be humble, for you are made of earth
It smelled like them - Other;
The longer she lingers, the stronger their scents grow.
Fur snorts; tries to force the smell of them from her nostrils but it does no good.
She sucks at the air, tries to take in the smells of the forest at her back but all she gets is lungful after lungful of field: crushed grass, churned earth, horsehair, and a thin current of fear running underneath it all. (Seems she was not the only one afraid here, from horse to mouse - fear found them all.) Because of that, she stamps a hoof deeper into the dirt, clearly displeased at her own realizations about this place and none of them are good.
Her mind ticks and turns, from one thought to the next - forest, fear, mouse, me, and most of it is nonsensical. Okay, not entirely nonsensical… maybe, more instinctual as she reacts first and thinks later. Her black eyes stray as much as her mind does; looking first to the Others before her then casting furtive glances back at the forest that flanks her. Fur would never be able to say what it was that she was looking for, most likely assurance of some kind and most likely from a deer’s face or the familiar trunk of a tree (except trees cannot offer assurance, they can only offer staunch boughs and bark). She tasted the coppery beginnings of fear again in the back of her mouth; had to bite it back, especially as the disembodied voice spoke to her, spooking her.
Fur gave a visible start; she spun around and her eyes darted amongst the forest shadows, searching until they fall on him. She only knows it is a male from the deepness of his voice and the smell (her horse’s nose betrays her, sniffs him out, declares him friend - not foe, not yet anyway…) of him that is so tangled up in forests, maybe not this one that she has come to know, but another like it, since all forests are related somehow. It is this forest-smell that emboldens her approach towards him, though she hesitates because his eyes are so chilly and blank and such a blue that she has never seen except in the confines of mountainous arms and ice. His eyes give her pause and she cocks her head to one side; she’s not quite sure how to respond to him - deer spoke in grunts and bleats, and she had come to do so too. He did neither - no grunt, no snort-wheeze, and the tone of his voice was cajoling in the sense that it lulled her into trusting him.
She came closer, and closer --
Her little nose stretched up to hover scant inches from his as she inhaled his scent and said one of the few words she could recall - “Tree.” It made sense to her, he smelled like trees, but not these trees - they smelled sad and old, maybe because of all the fear in the field that sucked the happy green life right out of them.
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