tw: description of injury

Fate is fickle.

Such a simplistic statement and one everyone knows from their earliest years. Some have to learn it through traumatic events, others have years of ignorance (bliss) before they begin to understand. But, eventually, the lesson is there. And then it’s learned again by some other new, sometimes catastrophic occurrence. And then again. Over and over and over and over and over…

For Zevulun, these lessons greeted him shortly after he exited the womb. The loss of a mother and of his twin sister, before he had existed for even half of a year? Fate is fickle. The loss of his father shortly after his sixth month? Fate is fickle. The loss of his first love and their child, his first, discovering his father had never died, but was sick and disfigured and self-exiled, leading his sister to murder their father in an emotional fit and ban them from the islands, resulting in his abandoning others who loved him, and new children who’d never know him, wandering the world for years, aimless, angrier and sadder and guiltier, until he lost sight himself and fought the sister who’d raised him, nearly killing her in the same way she’d killed their father?

Well, that.. Honestly, that was pretty rough.

Given his track record, one would think that four years later, after he’d pushed against fate to return to the islands and rebuilt his life, there would be no more need for Zevulun to learn the lesson: Fate is fickle.

Hah. Hah.

In the early autumn morning, when the fog hung thick over the yellowed, dead grass hills, a sickly, weak, scarred horse hobbled slowly, but not without determination. He looked barely held together, a gruesome injury down the inner length of his back-left leg, where skin hung away damn near down to bone. The skin was scabbed, but as he moved the scab cracked, and pus oozed at the breaks. The smell was rank, and his pink-lined ears turned back with irritation as it rose the more he moved and disturbed the flesh. Hurt, too. Hurt like hell. But he still kept walking. There were other gashes and the like across his cream coat, but none as gruesome as the injury on his back leg.

Zevulun was not gone. Zevulun was not his father.

The smell of a stranger in the Prairie was stronger than that of his family, and the hurt he felt was deeper than the injury he suffered. His pink, dry, cracked lips pulled thinner. He was certainly in no shape to make any threats, but the rage that heated throughout his insides at the mere thought of someone taking advantage of his absence to harm his family set fire to his blood. A hard snort pushed the smell out of his nostrils so his next inhale could be deeper, a plume of white air disrupting and dancing with the fog before him. He lifted his head and peered through the low-lying fog, trying to make out any distant shape of another horse he could find. Hopefully someone familiar, before he had to face the one who’d thought they’d stumbled on some wonderful opportunity with a leaderless Prairie, rich in vegetation and seemingly ready for taking.

Zevulun was struck, then, with a sudden thought of Balor. Not of their shared memories, good and bad, or even of the last time he had seen his friend. Instead, Zevulun found himself thinking of the painted stallion who had been a stranger to him, in the beginning. The one whose home he had first taken. It was similar to this instance, wasn’t it? Had Balor experienced a moment like this, where Zevulun’s strange scent filled the air of his home thickly, and had to reckon with what his absence had brought? Had he wrestled with these same feelings of self-loathing? Struggling to swallow them down, remain firmly planted and do as he’d promised he would for his loved ones? What strength Balor had then, to meet peacefully with him and agree to share his home. It was a strength that Zevulun let himself feel fiercely, and the resolve became determination across his face. Despite the fact his physical state looked on the doorstep to death, the pale stallion lifted his head and there was a hardened shine to his eyes.

He had promised Balor he would look after them.

He would be going nowhere. This was his home. Only death could take it from him.