He wakes to the crisp, clean scent of the pines and smiles.
The trees that had sheltered him through the night are like long lost friends he’s happy to have reunited with again. The branches cut through the summer-warm air, reaching down to rest their shaggy arms upon his back. He shakes off the fallen needles that had coated his back overnight, displaced from their sources by the creatures of the moon-time. Because the Chamber is not the soulless, lifeless stretch of rock and brush that everyone seems to think it is. Life fills even the darkest of forests and highest reaches of stone. It survives in the smoky mist that curls around the boulders and thrives even before the ground has thawed from frost.
He can’t believe how much he’s missed this place.
A raven hops from one of the higher branches down to the one Walter is currently under, shaking more piney residue onto his back. He glares at the twin beads of black staring at him, seemingly mocking him. Yeah, birdy? Without warning, the palomino snaps his white wings out with a flourish, upsetting both branch and bird at the same time. The raven takes off, protesting with its incessant CAW-CAW track far into the distance. He smirks with his little victory, but at the same time, his eyes search for any sign of movement around him. Straia - was that her name? - had seemed rather attached to her ridiculously large flock. Don’t want her to get the wrong impression of him…
With a last quick peek into the shadows of the tightly-pressed trees, he follows the trajectory of the raven’s escape. He is on hoof, however he covers the ground almost as easily as he would the sky. This kingdom had been his home for many years. In his extended absence, thoughts of the Chamber had passed through his brain like tumbleweeds across the prairies of the Outside-lands: quick, infrequent, and gone between one blink of his eyes and the next. But he realizes now that it had never left him, really. As much as he had tried to bury his past firmly in the soil he once had tread upon, he knows that he had been wildly unsuccessful. Every easy, unfaltering step across the pocked ground proves it more and more.
He only stops when he finds what he is looking for (what he has spent decades looking for, unconsciously).
“Djinni,” his voice is the smooth tenor it’s always been. She’s just as beautiful to him as she’s always been, too (no matter what form she takes), but he doesn’t tell her that. There’s a blockade that forms somewhere between his heart and his head. And even though he can read her emotions – her’s and everyone else’s – he can’t translate them, can’t reconcile them with his own. When it comes to Djinni, his head always wins out in the battle for supremacy.
Walter looks around them, taking in the pines that stretch away to the hills that rise up and up. He remembers all the times he’d climbed those same hills as a boy. He remembers the freedom and fearlessness of his daytime adventures. He remembers the loneliness that crept from the mist and swallowed him in the nights. His honey gaze levels on the mare who’d eased so much of it later on; she had pulled him back from the brink without ever realizing it.
He doesn’t tell her he loves her (does he?). Instead he says, “I like seeing you here.” Walter gestures around them with his nose. He’s never been afraid to say what he feels, what he thinks – he’s just not often sure what, exactly, he does. “Want me to show you around some more?” He ruffles his wings at his sides, already anxious for her to see it all. Already anxious to spend more time in her presence, to play the game of cat and mouse (where the roles are always changing) that they constantly fall into. “Us locals know all the best spots, after all.”
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long