Grief is a strange and incredible thing. It does not have a single shape and can be difficult to recognize. One can grieve themselves, an idea, a memory, loss of a million different kinds. It can live in every breath, alter every thought, bring an ache to each heartbeat. The longer you live with grief the more it changes you. Like time, wind, and water carve a landscape and alter it forever, grief separates you from who you think you are and leaves no road back.
She is still learning who has been left behind by that erosion. Some days her soul feels raw and savage, less now than in seasons past, but something is still wounded. That must be alright, to be able to find pain when one looks for it, a sign of being fully alive.
Autumn sunlight spills warmly over Kensa’s chestnut shoulders, rangy oak tree limbs, and their capped acorn bounty wave lazily above her as she grazes. Gold trimmed ears flick atop her flaxen draped poll but her posture is relaxed. She is at home in this untrafficked quercetum, an unpresuming strand of oaks belonging to no one. A shiver travels along the sturdy mare’s back and she raises her head alertly. Her topaz eyes do not scan the spaces between the trees marching out around her but unfocus as she recognizes the sensation that has disturbed her. She cannot imagine who would pull her in this way, but it seems she has not yet outgrown curiosity and goes willingly wherever she is being taken.
The setting sun’s light races over the golden rivers that spill along her sides as she rematerializes on a beach and turns toward the sound of crashing waves. It is cold, and her pale nostrils flare and burn when she draws in a breath of frigid salt air. Wind cuts against her skin, dragging her mane down along the sides of her neck and tangling the flaxen ribbons of her tail around her hocks. Quick eyes flash from water and northern ice to the familiar scaled shape only a few paces away. “Leilan?”
The draconic stallion is different, changed in the way Beqanna changes all of them. Does he still remember her as a friend? “Where have you brought me?” The land around her is unfamiliar, colder even than Nerine when she’d visited Heartfire there. This place is wintry when she knows autumn still reigns. Icicle Isle she guesses, but waits for Leilan’s reply, watching his face carefully. There have been years between her and the lives of those she once knew, there is no reason anyone would seek her out after so long. “Why?” Asks the chestnut at last, and though she never truly left it feels as though she has been thrown very suddenly back into the real world, remembered again, and uncertain if she is ready to be.
@Leilan
