of the distant mountains; Brynmor & Igni

[roan]

How many years I know I'll bear
I found something in the woods somewhere

Roan is small and alone with the cold until they come.

She doesn’t mind though, it has been that way for her for years.

Maybe, in another year when her strength has come back into her own, they’ll work on giving Igni a sibling. It is a sweet thought that her mind flirts with as she stares blindly at the snow, never seeing how kindly it swirls around her and melts into her skin with familiar little kisses. She tucks this sweet little thought away for another time and listens for her precious family to find her - it doesn’t take them long and she is glad for that.

There is a thud on the rock nearest her and she turns her head towards him, a smile gathering in the corners of her mouth. She cannot see him land but has listened to him talk proudly of all that has happened since she became ill after their daughter’s birth - the wings, the promotion, all of it. She is proud of him too and the name he has made for himself in this cold hard kingdom. Pride and love are tangled up in the lines of her face that have become harsher over the difficult time she has had after the birth, but the way he says her name softens her face back into its old loveliness. Their noses touch and happiness overwhelms her - almost hurts, because she has missed this as much as he has.

His nose roams across her skin and scars until it comes back to her face and she turns to rub her cheek against his own - they don’t have much time together until their daughter will join them and she savors these few precious moments that are just the two of them and the wild wind that blows across the Tundra. “Better than I have been,” she murmurs back to him, keeping the same gentle quiet that permeates the air around them and keeps every hushed and sweet. Her lips slide down his neck to his shoulder, where she presses a long lingering kiss into his fur and just breathes him in - holds his scent in her lungs in a way that she hasn’t done in what feels like forever.

She takes a step back from him when their beautiful daughter joins them, voicing her fake disgust and barely contained joy. She can feel her daughter’s nose touch hers and she just stands there, trading air with the light of her life in such beautiful horseflesh that she cannot see and her heart tightens just a little at what she is missing out on. She has never loathed her blindness but she does just a bit in that moment that she cannot look upon the mare that Igni is growing up to be. Roan doesn’t mean to sigh but disguises it with happiness as she bumps her daughter’s nose and plants a swift kiss on the girl’s cheek knowing that she is getting a little too old for such public displays of affection.

“My daughter,” she murmurs.

“My darling daughter,” and her head swings between the two like a pendulum weighted by her love for these two horses, her heart brimming with joy that she is still with them and not defeated by the sickness that sapped her of strength and almost of life itself. She can do little but smile and look between them into complete darkness but to her, they are two pinpoints of brightness in her life and she has never been happier to stand there between them, touching noses and just breathing in the smells of them.

Roan