08-25-2018, 09:20 PM
If it is possible, he has grown wilder.
The points of his horns are unusually sharp and the shape of his face is rougher, older. Time has not been kind to him but neither has life been kind to him overly much. What kindness it has given him has been in the bountiful crops of foals he’s sired and in the singular most memorable love of his life.
Skin the color of fruit and just as sweet to taste and touch.
He still remembers.
Honestly, how could he forget?
But life kept them apart. Others came. Warmed his loins for a night or two. Then he left because none of them were her. None of them had ever made him leave the earth to try flying. He’d never been so close to the sky and the stars than he’d been that time with her. She gave him more than just love - a beautiful set of twins, that memorable flight, and most of all, the chance to love again despite how gruff he always was. He tried to deflect her emotion away from him but it hadn’t worked. The only thing that worked was how she’d gotten in under his skin and pierced his heart like a thorn he never wanted to work loose.
The thought of her is what keeps him up at night. He doesn’t need sleep. It comes and it goes but never the picture of her face that his mind holds more precious than water or grass. Her face is what makes him go on, get up off the earth and force down the things he needs to survive. Even the dawn finds him awake and staring up through the canopy of leaf and branch in hopes that he might spot a winged silhouette. He has before, but they’ve never turned out to be her. Not a single one. Still, when he thinks the disappointment ought to crush him, her face comes to mind and he is rejuvenated in his desire to find her.
Except he never leaves the forest. Not once. Not in years. Not since that flight to Tephra and thereafter. He lingers, growing as wild as the woods around him. Grows into a thing of horn and fur and branch that snarls somewhere in between all of that. He remains hulking and gruff to those that come to close to his patch of forested earth. More often than not, he just chases them away. But this dawn feels different. He can’t figure out why but he has been awake to greet it which is not altogether unusual for him to do. His black eyes take in the brightening sky through breaks in the limbs and leaves above him.
Someone goes flying by but he dismisses it. So many times he’s looked and hoped against hope, against the better sense in him that says it was just a sweet time for a sour soul but she’d done something to him - healed something in him that had been broken so long ago by a first love that no longer means much to him beyond a memory of stupid youthful sweetness. What he’d found now (or then), had been more lasting and it bubbles back to life in him again despite the years of sludge that he slumbered beneath. Awakened, feeling a strangeness in the air that he cannot place, he begins to step away from his part of the wood that he has claimed for himself.
Mandan’s pace is slow and without rush despite the sensation in his blood that today is just different. He cannot place how or why the day feels that way but it does. So he listens to it, because he has never been one to outright ignore the murmurings of instinct though for so long the voices of long ago have been dormant in him. Now they raise a ruckus and he reacts, walking through the woods until he comes to the edge that meets the meadow. The grass is long and golden here, causing him to turn his heavy horned head to consider the trees. When did the leaves lose their greenness?
He blinks, a bit stupidly as he realizes the seasons have gone round again in their ceaseless circle. Then he sniffs. There is a scent that teases at his nostrils in the last of the autumn. Not a scent of leaves ripening or grass dying but a mare’s scent, and not the kind of estrus and sex. It is the scent of dawn and dusk, of magic and healing. The kind of scent that love would have if love could have a smell to it. He sniffs again, pulling a deeper headier draught into his lungs until he holds it there for so long that his lungs protest bursting. Not that he’d mind. He’s thought of dying enough just to get one last glimpse, one last touch, one last anything of her.
Now he has it and memory is cruel, but both the wood and autumn are crueler for the trick he thinks they play on him. Instantly he is sour, growing surlier by the moment as he plods down the path that picks its way through the trees and to a clearing. There in the clearing she stands though, and he mistakes her for a mirage at first with the way her wings stretch out in defiance of the open space. “Exist.” he mumbles before he’s even aware the word has left his mouth. There is no synchronicity between brain and throat. He’s said her name and cannot take it back, but he here is speaking to visions of her in the forest when she cannot surely be there.
Her scent is stronger, more alluring. He denies the truth of it as much as he denies the beautiful heartbreaking sight of her. But there he goes, mumbling again to ghosts and loneliness. “You’re not real. You’re not really here.” and there is a forlorn note to his brusque voice as he takes but a single step forward, towards her, towards the only salvation he’s ever known but never said. There was so much he’d always wanted to say to her but never did. His throat always closed up on the words and he choked them back down, knowing that she couldn’t possibly love him the way he loved her.
No - pined for, that is much better than just plain old love. He pined for one look from the eyes that he remembered as stark and emerald. So he takes another step to dispel this cruel enchantment the forest and the dawn have laid on him. Why have they taken up arms against him and used this for their trickery?! His lips draw back from his teeth and he thinks to bite at the vision before him but again her smell hits him and stops him dead - spells don’t have smells and she smells all too real, even gives off a heat that only a horse can. “Are you real?” he whispers, afraid she’s not.
@[exist] <3