Another autumn had come and gone. Winter settled over the Crossing again, a deep chill that grasped the land and swaddled it in a frigid blanket of ice and snow. The bay stallion huddled amidst the thick copse of trees that lined the clearing of the Falls. At least here between the thick trunks of oaks and peeling paper birches he is buffered, the wind and snow less likely to reach him.
Mother had described the snow to him once as a foal, what it looked like as it fell from the sky and piled into the boughs of the evergreens. But it was hard for his mind, which knew only darkness, to envision what
white looked like. What was the opposite of dark? How could a mind who had never known light ever conceive of it? As a very young child he'd felt sad, more often than not, about all the great sights he was missing out on.
But Felony had quickly disavowed him of any notions of victimhood. No son of the Lagoon would be a simpering little fool, convinced the world had done him wrong. It had worked, but perhaps not in the way his sire had intended.
That all felt like a lifetime ago, now. Felony was long dead, and mother alongside him. There was a high chance that Ruger was gone as well, considering Mikhail hadn't heard a peep or caught a single whiff of him since that day in the Commons. Roheryn, too... Despite his best efforts, the tobiano often wondered where his son had ended up. Like his uncle, Roheryn had effectively disappeared from the Islands, and sometimes it was hard not to linger on one grim possibility: was his only son dead?
Mikhail wasn't sure how it made him feel. Continuing his bloodline had never been a top priority, and he'd certainly been a less than present father in all of his children's lives. But he'd be a liar if he said he didn't feel
some sort of connection to them, some lingering thread of paternal affection that made him pray to whatever deity was out there that they'd eked out better lives for themselves than he had. That same thread pulled at the thinning strings of his heart when he imagined them in the ground.
Heaving out weary sigh and shaking his head, Mikhail shuffled out from his little shelter and came to a stop at the edge of the Falls. They were unusually still, he could tell, because what was usually a great and thunderous roar had been tamed by the ice into a mere trickle that echoed through the silent winter air. Pausing, the milky-eyed stallion took a moment to appreciate the quiet, the only discernible sound that of his breathing, the water trickling, and the wind through the barren branches.
who knows upon what soil they fed
their hungry thirsty roots?
fifteen. georgian grande mutt. bay tobiano
of nowhere. blind. felony x zhenya. pippa.