Glim has grown.
Did she want to? No, not necessarily but she’d had no say in the matter. No say at all in how her body betrayed her and blossomed into a small lovely shape that suggested she was a version of her mother in miniature.
Glim was not Caw though.
Never could be.
Never would be.
She was supple and willowy in the way that wild horses are. Bramble-maned and fast on her feet. Still spotty and silly.
But she is not without a roil of shadows that follow her. Sometimes they coalesce into a singular shape that she happens to favor that day. It could be a lynx or a buzzard. Might even be a pygmy hippo! Nonetheless it is diligent in its murky trail behind her with only sharp yellow eyes to distinguish it from any other ordinary shadow.
On this afternoon of rainy drizzle; the spotted mare - still strange to think of herself as that - is followed by a shadow-lynx. She gallops and he slinks. He pounced and she shrieks. It’s all play; no harm or foul. His shadow-teeth grasp a delicate ankle but she shakes him off easily.
Their games take them far across the grasslands until winded, the spotty mare slows to a crawling walk and her shadow-companion joins her. Rain still comes down. Glim grows damp from it but has no care - rain is rain. Besides the grass and rivers need it. Which in a way meant she did too.
But there was an odd flash of brilliance on the drizzling plains that gave her pause. Something silver, like the promised edge of a cloud or a cold sharp blade. No matter, she was drawn to it and worked her way over to the stallion. Glim didn’t know it yet but she’d seen him once before - long ago when Caw summoned them all to her, lovers and children both.
She’d been the youngest then. Just a girl. Now she was older and the memory of him stirred halfheartedly inside her brain. Maybe if she squinted at him, that memory would surface but it remained elusive and he was not. She inched her nose out to him to get a whiff of his smell then snapped it smartly back to her buckskin breast.
“Do I... know you?”
something in his smell told her so but she questioned it nonetheless.
@[tannor]