I am a stranger to you; spear

[Spear + Spark]

An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Most of his time thus far has been spent in idle grazing and small explorations of the hills and the springs that crisscross their cragged faces; mostly, he just watches the hares hopping about as he grazes, the grass and his feathered legs mingling together like old friends.

So far, it just seems to be the little spotted mare and himself that claim (he hasn’t claimed it in the traditional sense, just said he’d like to stay and he has) this place for a length of time and the rest seem to come and go fast enough that their scents don’t remain long on the air or their tracks on the earth. He’s come across his own hoofprints often enough that he thinks he’s been one of the few to traverse back and forth across the hills.

Spear likes that it is not entirely a gentle terrain, and that it reminds him of a place far from here that he has spent a good amount of time in. (He thinks of a mare there, and has no idea if she has a long-legged foal by her side now that looks a little something like him and her, and he realizes that he’ll never really know…) The cacti are familiar in their barbed arms and unusual shapes that throw long strange shadows on the ground, and the pine brush is also familiar to him - he remembers, but shakes it out of his head and resumes the comfortable tedium of grazing on the green nutrient-rich grass that fills his belly.

He cranes an ear towards the soft nicker, raising his head to watch the spotted mare trot towards him. It takes her a good minute because she lacks the height that he has, and her smallness reminds him of his twin sister only Crota is more plump and plucky where Spark was just small and slight, like a slip of smoke or a sliver of sunlight. His mismatched eyes never leave her, from the way the feathers bob and dance in her mane to the way she smiles already. He finds it easy to smile back at her, “Crota, good to see you too. Been quiet here when you’re off and about,” he mentions, having noticed her come and go quite a bit, and presumably to thicken their ranks in the hills and give the land a fighting chance to survive when the mists come take them back.

“I like the hills very much. They remind me of a place not unlike them that I once knew.”

spear