Wolves haunt her dreams; packs of shifting indefinite size that commune beneath the moon and lift their slender snouts back in song. She longs to join them but no howls rise from her smooth equine throat. But then the dreamscape shifts, traps her further in an elaborate sleekness of canid fur beneath her lips. Fur that is cream blending to a tan topping that ran from nose-tip to tail-end. Behemoth in size and eyes like the navy of a night just before all the stars are out.
Unforgettable!
She dreamt of that wolf each and every night, though less so as her own pack began to gravitate to her. First as pups, then grown and nipping at her heels as if she was the moon to them, splashed with the blood of the deer they’d taken down to fill their bellies full of meat. Sometimes, they offered her the first taste and she had to decline because she was not like them. Not a wolf at all, but horse, and almost certainly something else that allowed her to command them as if her scent alone was all the magic they needed in their world.
Like the blood-rich scent of wounded prey.
Then his words echoing out of memory and dream, spun in a beautiful web of both that she could not struggle out of: “Something about you is… special.” But she had not believed him, not then and not even now as she breaks from the dregs of her dreams to peer at the small pack slumbering around her. There was always one wolf sentinel to them that was not sprawled out at her feet, and she knew it to be the alpha male tonight.
He reminded her of her father’s companion, Red. Similar mannerisms, and that same desire to follow and defend as if she was mother or mate to him. Of which she was neither, just a friend and the carrier of that strange allure. Still, she had named him as her father had named his wolf. Named him Flint for the color of his fur and the hardness in his eyes.
That hardness only ever softened towards her, or his mate, the gray female that often ran beside him. May hoped they would be blessed with pups some day, and that some day they would leave her for lives of their own. But the pack grew and lingered, until there was a beta and an omega and May stopped naming them at all. It wasn’t that she didn’t care or didn’t feel some attachment towards them. She just knew that they needed to find their own wild selves as much as she did.
So their numbers jumped and plummeted and only Flint and his mate stayed consistent. As fixed and constant as the starry points on a constellation. The chestnut sabino’s return saw only the two wolves flanking her; the rest of the pack had balked and slunk off to vaster reaches she dared not go and did not care to go to. Home beckoned, and if not home, then the heart-place that she knew had seen her from a knob-kneed girl to a curvy wild woman with sprigs of lavender in her hair.
May threw herself in a reckless gallop the moment the trio hit the black-sanded shore. The sulfur-stink of the massive volcano bathed her in its embrace and she plunged in heedless among the hot springs and smoking rivers, some of water and others of lava. Flint and his mate paced her, their hackles raised at the eeriness of the landscape and all the unfamiliar smells but May didn’t care. Her heart sang a joyful tune at all the familiar sights that the children of Daemron and Pyxis knew.
Places that had been played in in the usual cavorting that all children do. Games of hide and seek, chase the tail, epic battles of colt against filly and so many more. Until flashes of cream steal into her vision and May slams to a halt, breathing heavily as sweat lathers her painted skin to a fine foam. She begged her mind to stop and it relented, temporarily, as Flint and his mate encroached on her sides, licking at her armpits and knees. The pair sensed an offense in May that she had trouble explaining - girlhood crush, a magical mistake?
She couldn’t explain it either but it haunted her, as the ghosts of such things can do. Giving a shake of her head, lavender sprigs flying and the scent battling the sulfur in the air, she stared with a bit of a wild look at the land so familiar to her until her heart began to calm it's terrible pace. Home did wonders for her like that.