It is sheer bliss to feel the ground level beneath her feet, the strain on her muscles eased, and when Jabari moves aside to make room for her, Reef pauses beside him and lets her body rest. Catching her breath, the little mare looks around and slits her eyes in the face of the wind rolling off the ocean. She can hear its heartbeat as the waves crash against the rocky face of the hot land. It is a brief respite, but a welcome one, and, rejuvenated by the salt-water air, Reef is only half a step behind the painted stallion as he leads her onward.
It feels a little like seeing the ocean for the first time, again. Her hooves clatter on the hard rock as she steps past her guide right to the edge of the cliff jutting into the sea, and she perches there to lean into the fragrant wind. The ocean rolls below, foaming on the crest of each wave before pushing its delicate tulle up the pebbly beach. Lace and pearls, her mother had told her, and this beach the catch-all for that discarded jewelry. Reef wonders if there are other rocky shores like this elsewhere in the world, or even distributed among these islands: it's the first of its kind she's ever seen.
One ear twists toward Jabari as he joins her, and responds to her musings. "Dream" is an interesting description for a storm, and brings her back to that pattering downpour on the Crossing her first day. What would it have been like to watch that storm roll in from here? A heavy bank of dark clouds surging overhead, deepening the blue of the waters beneath to something navy and opaque, the wind blustering through manes— she would love to experience it. The sky today, though, is clear, and the water itself quite calm.
When he agrees with her over the creation of the pebbles, Reef turns her head to eye him curiously, wondering how open he would be to an idea as fantastical as mermaids. Jabari reminds her a little of Vidarr, but where that gray stallion reminded her of river running over stone she feels this one is more akin to a clear, cool lake. One could stand hock-deep in him and examine freely his shallows, but Reef believes there is a depth to him hidden from the casual wader: one must be willing to test the serenity of that surface by plunging blindly into the deep.
"My mother used to tell me stories," she offers, "of creatures in the water. Some of them, she said, were a little like horses, but with the tails of fish— small, delicate, lacking hooves entirely but possessed of the noble face of our breeds, and they would adorn the manes of very strange creatures indeed. 'Mermaids,' she called those ones, and they're unlike anything on the surface of this world. They have flat faces and no ears to speak of at all, and the ends of their forelegs are separated and webbed like the feet of a gull. They, too, have fishtails, and they scour the seabed for hidden treasures of all kinds. These pebbles, she would say, are all the pearls they've gathered, all their treasures stolen by the sea." Reef pauses, and then with a little smile adds, "It's fun to think about, whether or not it's true." |