzzle flitting from her face and then back toward her body with ears that flicked uneasily back and forth. "What can I do?"