10-20-2017, 11:59 AM
the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
“I don’t think you’re naive.”
Oh but she is! Despite his gentle contradiction; she is far more naive than she cares to admit and she’d do just that, as she had with him, admit from sunup to sundown because it made no difference to her except that he knew it even if he didn’t agree with it. But she knew she was because he loved someone and she loved someone, but there was something undefinable between them that felt a little like love did.
“What are two fools like us to do?”
Spark had laughed then; knowing they were fools, both of them for the things that they’d said to each other that they’d likely never said to another. It was that attraction of fire and ice, opposites and extremes. As much as her heat infuriated the polar bear in him, his ice kept her flames extinguished most of the time. But the mention of fools stuck with her, long after their embrace ended and life took a sad downturn for them.
Time passes.
Like it always does.
Spark spends most of her days in the company of the volcano. She grows lazy amidst it’s spewed ash and infernal heat, and much of that same ash blankets her skin so she is less a medicine hat mare and more a pale gray hump of flesh against the landscape. Spark dreams, but the dreams hold as much haze and lack of clear definition as the very air around her does. She is no seer and cannot discern meaning from the dreams she has. They are just there, companions to the murk she seems mired in.
Something makes her stir from the murk and shrug the ash off her back.
A scent she has not smelled in days, as if he’s been absent and elsewhere.
“Ledger,” she murmurs to herself as her hooves carry her towards the soft sand of the shore. Spark thinks that he has not heard her because there is a look on his face that was not there before, he’s harder than she remembers him being from the last time his face bent to her neck in friendly tenderness. He spits a sharp accusation that makes her pin her ears flat against her poll as she stares at him but he refuses to meet her mismatched gaze, staring at the tide swirling around their feet.
She knows who he refers to; his beloved but she finds it hard to believe that the mare lied to him. Except she has no idea the things that transpired elsewhere, as she is rather sheltered the longer she refuses to leave the Tephran lands. (She tells herself it’s because she might miss Giver coming back again if she goes off to the meadow or forest, or even the field for a short trip. Spark knows better though, deep down, in the marrow of her bones that she just doesn’t leave because she’s afraid of going.) She cannot even begin to ask him the how or the why of it as he goes on about it being gone and her having taken it. Then he mentions looking for the spark, and she thinks that almost was a joke if not for the pained moan that left his lips.
Spark meets his gaze but holds it only for a moment before her eyes drift down to the big X marking his chest. It concerns her, for it mimics the jagged lightning bolt of knit flesh that formed a scar where the buffalo had gored her mother. She knows the tale of it, that Scalped had died that day then came back to life hours or days later, immortal ever after. It had been a pivotal moment for the original medicine hat mare that Spark bore resemblance to out of all her siblings, half or full. It is how she knows that something pivotal had occurred to him, besides the manner in which he talks, as if crazed.
“Ledger,” she tries again, just as soft as before but more pointedly.
Except he goes on and on, and she can feel his pain tenfold as he talks. Spark doesn’t fully understand, nor does she pretend to as he moves to rest his head against her neck. She can feel his eyes close against her skin, the lightest fluttering of motion like a butterfly coming in to rest and he then asks that very thing - “Can we rest now?” and there is something childish and alarming in his plea that makes her heart go out to him.
“What happened?”
She tries to ask, knowing that she is about to touch upon a hurt greater than the one she has known. Spark cannot imagine what he has been through, what malicious turn of events has unfolded to leave him like this - this was not the Ledger she knew, the gentle one-eyed stallion that had swallowed her own hurts as much as she had swallowed his. She knows this will be a hard tale for him to tell - if he tells it, and she thinks to snatch back her question but her neck bends round to land her nose against his shoulder. Warm breath after warm breath is blown out upon his skin as her lips press chaste kisses to the cracked skin.Spark