don't lose faith; TARNISHED

[Tarnished]

This the story of how, when the wolves knocked,
I met them at the door and I became the beast instead.

It had taken him a long time to admit it to himself, but he had loved that girl.

He thought about her sometimes; wondered, deep down, what might have happened between them if the worst hadn’t happened to her. What their children might have looked like—if they would have had any at all. If he would have become King like his parents intended him to, if she would have ruled alongside him; the mild to his wild, soft enough to smooth over all of the feathers he would have likely ruffled and still the rage budding inside him whenever he wanted to wage war against someone else. There would always be someone else. But it would not be her. Not Else. Else was long gone from his life now, her children grown and no longer in need of his protection while the ghost of their mother (dead to him, dead a long time now) continued to haunt him still.

Echoes of her cornered him in his sleep, begging him to tell them why everything had happened the way it did; he had no answers for them, and so there would be no nightly reprieve, no sweet escape. He could only learn to live with her ghost and with what he had let happen. He could only carry on—pretending the ache would eventually dull, pretending to be strong when he wasn’t. He missed her more than he had ever missed anyone and though she lived within the same borders, she was simply out of reach.

Remembering was hard.

It was harder still when you had to walk past someone like you’d never known them in the first place.

So he leaves, as he is prone to do; he ventures further from the Deserts than he has in weeks, his father probably expects him to return a few years from now, weary from travel with a brand new brood of children in tow—but that isn’t the case. Tarnished intends to return this time, some time, probably within the next few hours unless a portal opens up and spits him back out in hell.

Just like last time.

Tarnished cringes.

He doesn’t like thinking about last time.

Screwing his face up thoughtfully, the dark horse decides that it’s probably safer to take to the air; almost nothing bad ever happens up there, right? Unless, of course, there’s a thunderstorm or something of the like. But the skies are clear as they’ve ever been these last few days, save for a few white wispy clouds stretched thin across the vast expanse of blue. He sighs, sprouting wings—large, leathery things that match the color of his coat; the stallion starts forwards, gathers a quick burst of speed then leaps into the wind. One, two, three beats of his wings and he’s surging up and out of The Meadow.

Away, away he goes, until everything below looks like a map he’d seen once in The Doctor’s chambers.

He shivers, and not because of the cooler air.

No, definitely doesn’t like thinking about it.

He flies low over the tops of the trees, skimming the tips of the leaves with his hooves before shooting upwards again; birds scatter, squirrels chatter up at him angrily, shaking their tiny fists—annoyed at being so senselessly spooked. So Tarnished does it again. Again, and again, as if he’s got nothing better to do than pick on creatures not even half his size until he grows bored with the game and decides to sail in for a landing. It’s a snug fit, so he shrinks himself as he nears the trees—no bigger than the squirrels he’d been bullying, he shoots between branches like a bullet and then flares out his wings before he hits the ground. They change shape, acting as parachutes; he glides through the air and before his hooves ever touch the ground, he’s back to normal size. Skipping, almost, down a well-worn path and humming his Jungle Mother’s songs to himself.

Oh, how merry.

Tarnished flicks his ears back, his heavy head turning towards the sound of splashing. Probably a foal, he guesses, remembering how much Nyxia liked to play in the ponds around here; he doesn’t hear a weary mother urging her child to get out of the water, however, nor does he hear the usual laughter or squeals typically associated with a child at play. So he grows curious and, as always, his curiosity gets the better of him.

As it turns out, it’s not a foal playing in the water.

It’s a mare.

A mare he’s seen before, he thinks.

Somewhere, somehow, he’d met her a lifetime or two ago.

“Hello,” he says, casually sticking his head through a blackberry bush. “I think we’ve met, maybe?”

TARNISHED