Falls

Lost.

Very little of the last two and a half years has been constant in the young mare's life. Her earliest memory holds a lonely shore, the sound of the waves as they flowed back and forth over her small body, the feel of small grey pebbles digging into her skin and the scent of pine in her nose. The panic as she rose, shaking on unsteady legs, and called out into empty air, waiting for an answer that would never come.

The months that followed, tinged with hunger and fear and desperation, relying on the kindness of mares with soft eyes and low voices.

"Are you lost, little one?"

She never stuck around long enough to find out. They were nice - most of them, anyway - but they weren't hers.

Mother, she'd heard them called the foals who always seemed to accompany them. She was too afraid to ask what it meant, so she figured it out herself. She had no mother as they knew it, no warm-bodied protector to guide her to adulthood. Her mother, she learned, was the darkness between the trees. It was the space beneath the wide-leafed ferns that kept her safe at night, the caverns that sheltered her from storm and wind and biting winter cold. It was the rustle of the breeze through yellowed autumn grasses, camouflaging the sound of her steps. It was the howl of wolves in the distance, their lethal attention pointed briefly elsewhere.

Lost, she was, to the one true mother who spent all her waking hours looking for her - and now, as she sips from the cool water of the Falls, an uncharacteristically early autumn snowfall further dusting her speckled back, a restlessness unlike anything she's ever felt rises from somewhere deep within, drawing her honeyed gaze curiously out, wondering what might be found in the fields beyond.