but i was not blind;

At first, Claret doesn’t realize what is happening. After all, her father and brothers keep broadly open borders - anyone can traipse in, and it isn’t uncommon to see singular stallions lingering. The Prairie has always been a place of refuge, always allowed strangers to come and go. After so many quiet years back at home, safe from the trauma of her past, her immediate instinct isn’t to run – and Claret is proud of that, still. It took a long time to not look on every stallion as an enemy, to not see danger in every man and run at the slightest hint of a new scent on the wind.
That instinct borne of trauma would have served her well now, if it hadn’t been so aggressively tamped down.

The young stallion who approaches is handsome enough, she supposes - colors that remind her of her Uncle, in truth, all bold bay and white marred coat. Is he a friend of Castillon’s? Or maybe a suitor come for one of her half-sisters. She nickers gently in greeting, ignoring a creeping sense of anxiety as he rushes forward. If this was one of the stallions who is welcome here, why wouldn’t he return the call? Why wouldn’t he approach at a sedate place, leave himself politely distanced?

He swings around and nips at her flank. She knows what’s happening here, has lived this before. She swings wildly between two immediate thoughts – I will not be that victim again, and a small, terrified wail of No, no no - I cannot go back there. The firm voice, the one that sounds suspiciously like he mother wins out, even if she cannot silence the fear, even if she cannot will down the bile rising in her throat.

Claret leaps forward, kicking out abruptly with her back legs as her heart races and her vision goes black at the sides. “No,” she says weakly, doing her damndest to stand strong when he pushes against her shoulder. Helplessly, she takes a half-step forward. She’s never bothered to learn to fight, instead relying on the fact that her mother and father and brothers all being capable of protection. Claret calls out now for any of them, voice hoarse with fear and desperation.

She isn’t alone for long - her father appears and she lets out a desperate little sob, relief and fear all mingled as one. He’s still limping, fresh off a fight and never quite recovered from the injury that had kept him away for so long. She doesn’t know anything about this stranger, and her father had lost fighting for her once before. Her father lunges at the other stallion and Claret cowers behind him, suddenly nothing but a helpless filly hoping that her father can protect her. She’s frozen in place, muscles shaking with the effort it takes to hold herself up and not flee. She tries to fight back the stinging tears that well in her eyes but she fails, and they fall hot and heavy onto the ground below. She just…she just wants this to be over. She never should have left the safety of her trees.

Another body joins the fray, emerging from nowhere. Claret knows now she’s in some sort of panic-induced hallucinatory state – because how else could the strange, lovely mare she had met at the Falls be here? She’s thought of her often, of the strange conversation they’d had before parting ways without sharing names, just like they had promised. Her arrival startles Claret out of her frozen state, and she takes a step backward. She doesn’t know much about this mare, but she came in so confidently, gracefully diving for the stranger’s back legs, that Claret is more optimistic now that she will be rescued, and her father won’t die in the process. Even still, all she can do is stand and stare in shock, try not to hyperventilate to the point she passes out.

claret