Meadow

Life on the Crossing was as unsettling as he had imagined it to be. There was always a fear that lurked at the edges of your mind when you finally succumbed to sleep, a knowledge that there was no one, and nothing to protect you. Geçersiz had no friends to keep watch over his back, nor other bodies that might dissuade a predator. He was alone, and he knew it.

A part of him had considered begging Shenzi to take him with her to wherever it was that she had ended up, but the ashes of his father's stubborn pride had refused to yield. The last thing a fierce fighter like the Barb needed was a lost colt masquerading as a grown stallion tagging along at her heels. Instead, he had bid her goodbye once their conversation had finished, and had resumed his lonely existence on the Crossing, heartsick for the things he could not have.

He slept fitfully, as he did most evenings. The dusk was not the easiest time to sleep owing to the number of predators that hunted in the twilight, but it afforded him a chance to wake before dawn and gather the herbs that bloomed beneath the moon and not the sun. His stocks had ebbed and waned as the seasons flowed together, and he had learned the hard way that the Crossing was far damper than his dam's methods of preservation were prepared for. Without the dry air of Salem or a protected cave outcropping, there was no such thing as a dried herb, only a mildewed husk of what he had tried to save.

Geçersiz. The sound of his name in the night air did not immediately rouse him. Nightmares were frequent and laced with the sound of his mother's voice calling out or apologizing to him, depending on which way his survivor's guilt wished to twist the knife. Geçersiz, please. The addition of the please only heightened the effect and he stirred uneasily, his face scrunched up and ears ticked back as he tried to shy away from the familiar feelings. He could do nothing to save his mother now, but that never seemed to occur to him in the nightmares until it was too late.

I... I need your help. That, though, did rouse him. His mother was a woman of few words and fewer requests, which meant that those words had come from outside of his own mental prison. He blinked away the tiredness from his gaze and looked around for the source of the sound, but it had faded before his eyes had opened so he instead turned to his other senses and drank in the scent of the world around him.

Her scent - forever entangled with memories of family and home - was easy to spot because of it's familiarity. "I'm here," he spoke to the silent night, his eyes still adjusting to the thicker darkness of the trees. "Shenzi? Where are you?"

He felt her a split second before his hurried jog nearly ran him past her position. His muzzle skimmed across her ribcage, whiskers tickling along the swollen shape of her figure without recognizing what it was for an awkward second before he jumped back, abashed. "God, I'm sorry." He took another hasty step back, his ears flicking to the sides apologetically. "Did... were you the one that called out for me? Or did I imagine that?"