Meadow

The impulse to come back to the Crossing was madness. No, worse than madness. Jaskier knew that he was courting a very real danger in coming here, but the moist heat of Atlantis— and the green ceiling of its canopy— felt oppressive after the long season he’d spent in the desolate and cold Lagoon. And though he might have wandered anywhere else, the truth was that he wanted to return. He wanted to toe the borders of the bachelors’ home, to taunt them over their defeat and Enya’s victory. He wanted to look through the bars of his prison from the other side, and escape the small part of himself that was still meek and afraid. Shaking the last remnants of seawater from his coat, the brindle stallion imagined each drop to be a weakness that he was casting off, casting away.

When it was done, he moved forward without hesitation, his hooves leaving scars in the soft blanket of snow.

Beneath the sparse cover of the winter-bare trees, the murmur of waves and wind soon faded. For a while, everything was so still and silent that Jaskier could hear his own breath rasping out into the air. He could even see it, for that matter. The pale, vaporous cloud it formed in front of his face with each exhale, like the mist that rose from Atlantis’s ground when cool rain struck warm earth. Or like the thin veils of snow that drifted down onto his back where pockets that had gathered on a branch were shaken off by the flutterings of birds and the scurrying of small creatures.

At the startled burst of a bright-chested robin taking wing, the buckskin froze, one slender leg still hovering uncertainly in the air. If the forest had been silent before, it was deathly quiet now— not the stillness of tranquility, but of expectation. Of foreboding. Tensing, Jaskier turned his head first in one direction and then the other, the black broom of his tail dancing agitatedly through the air. And then— then the dubious peace was shattered by a chorus of snarls. By the ominous rustlings and snappings of brush breaking beneath a heavy body, and then the shrill warning call of one of his own kind.

Nostrils flaring, the golden male could smell it drawing closer. The sweetish stink of sickness and rot. The scent of death.

The undergrowth to his left rustled, and he didn’t wait to see what shook it. Twisting in the direction that the equine call had come from, Jaskier lurched forward, hind legs kicking out in panic. Racing forward blindly and heedless of the branches that whipped his face, the stallion burst into the meadow with wild, white-rimmed eyes. If not for the copper-red woman whom he nearly collided with, he might have even kept going— might have kept running until the sea finally stopped his headlong flight. Instead, he dug his heels into the hard frozen earth, sliding to a stop and swinging around to face the strongest concentration of sickly-sweet smell. “There!” He hissed through clenched teeth, scooting back a few more steps.

“It's coming.”