the city never sleeps at night... [kristin pony; any]

[Reagan]

now don’t you understand…that I’m never changing who I am?

Breaking the wind of flight was something that Reggie had never particularly been very good at, but now that she was forced to walk among the mere mortals as if she were—or had always been—one of them, she found it exhausting. Her feet hurt, there were spurs in her hooves, her muscles were cramping; essentially, the old hag was complaining.
 
The way old Irish hags do.
 
She was still constantly praying in Gaelic for the return of her magic, and still incredibly weak from the expulsion of the strength from her body, but as she moved through the foggy expanse, she was learning one very important thing—she could still hear the land speaking to her. The only problem was, she could not speak back. Her eyesight had returned, and in the distance she had seen a mountain cresting the sky as if it were some sort of pillar—a mecca for lost souls. She at the moment could care less about her soul—she knew she was a sinner and had given up her blood as a sacrifice for her arrogance and hubris.
 
She would continue to pray to her God and Mary, but she doubted at this point that even they cared about her. Such a sad state of affairs.
 
Reagan approached a big rock, and in her lack of hesitation for her age, she attempted to climb upon it… finding little footing a lot of embarrassment as her hind legs scrambled to make their way up… her bum literally flying in the air…
 
Reagan, the normally formidable mother-queen, was stuck.

[Spear + Spark]

Spear and Spark rarely complained; who was there to listen to their complaints?

They could fuss at the wind for blowing their manes into their eyes, and they could grumble at the ground for being too hard on their hooves but in the end, the wind was the wind and the ground was the ground - unchanging, like they are - just two small not quite baby horses that looked like shaggy little sheepdogs, since they’ve not yet lost all of their winter fur.

Spear weaves in and out of the fog, sometimes ahead of Spark and sometimes just behind her. She hates it, because he pops out of it unexpectedly and then dashes away before she can chastise him with a nip. Spear has learned to avoid her teeth, they pinch harder than he cares for - she’ll be one hell of a mean mare someday, he thinks. Stars help the poor stallion that ends up with her! Spark is thinking the same about Spear, not that he’ll be a mean stallion or she’ll be a mean mare really, just that he’s so ridiculously mischievous, that she doubts a mare can ever really take him seriously. She thinks he is going to lead one hell of an incredibly lonely life until he comes around, pestering her like he is already.

(They are twins after all, and very nearly inseparable.)

Behind him is the Mountain, feared and awed by all - except them, to them it is only a Mountain, and one that grew up overnight. They have no reason to fear it’s steep rocky slopes or clamber all over it except to exercise their legs and try to bite at the sky (they are children after all, fuzzy little horse children!), but they are bright - they’ve listened and they’ve learned that others fear it, stand in awe of it, because the Mountain takes and what it takes, it can give back and many want back what was taken from them. Spear and Spark never had much but each other to begin with, so they cannot miss what they never had - any drop of magic in them laid dormant, as much as they hoped their father’s new volcanic country was, dormant and humid and so very different from the icy slopes he once ruled over.

Back to the story at hand --

Spear is using the fog to his advantage to antagonize poor Spark who is for some reason, not as focused on play as she usually is and this annoys Spear to no end. “Why are you so boring today?” he asks his sister, and she just snorts at him, not deigning to answer his question - colts, they were so stupid sometimes, like now, and as bothersome as a fly! Her tail snapped irritably against her fuzzy flanks, as she glared at him, “Why are you so annoying?” she said pointedly, to which he only grinned and disappeared back into the fog, presumably to scare her again. Spark sighed and shook her head, he was forever a fool but she loved him all the same for it.

The bay overo colt is ahead of her in the fog, and there looms a rock before him. It gives him pause, something is off about the rock…

Spark is there all of a sudden, beside him, and she peers off into the direction in which he is so keenly staring. “What do you see brother?”

“Something…” he echoes back, boldly stepping towards the rock-monster which is not a rock-monster at all but a mare. She is as gray as the rock underneath her, but she seems to be stuck and that is rather curious, Spear wants to know how she came to be in this predicament so naturally, he asks her - “How on earth did you get stuck?” Blunt, as ever.

Spear & Spark