SABAH
Sabah may have been only flesh and blood in those moments, but flesh and blood had its limitations. Very quickly she was numb from head to toe and great, wracking shivers seized her, starting at her knees and working their way up until her teeth clattered in her skull. She emerged from beneath the falls, cutting through the chest-high water and nearly slipping on the rocky bed of the basin. She blinked furiously, pausing just in front of the foam-white veil of water as her vision cleared, and there, on the shoreline, he was.
Zion was just as she remembered, bar his thick winter coat: tall, with a body of dark bronze, the tips of his mane and tail faintly silver. The first time they'd met, she'd thought he was Abraxas fresh from a swim, for her son turned the same deep color when he was wet. Where Brax's eyes were hazel, however, Zion's were as green as spring grass. They had hypnotized her then, and they hypnotized her now. Sabah's own mismatched eyes—one brown as mud, the other blue as the sky—met that unwavering gaze while her frozen body rippled with involuntary shivers. From within, heat began to thaw her, creeping past her jaw into her cheeks until her face felt ablaze.
One of them must break the silence, however, and Sabah was facing hypothermia if she remained in the icy basin of the falls much longer. As water continued dripping from her dun-and-white body, she awkwardly picked her way to shore with numb legs, her hooves skidding on rocks until she stood facing Zion on the frozen ground. Rivulets traced down the contours of her face as she looked at him, and for a few moments all that touched between them was the clouds of their breath. Emotions warred within her: Zion was a stranger, and yet he wasn't. She knew next to nothing about him, but the day they'd met was one of the few warm memories she had to comfort her at night.
Then it was not just her jaw chattering or water that trickled down her face: her bottom lip quivered, and tears welled in her eyes. The urge to press into him and cry on his shoulder threatened to burst from her, but she held back, managing a sad smile. "Why, it's you," she said simply. "I never thought I'd see you again."