Keeper-
Keeper has not left the field in a few days.
She is beginning to feel a sense of commitment to a place that she hasn’t even been fully granted permission to join. So it is an odd sense of obligation that keeps her coming here time after time. That odd sense makes her do odd things, like paw at the earth with a hoof to disguise the restlessness that snakes through her. Keeper can feel herself beginning to change into a different creature, one that is starting to conform to the requirements for participation in a place all because she lacks a true sense of belonging, at least, that’s what she tells herself it is.
(Really, she just misses how the deer have already gone for the upcoming winter and how she hasn’t laid eyes on his skin in quite some time but that was typical. Him and her revolved around one another like cycles of the moon, waxing and waning but never quite nearing the fullness of their short spectacular moments together.)
Keeper looks up to the sky, banishing thoughts of him from her mind and realizes with a squint, that day has become night and the sun changed itself out for a multitude of stars. They twinkle on, bright and unconcerned with what transpires below them, because stars are stars and have no care for the lives of horses who’ve mastered things like language, magic, good and evil. Long after the last horse is gone, the stars will still be, she thinks with a faint smile. Same with the earth and the rivers that run across it, like the creek that talks in a soft watery tinkle not far from her and reminds her of a thirst she hadn’t realized she felt until just then.
The little dunskin mare passes the blue roan tobiano by in the night, not fully aware of him leaning against the tree. Her black eyes are on the creek and only that until she bends her slim neck to it, submerging her muzzle and feeling the cold water run down her throat, soothing an ache that was greater than she’d first realized. Once finished, Keeper lifts her head, droplets caught in her whiskers catch the starlight and sparkle before she gives a light toss of her head and sends them scattering away from her in little arcs of water and light.
There are a few smells here, of horse mostly, but one is recent and her nostrils work to pick it out of the tangled skein of new and old. A stallion, he’d been here not long before her and she swings her head about, casting her gaze out for him until she pins him beneath the copse of trees with her black stare. He seems bored, even from at this distance and she can only imagine that he is waiting for something to happen or someone to happen upon him. Her smile broadens, it is evident that Keeper will happen upon him this night because why not?
So she walks over to him and throws her pale dun hip against a tree opposite him, gives it a good scratch and cannot help the sight that falls out of her now open mouth as she relieves an itch. “Mmm,” she murmurs because it felt good, rough bark on her not so soft skin - her winter pelt is growing and it makes her hot and itchy at times because winter is not quite here, though notes of it blow through the colder wind and chill the creeks, sometimes even frosting the grass so that it crunches in the early morning hours when the horses first wake and stir.
“New here?” she ventures, casual as a calm in its shell as she glances sidelong at him before peering back out towards the creek and the wide expanse of field softened by the starlight.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless