Keeper-
His eyes are the blue of Hyaline’s lake, she realizes, stunned.
Keeper had not noticed that before, as they seem more crystalline and so vivid a blue as to be almost pale in color. Hyaline’s lake is like that sometimes, and that is all she can think of as she falls into the unfathomable depths of his eyes before pupil swallows up the blue with its enlarged black roundness. The blue becomes but a sliver of a ring around the pupil but there is nothing sinister in his look, for all that it holds her captive, it is gentle in its manipulation of her own gaze.
Her eyes are black on black, like an animal slinking through the dark that is finally startled by a flash of light on their face. Just like that same animal, she is familiar with a life shrouded in quiet and instinct. That is how she can understand him, he is like her deer - shy and wild, quiet and beautiful, and she is surprised that he lets her close enough to touch him, to talk to him. The deer never let her do that! They raise the white flag of their tails and show her their fleet cloven hooves as they run from her.
He is bigger than even the bucks that she chases after, but she is not afraid of his size or his nearness. It never occurs to her that he could hurt her. She recognizes that he is a stallion and she is a mare, that there is some gap of age between them but it is one that seems inconsequential, as inconsequential as the division of their sex - he and she, and that other instincts could come into question here. Despite it all, Keeper is not afraid of him for all that she can feel the thick rope of muscles beneath his skin whenever one of them shifts and their bodies touch.
She hears him say her name and it breaks her concentration, snaps it clean in two as if had been no more than a twig underfoot and her gaze wavers from his for just a heartbeat of a moment. His breathless mention of something far more nefarious lurking in the cave was a possibility that had never occurred to her, and for a second, she feels a slight admonishment in his tone until his lips rustle the dark and light strands of her mane and she looks up at him with a smile.
“I suppose there could have been…” she trails off momentarily, a pinprick of daylight visible in even their forested corner of the world that she has forgotten even existed outside this time with him. “But there was only you.” she finishes, equally as breathless, because the coming of the dawn is a signal that he’ll retreat which is something that Keeper had known would happen. It was as inevitable as the dawn was. Come sunup, he’d tuck himself back into that cave and she could hardly blame him. She’d seen how the moonlight had been harsh enough on his sight, she could not imagine how worse sunlight would be and she’d not have him dayblind on her account.
Keeper knew that she would come back as often as she could, each and every night if she had her way about it, to draw him out into the night with her. He’d grown on her, the way moss does on a rock, and he’d not be easy to shake off like the flies in summer with a shiver of her skin or a flick of her tail. No, Balto had become something more - something magical, for all that he dwelt in a cave in the forest.
She thought it was like something out of one of her grandmother’s tales:
Girl finds a cave in a forgotten corner of the forest.
Girl finds boy (man) inside of the cave and tries to show him the world.
Boy (man) stays in cave and each night, girl comes back, time and time again.
Keeper knew she would be back.
Time, nor the cave could keep her from him.
Trouble found her face in the form of a sad look that she gave him, knowing that he’d have caught sight of the pale light pearling the sky above the trees. Or he might have known instinctively that morning was fast approaching and that he’d go, and she’d go too, to finish her search for mushrooms and now, moss but thinking of him the entire time until she could circle back to his cave and coax him out of it again. Keeper sighed, and buried her face in his neck, sad to go and reluctant to leave him just now.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[Balto] I figured we could wrap this thread up for now until he's finished with his quest? Then we could post them together again so Keeper can tell him all about her new bear-self and he can tell her all about his quest? <3