There is nothing magical or powerful about the moments that follow their too-brief contact, but Lanfear clings to them anyway. She clings to them without understanding why— without knowing that the absence of anything to call her own has built her this way. After all, it isn’t easy to define the effects of a hole that’s been there for as long as she can remember. Until Gavriel— and now this nameless shadow— the black mare hadn’t even known that it existed. But now that she feels it— a tear that bleeds into her chest with each beat of her heart, a cold where the warmth of his skin had just touched— it’s impossible to ignore. As if that hole has torn wide open and is growing more and more with each moment, threatening to swallow her like some vast, deep sea.
Snälla, vänta. She can’t understand them, but these alien syllables— both soft and harsh at the same time— seem to echo everything the spotted woman feels. It’s confounding how much she wants to lash out against the stranger, how much she aches to press herself against him. Torn irrevocably between these two extremes, Lanfear does the only other thing that she knows: she runs. She doesn’t run far— no more than a couple strides, barely enough to put a full length between their bodies— but she runs regardless, at least until the leaden shackle of his words stops her. Please don’t leave. And though in the past such pleas have only proven the necessity of her retreat, the slender creature yields to the gentle command. With one foreleg still lifted mid-step and her ears lifting tentatively from their tight coil, she stands there and waits for… something.
She doesn’t know what it is or when it will come, but she waits for it.
Seconds and perhaps minutes tick past during this stalemate, measured only in the number of breaths that Lanfear takes. One, and her companion hasn’t moved beyond the barely-perceptible rise of his own belly. Two, and they exhale together, the distinctly-separate rhythms of their bodies tangling into one. Three, and the language of the dark mare's body begins to soften until everything about her is a shadow of the stallion who stands just beyond her reach. Four, five, six, and her fears fade into a murmur as soft as the distant sea; retreat like waves down the pebbled shore. But they're still there, beneath the soothing balm of their mutual stillness. They're still there, her fears, and will inevitably rise again. And again. And again. Curling around her like fingers of white foam, pulling at her until she lets them carry her away.
For now, however, Lanfear roots herself in the meadow's frozen soil. For now, she remains fixed amidst the shifting landscape of her life, stands firm against the tilting ground that is determined to tip her back into the inky draft's searing touch.
For now, she is content to stand on the slender boundary between the freedom of solitude and the bondage of touch, and wait for one or the other to claim her.
