In a world made transient by the ever-changing tide of life that flows through it, the black mare has become a permanent fixture. A boulder rooted deep in the soil, unmoved by the ocean’s ceaseless pull.
True to his word, her radiant companion departs with the dawn, leaving Lanfear alone to her kingdom of bare stone and keening wind. She watches him go silently, stiffly, lip curling back in a final snarl that’s intended to speed him on his way. But the victory of her solitude is a bitter thing, as hollow as her belly has become. There is not a single blade of glass to be won from the ruins’ shelves of rock, no soil to nourish the greenery that her kind needs to survive. In fact, there are no signs of life there at all, save those which originate from the sea itself. The ebb and flow of its waves— and the soft sounds that accompanied their passage— emulate the breathing of some great slumbering leviathan. But there is no true animation in the twisted remnants of granite and shale, no heart beating beneath its unyielding surface. Empty, it is empty. Like her.
The white-blanketed creature lingers there for two more days, waiting to see whether the young stallion will return. Watching the endless blue for as far as her dark eyes can see, and finding no answers in its shadowed depths. The sun comes and goes, but the boy does not. Her hunger grows, sharpens, twists through her insides like a thorned vine. It buries the ache of Lanfear’s loneliness, tugging her wooden limbs into motion. Leading her away from the cavern they’d shared for a single night, and back into the hungry jaws of the sea. From there the current bears her south and east, sweeping her along until the spires of stone sink into the sea behind her, and a wide, grey shore emerges from the waters ahead. Fighting free of the waves, the inky woman pauses only long enough to shake the seawater from her coat, shivering in the frigid winter air. Then she begins to drift inland, pausing frequently to grab mouthfuls of the autumn-brittled grass.
Though it is soon buried beneath a layer of snow, the meadow that Lanfear finds holds her in a way that the ruins could not. There is food, after all, even if it takes some effort to unearth. There is safety in the number of her kind that frequent this place. On the surface, the meadow has everything the reclusive mare has ever wanted from a home— survival without struggle. Companionship without the intimacy that conventional herd tends to encourage. Peace and solitude in the forest just beyond. But as with the victory she’d won only a season ago, her existence here is bitter, hollow. Desolate. And after a time, Lanfear catches herself watching the individuals who come and go. Wondering where they will end up when they leave the secluded world of the meadow behind them.
Thinking wistfully of the contentment that she has glimpsed in their expressions— the contentment that she herself has never found.
