12-17-2015, 06:35 PM
Her tread is unsure until she feels the permafrost underfoot; too much time has passed though she has not measured it in ways that they have - she guesses, smells how the seasons change in the air, because she will never see the leaves and the snow fall. She pauses the moment the grasses rustle against her legs; she knows what they will taste like but hunger does not stay her eager feet. The little roan was all grown up now but she missed her father dearly and though she could not see, she knew the way home.
Happiness courses through her body, hot and strong. She looks forward to seeing her father and expects to find him near the caves. Roan has a healthy respect for the caves, she knows that things go on in them that only the stallions are privy to but that has never bothered her. To her, the caves are avoided at all costs and they smell of moss and dank. Still, that is where her father welcomes the newcomers to the fold and that is where she goes.
The deeper into the land she goes, the fainter the scent of her father grows. She smells only strangers here but never once is afraid that they might harm a little blind mare who knows their pathways all too well. Roan is counting on their curiosity and sense of propriety to keep them from casting her away. Once, she was a princess of this land and had played amongst the snows. She knew well the chill of the shadow of the ice wall that bordered the tundra - knew it better than most because it was a familiar darkness.
Her roan fur is thicker than most - always has been since her beginning on the cold hard ground; it keeps her warm as she waits them out but the shagginess of her pelt does more than trap the heat in her, it hides the burn-flesh from those earliest moments in the too-small acidic womb of the mother she does not know. The Tundra might have birthed her from its wet snowy thighs for all that she knows. The scars mix with the roan hairs of her pelt, nearly unnoticeable but still there and at long last she is close to the caves and calls out experimentally, “Father?”