"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Loam has made a home in the forest beside her green scummy pond.
Animals do not come to drink from this water and if they do, they die but Loam likes to look at their skeletons beneath the green scum she stirs up with her nose. She is careful to wipe her mouth off on her knee, smearing the scum across the sable skin because she doesn’t care about appearances - who does she have to look pretty for? No one. Not a buckskin stallion or a bay mare that made a tree grow out of the ground, their names relegated to the annals of a mind that is old but sharper than it should be.
She opts to leave her pond in some forgotten niche of the forest and when she comes out into the meadow, it is to the wind howling in her ear, blowing her sable hair around her face amidst the snowflakes that pelt her skin in tiny cold kisses. Loam snorts; not much has changed. It never does no matter how much kingdoms rise then crumble and fall, or how much the shape of the land changes. It is still all the same. Horses come and go, and some are not entirely horse at all but hybridizations of that and something else. She sniffs indelicately at the wind that berates her ears, bats them around crazily until she pins them back against her head. No, none of her bloodline has been here in however long since time escapes her.
Time shouldn’t; she is not immortal and she should be peppered in gray and have more sway to her back but Loam looks like Loam always has - thin, slim, sable in color with those deep dark emerald green eyes that look out from her sharp, angular face. Loam looks like an ethereal little haunt that has just emerged from the underground but that is being too kind to her in description when in fact, she is stunted and small from a childhood of malnourishment and a continued forgetfulness of the most common things that a horse must do like eating and drinking. It is a wonder that Loam is even still alive!
Alas, she is to perhaps the disappointment of none because she never succeeded in making a name for herself. She made smart matches in her matings with stallions but even her foals have failed her, scattered to the four corners of the earth like a handful of dust. Loam almost snorts but sucks in a sharp frigid breath instead and feels it chill her lungs. Yes, still alive though none would care. Except two. But she has banished them to the back of her mind. It seems impossible to think that him or her should still be sharing breath too, but then, anything is possible here. But to think of them is to accept the failings of her own heart and how mortal and sick it is to love either of them when Loam was never meant for something as beautiful as that.
Loam was always meant for dirt and death.
Both of those things are so much more real than three little words said to one another.
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
She is the last.
She’s known this, has always known this – but each year pounds this fact home, as she meets ages none of her forefathers did. It is a luxury, to grow old, and even as the years speckle across her muzzle, she does not bemoan it. It’s an honor.
The tree is tall now, though she doesn’t visit it as often. It took root on its own.
The names are still there, her linage made lasting in the soft bark of the hickory tree. The seals. They will be there – she hopes – when she is dead and gone, a gravestone.
There are still flowers in her hair, though she is too old for such foolishness. She doesn’t care. She likes the freshness of it; she likes the scent of them, the bouncing blossoms giving off their perfume. In her hair, the flowers are always blooming.
There is a name that is not carved in the tree, because the tree is a memorial, and she thinks - hopes the girl isn’t dead. There is a name, like dirt, a handful of fresh earth.
The kind of thing plants grow from. The place they thrive.
There is a name that sometimes crosses her lips, when she murmurs to herself (she is the only one she talks to, for days or weeks on end).
There is--
There is a mare before her, dark as a shadow, and maybe she is just a shadow.
There is a name.
“Loam.”
How long has she stood here?
Long enough for snowflakes to become leaves, that fall and roll past her in dry murmurs that sound like death rattles. The kind of death rattles that only leaves and wind can make together. It is a kind of noise that fails to wake her up enough to realize that she could almost put down roots her, like Hickory’s tree that she refuses to go visit even though she knows the exact location of it. To see that tree is to feel her heart squeeze like a vise inside her black breast, tight and hard, a constriction of emotion that Loam just cannot quite give in to.
Loam hasn’t looked at herself lately.
Who would want to see what a witchy mare of the woods has come to look like after all the years have gone by and she’s been forgotten? Not that she was ever someone to be remembered. It is quite possible that her own muzzle is peppered with the pale hairs of age that have come to visit her at last, but it is an age that she doesn’t feel - her joints are still nimble enough to bend to her incontestable will and she’ll give them no thought until the moment they start to fail her, locking up and sending waves of pain straight to her animalian brain. Until then, there are only the leaves and Loam, blazes of bright color and her own small sable self caught in the middle.
The scent comes to her first.
Not of a mare, but of flowers when there should not be flowers spreading their gay scent into the air. It makes her heart go sick with want and thump faster in her breast, because no one can make flowers bloom out of season except for… Hickory. She shuts the emerald of her eyes against the vision that comes drifting to her out of the woods. It must be a conjuration of her mind. No - not her mind, this is her heart’s doing because her brain knew better. But now there is the raw earthy smell of the bay mare herself that clogs Loam’s nostrils to the point that she is forced to snort out the scent, even though it had crawled down deep into her lungs and stayed there.
