finger trips across my cheek----------------
----------------kiss me until i can't speak


Several hundred feet in the air, Pteron balances on a limb barely wider than his own nose.

His wings are outstretched for balance, much as they had been for the last hour. The setting sun has reduced the visibility, but he places each hoof carefully, remarkable stable in this odd activity. At least, he was remarkably stable, at least until the grow shadows hide a bit of slick wood, and he is suddenly falling. The stallion’s feathered wings curl in toward his body, but not before they crack a few times against branches wider than he is. There is no catching himself, not with these tight confines, and the fall to the ground seems to take an eon.

When he does finally crash down, one white wing snaps beneath him and the other collapses to cover his head and neck. If anyone were watching, that might save them the rather gruesome sight of a skull split open and oozing, though Pteron most certainly feels it. There is a long moment of silence, and then a low groan that can’t possibly come from a throat as crushed as his had been. And yet it does, as does the muffled “Fuck,” from behind the feathers. A breath raises his sides, and there are a few muted snaps of ribs reconnecting, and then the softer ones of his vertebrae rejoining as he rises to his feet.

Pteron’s olive eyes blink rapidly as he looks around at the twilight woods, but he does not see anyone at first glance. Good, perhaps he’s avoided that embarrassment. The wing that had been pinned beneath his is the last to heal, and there remains a sharp ache. Hissing quietly, Pteron turns his head to get a look at that joint, and sees that it’s been pulled from the socket. Grumbling to himself, the tobiano stallion walks toward the tree from which he’d fallen. He lines his shoulder up with the solid trunk, and gritting his neck, forces the wing back where it belongs. The twinge of healing muscle tells him that he’s been successful, and Pteron lets out a long sigh.

The bruises from that won’t fade till noon tomorrow, he knows from experience, and the soreness might last days. 

Best to walk it off, he thinks, and heads out into the woods

-- pteron --

finger trips across my cheek----------------
----------------kiss me until i can't speak


Despite the near-instantaneous healing, his regeneration is far from painless. Pteron is limping, favoring every leg but especially the left fore (snapped in at least three places), and he is barely away from the scene of his fall when he hears a voice.

It is not one that he knows, but he hurts to much to turn quickly, and instead makes a slow half circle so as to not bend any part of him too tightly. The speaker is a black stallion, a little difficult to make out in the shadowy woods. Pteron comes closer, his ears pricked curiously. He’d usually have a smile for a stranger, but there’s a shallow cut across the delicate skin of his nose that give a bite to any attempt at movement. Still, he can’t just stare wordlessly at the unfamiliar man, not when he is attempting humor that doesn’t really sound mocking.

“Didn’t anyone tell you to watch your head in Taiga?” He asks with faux innocence, as though the warning is commonplace. “You’ve got to look up. Never can tell when a horse is going to fall from the sky.”

It’s worth the sting, the dun stallion thinks, stopping now that the two of them are near enough for a conversation. The proximity brings with it the scent of Loess, and it is a good thing Pteron is not smiling widely. It surely would have dimmed at the reminder that there is something of his in Loess, and as it is his half-smile fades to just pleasant interest. Pteron has avoided the southern land – though he knows that is abandoning his duties as well – since the night he had found Reia with her belly growing wide. His own concerns over fatherhood are not so terribly far from Kildare’s, though perhaps the black stallion does not spend late nights thinking how he might steal away his child from its mother and spirit them both away to a place that will never be found. Pteron does not like these thoughts, does not like that he can even think them, and he brings himself back to the stranger in front of him with a mild shake of his blue mane.

“My name is Pteron,” he tells the other man. “What brings you into Taiga tonight?”

@[kildare]

-- pteron --