Falls

but i was not blind;

Kvasir was nice. Micah was nice. Lir and all the other stallions who come through and are not-so-subtly introduced to her are nice. It doesn’t really seem that finding someone nice is her problem, regardless of what her half-sisters all think.

Claret…doesn’t know what her problem is, really. She sees Castillon come home over and over again, smitten with beautiful young mares, watches as they stare at her brother with wide eyes overflowing with admiration. She wants to feel that - to feel young and hopeful, to find what they all have seem to find in the Prairie. But every time she tries, Claret just shies away. She shies away from affection, from kind words, from a teasing smile and the flirtatious press of a muzzle. Maybe something broke in her, when she was taken prisoner by that stranger from Salem. But if she thinks about it, really, truly thinks about it….Claret knows it was before then.

She’d seen other mares in the Hills, dragged in as prisoners. And in a few days or a few weeks, they would soften to the stallion who stole them away, kept them isolated in that wasteland. Apparently he was handsome, and kind enough (when he wasn’t kidnapping unwilling women). And…for most mares, Claret is realizing that was enough. The way her half-sisters whisper, being swept away like that would be romantic - what a way to start a new, adult life. Somewhere new, exciting, with a stallion who was so moved by the way you look that he couldn’t be bothered to talk to you before stealing you for his own.

She scoffs, and then kicks at the pool of water below her, ripples obscuring where she had been staring intently at the reflection of her own face. It has to be her, right? Something is wrong with her. Claret can’t even begin to fathom why; she had good parents, and while their relationship was always….strained, they love her. No great trauma as a child that would have shaped her; no possible, reasonable excuse that she just cannot find – what? Love? Companionship? Honestly, Claret doesn’t even know what she craves, other than to no longer feel like a stranger in her own home, the way she has ever since her mother left for good.

“Definitely broken,”, she mutters quietly, kicking at the water again.

claret