09-02-2016, 05:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-02-2016, 05:20 PM by Spear + Spark.)
They wake to the taste of spring on their tongues and their skins; it is beautiful, balmy, and they are damp from lying amidst the snowmelt. Impossible! Both of them scramble to their feet; the Tundra should never be able to melt! Shock numbs each of them and they begin to call out for their mother, and even their big black father. Scalped does not answer them, and that alone is terrifying to the ever-brave twins. She has always been there for them, but she does not come now as they call for her. [/align]
(They do not know that she has been stripped of her immortality; that the oppressive weight of all the years that she has been alive has been felt, but she still looks like a mare in her prime. The medicine hat mare has ever been aware of her inability to age or die, until now and the fear of her sudden mortality - however temporary - weighs heavily upon her.)
They spin in circles; gyrations of fear and uncertainty as they orbit one another. Eventually they stop, tails flung nervously about their hocks, noses touching as they center themselves through breathing one another’s familiar smells in. At least there is that - they have one another, always, and they find comfort in that, orienting themselves to the strangeness that is the lands they’ve always known. Everything seems changed somehow, new and alien, as they leave behind what had once been a land far to the North and covered in thick sheets of ice and snow. Now, they feel muddy loam underfoot and they begin to kick up their heels - they are children still, and play is always on their minds!
Spear and Spark leap and gambol as they have always done; their play is infectious between themselves, as is the laughter that spills from their happy lips. It seems that they have momentarily forgotten the rumblings in the earth and the cries for a mother that never came to console them. They don’t remember until it grows dark, and one by one the stars come out above their upturned heads as they stargaze for an hour or two, until they feel lonely and small even as they stand beside each other. Spark turns to her brother, “Should we look for any of them?”
“Who is there to look for?” he answers back, chin still upturned but his black eye slides to take in her pale pinched face. She looks tired, more so than usual for Spark, and he thinks that Scalped’s absence must weigh more heavily upon her than it does him. “You are thinking about her aren’t you?” he guesses, touching his nose to her bent poll. Spark stares at the ground beneath her hooves; “Yes, I worry about her.” They both know that the medicine hat mare is more than capable of holding her own, even as the lay of the land has changed, feels bereft of things they never had a taste of. He enfolds her into the crook of a brotherly embrace, nuzzling her neck, “It’ll be okay Spark, we are survivors - like her.”
He then hears a familiar bellow and his head turns sharply in the direction it came from. Spark hears it too, and turns her head in the same direction. “Could it be…?” she murmurs, and then both of them go tearing off towards the sound and eventually, the smell of their father - Offspring. He stands black and imposing beneath the drooping boughs of a grandmother willow, and they skid to a stop before him, their small sides heaving from the force of their reckless run. “DAD!” they cry out in unison, happy to have found someone that they know. There is a black mare with him that they do not know, but she seems to know the big black stallion and they accept that, each of the twins nodding to her in greeting.