11-13-2024, 02:19 PM
It’s my idea to follow the young stranger. The Forest doesn’t get as many visitors as it used to, not now that the shadows are longer and the nights cooler. We especially don’t see anyone around our age. We’ve seen all sorts come and go - lovers and traitors, diplomats and demons. I cringe away from thoughts of Niklas, focusing my attention on the colt rounding the bend. When he pauses, we do, too. I hold my breath, watching him intently, curiously. It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to anyone but Meyer, and even then it’s a mostly one-sided conversation. There was that time I saw Set, back before the weather turned. I’d been looking for Meyer in his favorite places in the Ruins, eager to share with him a new grazing spot I’d found, just a little way into the Forest. Instead, I’d found my grandfather. Only, I didn’t know he was my grandfather at the time. He told me, then. He also told me that my mother was back, that Niklas had brought her back and Set was looking for her. I swallow hard, clinging tight to the shadows when our quarry pauses again, listening to the woods around him.
Meyer is unusually distracted when the other colt starts on his way again and I take the opportunity to duck down a shortcut. A bed of dead, fallen pine needles and leaves muffles the sounds of my hoofsteps as the path angles to cut ahead of the winding, wider path that the stranger is on. When I’m nearly parallel to him, breathless, I whisper-yell.
“Psst!”
I can feel Meyer’s exasperation from here, but I’m still surprised when he breaks his cover, stepping out into the path back where I’d come from, the weak, filtered sunlight catching on the gold highlights in his bedraggled coat. He’s mad, that I can tell, but there’s something else in his defiant stance. Fear? For me? Suddenly I’m acutely aware there could be serious consequences for my actions. Meyer is always telling me to think before I act. But this stranger, he’s just a child, like us. Surely he wouldn’t …
I blink rapidly several times and muster my best growl, deepening my voice and attempting to match the authority I’ve heard in Set’s before. “Try to harm him and I’ll tear your throat out.” It’s a bluff - I’m much too small and dependent to do anything but get myself killed and I know I sound like the child I am, but I’ll die for Meyer if I have to. He came back for me and he’s watched over me ever since. Stupid, I think, and I don’t know if I mean him, or myself.
Meyer is unusually distracted when the other colt starts on his way again and I take the opportunity to duck down a shortcut. A bed of dead, fallen pine needles and leaves muffles the sounds of my hoofsteps as the path angles to cut ahead of the winding, wider path that the stranger is on. When I’m nearly parallel to him, breathless, I whisper-yell.
“Psst!”
I can feel Meyer’s exasperation from here, but I’m still surprised when he breaks his cover, stepping out into the path back where I’d come from, the weak, filtered sunlight catching on the gold highlights in his bedraggled coat. He’s mad, that I can tell, but there’s something else in his defiant stance. Fear? For me? Suddenly I’m acutely aware there could be serious consequences for my actions. Meyer is always telling me to think before I act. But this stranger, he’s just a child, like us. Surely he wouldn’t …
I blink rapidly several times and muster my best growl, deepening my voice and attempting to match the authority I’ve heard in Set’s before. “Try to harm him and I’ll tear your throat out.” It’s a bluff - I’m much too small and dependent to do anything but get myself killed and I know I sound like the child I am, but I’ll die for Meyer if I have to. He came back for me and he’s watched over me ever since. Stupid, I think, and I don’t know if I mean him, or myself.
salomea
@Ravin