Jaguars prowl through his brain on the darkest nights.
Their claws press at all the soft spots, all the memories of home he cannot seem to push aside. He dreams of the wild tangle of the tropics, the choking vines creeping up the kabob trees. He dreams of the inexplicable nature of a place where clumsy hippos are made graceful only in the water, where light is leeched by shadows, yet flora flourish – where he had devoted his love and then left. His dreams are vibrant reminders of all he has placed behind him in order to move forward.
The call of a spotted cat sounds, but he wakes to find it is only an echo of the past.
Here, beneath the star-strewn sky of an altogether different place, Vidar is still a stranger. His apprehension has only grown in the months since he walked with a set jaw and a head full of questions over the Deserts border. It is a quiet sort-of-place (mother had at least warned him of it) and he is not always a quiet sort-of-man. He had grown up surrounded by the Sisterhood, had basked in the friction-heat of strong personalities and their collisions with each other. It was as constant as blood running like rivers through his veins, a drug cut by all the life and death playing out around him. There was never a quiet moment in the jungle. Even if genetics had made him more of his father’s ice than his mother’s fire, environment would have won out in the end; the heat is inescapable.
It fuels him now, because nights in the land of sand are nothing like the mild nights of the Amazons. Vidar is alone (as he usually is) on a wide stretch of dune overlooking the oasis. There is no movement around the cluster of palms – not at this hour – but he makes his way towards it, anyway. The chance to quench one’s thirst is fleeting here (because there are no leaves brimming and fat with endless rainwater from which to drink – no trees to speak of, either) and he will not miss one. The blue stallion peppered with grey and white makes to move down the dune with as much grace as he can muster, but still slides most of the way. The ground isn’t solid; nothing is reliable in his life. The world is malleable. He is malleable, waiting for change to come.
He takes the final step too hard and sinks into the ground.
And keeps sinking down and down and down to black.
~
The blackness changes into a smoky, hazy grey gradually as his eyes flutter open. He rises immediately and instinctually. For the first time in months, his hooves do not disappear into the earth below as he heaves himself to his feet. No cold sand presses against his legs as he struggles to regain an upright position. It sets his nerves afire in an instant. Because instead of finding change himself (forging his own way, as he always knew he’d have to), it has found him. Taken him. A cursory glance around his immediate surroundings is all it takes to see that he’s been trapped wholly and securely. But with the same heat rising in his veins, Vidar does not believe his own eyes.
Everything in him tells him to fight back, so he does.
He bucks and spins and kicks until his sides are shuddering. Nothing gives way around him, despite his throbbing muscles and absolute exhaustion. But just like the walls and door remain untarnished by his blows, so too does his will to escape the fate he’s found himself facing. In his total fatigue, his mind races back to the jungle, then, back to his mother’s side. He wonders what the iron woman would do behind iron of another kind. She would assess, he eyes the stall again between breathes, more closely this time. Thinking is less of his forte than acting, but he would need to rely on his weakness for strength. His flailing hooves had only managed to crush the one thing he might have savored instead: sustenance. Disturbed pails and soaked food litter the ground. As soon as he spies them, though, fresh food and water appears. Vidar blinks against this development - magic?
His heat diminishes until it simmers just below his skin.
All bets are off where magic is in play, but he will not despair yet (ever). The stallion gorges himself on the hay and grain, drinks until his belly is rounded by water. If he is to die in the bowels of the grey-dim unknown, he will damn take every enjoyment he can from it. He will not protest in hunger or languish in the sound of silence ---
A scream pierces through the thick gloom.
Vidar lifts his head sharply and swallows the last swatch of hay (noticing out of the corner of his eye how it seems to reappear again beneath him). The air goes still again and he thinks it’s just another jaguar stalking in his head (am I losing it, first the jungle now this?) But then it sounds again, a shrill note that descends into incoherent cries. He doesn’t understand, but he knows now that he’s not alone.
Time passes slowly after that, each new voice he hears like a weight slowing the progression of the day. Days? Even he isn’t sure, as the light remains that grey-dim flat it’s been since he first woke. He doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t try to call out to the infrequent voices that seem to only talk in the language of pain. He isn’t fluent, after all, and doesn’t care to learn it for himself. Not here. Not in this place of slow time and abundant food, where he laments ever leaving home in the first place. Not in the shadows of his mother’s certain disappointment with yet another failure for a child. Not where he can only think and think and think without doing anything about it. He is useless here, paces endless circles and loops that give him purpose as the hours pass.
Circle. Think. Circle. Think. Circle. Think.
Stop.
Still, he thinks, because he can no longer do at all. Why am I still? But then he sees why, or who, more specifically. As the door opens (silent in this place of punctuating screams) a silhouette fills the hole it leaves. He’s never wanted to act more than in that moment. He’s never been as unable to stop his thoughts from multiplying more than in that moment.
Vidar