Keeper-
Keeper knows the Forest inside and out. She might be one of a select few who know it well from the tiniest acorn to the stoutest oak. Usually it is because she is on an endless chase of the deer that run through it. The deer know that she follows them, has since she was let loose of her mother’s teat and cast out to mix with secrets and shadows and the deer. She always follows the deer as much as she can and learns from them, the things she cannot learn from her own kind because she is not like them - she is… odd. There is no other way to explain it but that she had the shape of a horse and the soul of a fleet-footed doe.
Grandmother always said she ought to have been born with a fawn’s spots or a buck’s horns but Keeper had nothing so special about her but the very skin she wore - that mix of dun and buckskin that allowed her to blend in. She was as ordinary as the curl of bark on a birch tree from where it peeled away from itself and the mother-wood. Perhaps that is why she has come to know and trust the Forest in ways that few others do. No path has ever led her astray and no harm has ever befallen her when a pack of wolves ran by. She even knew which berries to eat and which ones could poison her stomach, and she knew where the streams came up from underground between the thick roots of trees as old as the earth itself. Keeper knew these things more than she knew the ways of her own kind. Sometimes, Grandmother said she was more tree than horse.
It comes as no surprise that she moves through the mist as if it were a lover, leaving tiny damp kisses all over her skin. She liked these times in the Forest when it was so quiet that not even a bird trilled or a branch broke in a creak and groan of severed wood. Here, she could hear only the hush of her own step as she moved slow and sweet through the places she thought only she knew about - places so deep that even the snows of winter did not fall here, despite how cold the wind might come whistling around every bark-bend. One thing Keeper did not know about though, was the cave nearby that the mist hid. She had been this deep and gone deeper still into the Forest but it seems that she has never come here.
Keeper would have walked on by had it not been for the sigh she thought she heard, or at first, imagined.
She would have walked on by had she not turned her head and saw a brilliant blaze of blue from within the misty dark.
Keeper would have walked on by had she not opened her nostrils and smelled him, cave and stallion mixed up together like nothing had ever been more natural than that blend of mustiness and musk.
If it had not been for those three things, Keeper would have kept to herself but as it was, a curious flame came to light in her breast and she crept forward, slow and sure of herself as much as she could be in the Forest. The cave-mouth daunted her though, because she is a creature of tree and shadow (and wide open spaces as no horse likes to be penned in by anything) and this was a different kind of cathedral and shadow unlike any she had ever known. Her eyes were as black as that cavern, and as depthless it seemed as she tried to peer further into the gloom - enough so, that she could make out the shape of him and she called to him in greeting, first through a whuff then with voice, “Hello.” She meant no harm, how could she?
Keeper had meant to hunt for mushrooms this deep within but the mushrooms were forgotten in the face of her discovery of the cave and him.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless