victory is all you need,
so cultivate and plant the seed
Everything is dark and small until it isn’t.
He comes to life in a world that is too bright and too loud, so very different from the space he’s just occupied. He can feel the vastness of it at once. Great big pillars rise into the air all around him, stretching to the sunlight that manages to filter through the thick canopy. He blinks against it. The songs of exotic birds reach his swiveling ears from both near and far away into the cluster of pillars, giving him a greater scope of the world. It doesn’t faze the little blue boy, however. He takes it in with an almost scientific curiosity, a growing acceptance of each new finding he makes.
Most of all, the colt is reassured by the presence of his mother. She cleans him and coaxes him and names him. Vidar, she breathes, her voice strong and smooth. Finally, he turns to her. Already, she’s standing, and from his place on the ground, she looks as tall as the trees. This impresses him until he manages to stand himself. He learns that perspective is everything – that his eyes can and will play tricks on him, that it’s best not to believe everything one sees. But he doesn’t think his mother will ever change or deceive him. As he takes his first meal and they bond further, he comes to know this deep within his baby-bones. She is his safety, his protector.
And eventually, he grows sleepy enough to let her play her role.
Vidar is awoken sometime later ( though he could never say how much later, as fresh to the world as he is) as a new sound reaches his ears. Curled up beneath her, he can feel the press of his dam’s leg into the small of his back. He yawns, shaking away the dark lock of hair that had fallen over his face as he slept. “Mother?” His voice is small and still tired as he looks up at her, but he senses the immediate change in her. She becomes harder, more pointed; lines of tension radiate from her face. Vidar scrambles to his feet just as the sound of another voice reaches them. Distress, he thinks. That’s the sound of someone who’s in trouble.
The prey instinct in him makes him want to back behind the steel grey of Lagertha. He knows he should, knows that there are bigger and meaner things out in the pillars that could snatch him at any time. But Vidar moves towards the voice instead, looking back at his mother before actually reaching the girl. Even from here, he can see that it’s another horse like him and his dam. She’s caught up in some pointy plant, though, and he has no idea how to free her. He knows his mother is a protector and wonders if it will translate to this girl, too. “Don’t worry. My mother will help you.” Vidar feels the corners of his lips instinctually rising in a smile as he watches the other.
Vidar
ooc: ugh, this is crap. but he and Sarkis are cousins!