Keeper-
He seems to be finding peace in the early morning darkness.
Keeper has to look away at last. She feels intrusive just staring at him as the moonlight touches his neck and then his face. It is like spying on a pair of lovers that have just found each other after so long apart. Moonlight caresses his fur and brings to life the tired sinkholes in his flesh, the eye pits and hills of cheek that show his age and his time long removed from anything but the cave. She looks back though, cannot look away for too long because his sigh brings her gaze around to him again and there it is - moonlight on his face, and a peace unlike anything Keeper has ever seen.
When was the last time he stood like this, in the moonlight?
She never thinks to ask him; he leans into her and the trust that is becoming apparent is enough for her. “Magic,” he echoes, his voice gaining a timbre and strength to it that she is not familiar with. He seems taken by her mention of that. In a way that makes him question though he already knows and Keeper can only answer him in that same gentle murmur, “Yes.” because she has seen it.
The King she serves is scaled like a dragon of old, she has met a stallion that could change into a cougar, and a cricket that turned into a mare that was perhaps never a cricket at all. She has a sister with black points and black hair but skin as green as the stalk of a plant, and a brother with snowy white wings that she used to hide beneath as a foal. Even her father had horns from the addax atop his head! Not to mention the fact that her grandmother has been alive for at least two centuries or more.
“Magic.” she repeats, unaware that it has affected her too. But that came later, long after she leaves him because there will come a time when they separate and she goes on a quest, and the quest leaves her different - changed, full of magic in some small way that Keeper would never have imagined. But that comes later, because she cannot think of leaving him now, or really ever. This night becoming morning but still so dark is too precious to her to give up. Keeper discovers that she has a problem - she can’t let go, not of this moment, not of him.
His chuckle breaks the spell the moonlight and his face had her under. She blinks, momentarily stupid and still dazzled by him as he mentions the mushrooms. Keeper feels a hot rush of embarrassment go to her cheeks but horses can’t blush, thank heavens! It had been a silly thing to mention, she realizes that now but also realizes that he isn’t laughing at her but with her, as if he knows all about the allure of mushrooms. She’s never hunted for them in caves, just beneath the trees in the big woods, so cannot imagine that that might have been all the fare he’d had at times.
She catches the inhalation as if he might go on with something to say but it never comes. Only silence, but it is a silence that is companionable to both of them and she does not mind it. Keeper is content with this, her breath on his neck and the way his face comes round to her at last and how the beautiful blue of his eyes lock onto hers as he gives her what he can - his name. She has to bite back a laugh, thinking how alike to foals they are in mimicking what the other says as his name leaves her lips in a breathy rush because she has to try it out and see how it sounds coming from her mouth. “Balto.”
If occurs to her then, a name for a name. Smiling, she tells him. “I’m Keeper.”
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[Balto] we do! Keeper and I love him to pieces! <3