Falls

This Fall felt much different than the last. Peyote was far more restless; it was proving difficult to keep himself confined to his little island in the Lagoon. Some invisible force poked and prodded at him until he could take it no longer and he had to move, to find another horse to interact with and bleed this energy free. As much as he had always found himself enjoying little playful fights he could pick now and again with his rowdier Lagoon brothers, Peyote soon discovered something about this season was making him easily irritable when it came to being close to other stallions. Moments he intended to be fun verged on the borderline of serious, and so the Lagoon Marauder decided to look beyond the Lagoon to exercise himself that day.

As much as he didn’t mind a fight picked now and again, he’d rather not have it misinterpreted as him feeling any negativity toward the Lagoon. Peyote loved the Lagoon. Things made sense again to him, even if they had a new twist he hadn’t been taught to anticipate. Rather than just bring mares back to keep his brothers happy with their decision to wreak havoc across the islands, Garmr, the newly appointed boss, decreed they needed to increase their numbers of brethren. Too, Peyote found a twist of his own - he tended to develop a fascination with the mares he went after, soon realizing he didn’t want any of the other boys of the Lagoon to touch so much as a hair on their hide.

It truly was becoming a conundrum he hadn’t expected and one he was completely unaware was actually quite normal.

At any rate all of this meant that he was striking up the length of Crossing Isle much more frequently than before and, when he was, he was often keeping a sharper eye out for lone stallions than he was for lone mares, His coat was not currently dried and cracked in layers of black-brown muck and mire. He didn’t have the time to lounge among the cool mud deep in the swamps he inhabited, which a part of him was missing. The dark, hardened, cakey mud went up over his knees and clung to the hair on his legs in clumps, but it was only distinguishable up close, considering his color leaned toward darker legs even when clean.

Ahead he took note of a considerable lump on the shoreline of the large pool the Falls tumbled into and his gait faltered to a quick stop. As Peyote had been spending enough time walking these paths as of late, he knew he would have seen a rock that large on the shoreline. He flicked his dark-lined ears forward and lifted his head, eyes widening as he blew a hard breath from his flared nostrils. A few more cautious steps closer revealed the shape wasn’t a rock at all, nor any strange creature he’d never seen. It was just a horse, an unknown one, laying in the water with their head resting on the bank.

Peyote remembered a night (had it been a year already? half?) here in the Falls where the sweet mare, Lenore, with the red eyes, had shown him where to let the cool waters run across his sore hip to ease the ache. Immediately, he thought the horse lying in the water must be hurt too, and decided to go closer to investigate.

“Hurt?” Was the only thing he said once he stopped close enough that they could talk to one another, but still plenty of room in case the large red horse wanted to (or could) stand up.