Keeper-
He is a quiet companion to her and the night.
Their talk is as brief as the breaths they breathe or the toss of someone in fitful slumber whose eyelids first begin to flutter than remain shut against the thing that sought to stir them from their dreaming. She knows it isn’t their voices, too hushed to travel far enough across the field and wake anyone. There are other noises though, common to the night that makes for fitful sleep and Keeper lets her black eyes stray across the cocked limbs and slumped backs, lowered heads and hardly moving ears, of those that sleep and dream.
Keeper might be a bit envious of them.
They find sleep so easily. Or sleep finds them, however it is. She would never think to do more than get a drink here, snatch a mouthful of grass, and rest for a moment with her hip thrown against a tree like it is now. But so sleep here? The air holds too much memory of the smell of broken hope and eagerness to let her do more than look and leave. Few come smiling and trusting; their smiles and trust broken like a stalk of corn, snapped just that easily. She has to wonder, in the lapse of their conversation and the way she stands there companionably with him, how many came bright and eager and left as something else?
It must be too many, she decides.
But not him, as he answers her about home and the like. Her gaze slides back to him, noticing the slouch into deeper relaxation though he remains distinctly taller than her. Most are, since Keeper tends to the smaller side of horses and her breed in particular. She’s almost a pony but manages to gain a hand or two beyond that to just be labeled enough of a light horse and she certainly lacks the plumpness that is customary of most ponies! Her shape is lean, carved from skin and bone by wind and centuries of wild unconcerned breeding.
Back to home;
He’s looking at her with a greater measure of intent now and she can read his interest in his face as plain as day. “I might…” she trails off with a sly quirk of her lips. It happens that this is when morning comes, first begins to touch this corner of the earth in pale blushing colors that gain and swell as the sun rises. If it is brisk outside the evergreen copse, Keeper does not feel it. She is warm here, beside him even though their sides not touch. The evergreen needles have trapped the heat of their bodies within and she is pleasantly warm from the fuzzed tips of her ears to the tips of her naturally shorn hooves.
“Would you?” she asks him, not quite sure she heard him right. The words had come out soft as a whisper so eagerly snatched away by the wind but not before Keeper’s keen ears had heard it. He has a heart-longing that she’s never known but can almost taste, a queer taste that sits on her tongue like a fat stone of sorrow. It makes her move closer to him, removing the scant inches that were between them so that their shoulders can touch and her nose finds his neck. “I could help you find that again.” she offers softly, companionably.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless