07-28-2016, 02:24 PM
Loathing crawls up the back of his throat; it is hot and violent, his reaction to this place. No land should affect him like so but the meadow is spun up in a web of love and loss that he feels every time he stands on the edge of it. His distaste is snorted out, blown through large red nostrils that gap and drink in the air around him in great gulps to fill the big lungs inside his brawny chest - Mandan is a big stallion, bay and hulking, and more than a little menacing with the horns atop his head. They spiral upwards, two alike, hard and sharp at the fierce tip as they come twisting to a point.
He has never had to make use of them - once, he entertained the blackest thoughts to ever sashay through his head, of skewering her breast with the pair of them. Only the innocent faces of his children (not hers’, thank the stars! They only ever had the one before she chose power over love and made sure he knew he was too lowly for her - she would always love the Falls first, and it’s King second, but always more than she had ever loved him and he can hear her flowery voice from long ago, plucking lies out of thin air) had stopped him from such ill action.
Why then, is he here now?
He cannot stomach the meadow much, these days. But he is there, lurking as he did the first time, in the shadows and the trees. He had tried hard to keep to himself, but there had been something carefree in him then that is lacking now - he is hard, too hard to enjoy the way the sunlight paints his skin in low heat as it tries to fend off the snowy cold. Even the snow is no match for him, his stride too rangy to be caged in by the tricksy drifts of snow that are shored up solid and deceiving. He barrels his way through them, breaking the icy crusts wide open, before disappearing into the trees again where the snow is softer underfoot since it is hardly fallen here.
Mandan comes to a stop just beneath a birch tree; the lowest reaching branches of which tangle-touch his horns and he just stands there, peering into the snowy dusk with eyes black and hard.