Hickory has taken root inside her as much as her tree has in the dirt.
Then she hears her name said from those lips (lips she has dreamt of beside a green pond in a dark corner of the forest) and her dark green eyes crack open to the sight of Hickory standing there before her, like a damned dream come true. Her mouth cracks open in the same fashion, and a croak comes out because she hasn’t spoken in so long - “Hickory” is all she manages for the moment, the rest chokes up her throat.
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
Time and again, she finds her.
It’s brief and fleeting – all too fleeting – but none of it changes the fact the mare comes into her life again and again, bringing with her a scent of earth. Bringing with her a fluttering in Hickory’s chest, a feeling she dares not put a name to.
Her line is not meant for love stories – she knows this, the way she knows their names. They are meant to live brief starburst lives. And she has defied that – she’s made no waves, done so little of note (except for when she faced Death, faced Famine, consumed her own flesh just to spit it in their faces). And she’s aged. She is the first to know grey hairs, to know the particular aching of joints on cold mornings.
She could be the first in other things, too.
A thing she dare not name.
The mare says her name and she feels the mare’s tone in a way she has felt nothing before. She shivers, as if a goose had walked over her grave.
“I didn’t--” she begins, but it’s a sentence with no end, because what could she say? I didn’t think I’d see you again. I didn’t know you were still alive.
She swallows. She inhales. There’s that scent again, the one she has thought of on quiet nights.
“It’s good to see you again,” is what she says instead, and it is. She moves closer, and brushes her muzzle over the dark pelt of the mare, and that motion – so simple – ignites more things inside her. All those things she doesn’t name.
Time is meaningless to their ilk.
The particles and dust that have formed Hickory and Loam have outstayed the ravages of time. What are seconds and minutes that tick by into endless hours thrust upon days that become months then years? A century could go by and somehow, the particles and dust that are Hickory and Loam will still find one another. The stars and some unknown god’s hand have seen to that. It is how they keep finding one another, in and out of time, like birds that come home to the ancestral roost of the heart.
It’s just there - inside each of them.
Their hearts are compasses that point their feet towards each other no matter the distance that has come between them. Loam knows that she could find Hickory in her dreams, full of trees and flowers, full of that beautiful brown face beneath all that black hair. Never has a bay mare looked so common in her dress but also never more beautiful than how Hickory looks when Loam sweeps her emerald gaze over her, ravenous for more. Skin as brown as a nut, hair as black as a raven’s feather, and she can feel a hunger build in her that requires no grass to sate it but one single taste of that mare’s flesh.
Neither of them should be allowed to love.
Bloodlines or lack thereof just do not allow it but here they are, together again. Always, and always.
Dark green eyes flick over the brown flesh, not missing for one instant the shiver that possesses it. A sentence begins but ends in an abrupt fashion that has Loam tilting her small head to one side as her tongue darts out to lick her lips. She holds her breath now, as Hickory talks and steps closer - close enough to brush her muzzle against Loam’s skin and now it is Loam who is prone to shivering which she never thought was possible. Even the cold is not enough to make her shiver and shake like an aspen in the wind but god, Hickory’s touch is her undoing!
“I missed you.” she croons to this woodland sprite that has haunted her life and her dreams and most of all, her heart. It is a murmur she tucks into the thick black hair that tumbles down the neck in a riot of messy windblown curls, as she breathes in Hickory’s intoxicating smell. Loam could get drunk of that smell, high as a kite in a bright blue sky even. She could forget that there is a world outside the press of their two skins together, and for a long moment, she does just that - she forgets and buries her black face in that black hair until Loam is momentarily indistinguishable from Hickory.
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
There is a feeling inside her, like ancient cities crumbling. Pompeii once felt a rumbling, once were witness to a sky turning black and the air turning to ash. Buildings collapsed and walls fall to pieces.
She is ancient. She is collapsing.
She is supposed to be a structured thing, and there is never supposed to be a rumbling or a sky turned black.
But nature – and this bay mare – care fuck-all for supposed to.
She lets the things crumble. Lets the world end. Because maybe it was always supposed to be this way. Maybe that stupid, convoluted history was always meant to end with her.
They have their tree. Their memorial. That is enough. She is not their memorial.
She is Hickory.
She falls against her.
(The theme, again – crumbling, falling, collapse. But already she is rebuilding or rebuilt.)
Loam is there to bear the momentary crush of weight, and then Hickory rights herself, and instead touches her with reverence, bold in her exploration, no longer timid or doubting.
She’d spent years wondering what she would do if she came upon Loam again, and now that such an opportunity is here, she is loath to waste it. I missed you, says Loam, and ah, she thrills at the words and the way they send shivers up her backbone.
“I missed you too,” she says, open and fraught, “I wasn’t sure that I’d see you again. I thought of you often. Of things I wanted to say to you.”
