Falls

The figure who haunts him has become a familiar sight. Not many linger in the Falls as spring settles its roots into the earth and brings life back to the world in the endless cycle of renewal. The lone brute, still recovering, begins to keep count of the glimpses of her, but between waking and sleeping, he loses track. And he wonders if it is not the other way around.

Perhaps he is the ghost manifested in this woodland that curls protectively around the waterfalls that refused to freeze over even in the dead cold of winter, and she is the only one who sees him.

So accustomed to being alone is he - so vigilant in his watch of the woods - that he stirs when she approaches, from that place he often went between sleep and wakefulness, and squints into the forest seeking her, muzzle raised to scent the air, ears standing to attention, as though he tries to work his way through his senses to determine which one of these caught a trace of her, and whether he can trust in it.

And then suddenly, there she is, and he perceives everything all at once, sight and sound and scent.

“You’ve been watching me,” he accuses, voice low and expression guarded, but there in his gruff utterance he lays bare an unspoken truth - he has also taken to watching her. And why? Because he was alone, and so was she. In a sense, they are outliers, because part of him knows it is not natural for their kind to be alone. Even the gathering of rogues in the marshy wetlands to the south is evidence of that - even those who don’t belong elsewhere seek belonging.

But not him.

And, if his mind hadn’t misled him, not her, either.

He wonders what it is she seeks, and why she has revealed herself to him more wholly today. “Do you know me?” The question is asked, and it is naught but a rumble over the persistent hiss of the stream. There are two faces he cannot quite recall, and he remembers voices, wants to hear hers, so that he might discern whether she is one of them. He has never ventured this far downstream, he thinks and so… So, there are only two possibilities. She has followed him here, come seeking him, or she is thirsty, drawn by the sound of water. It draws him too, the incessant whispers caught between the moss and the stone.

Runs too shallow here to drink easily.

“I do not -”

’Cicada.’

His torn right ear flicks toward the sound, and his stormy blue gaze snaps to the shadows between the trees there, off to his right. But there is no one there, nothing, no movement amidst the slender young birch stand. Momentarily, his gaze narrows, and then slowly, without bothering to brush off the straying of his attention, nor quite able to retrieve the words he’d felt moments earlier, coiled in his mouth, the spotted stallion turns back to the flaxen haired woman. He takes to scrutinising her in stillness and silence, a dangerous sort of intensity glinting in the depths of his aquamarine eyes.

C I C A D A