Once, he was a young boy with skin like stone. His heart, too, had hardened, folded in on itself in the weeks following his birth. After his mother had nursed him for a time (enough time to remember the sharp angles of her face, to remember the sharper words she used to cut him from her side), she had left him. She gave him her first milk, her name, his father’s name, and his own – and left him. But orphaning him wasn’t Ellen’s only gift. She had stilled his despair, clotted it before it had consumed him there, alone in the tall grass. She had broken his heart, and when time and necessity mended it, the scar tissue made it infallible.
He lived like iron for years, decades.
Unbreakable.
Almost, anyway. Walter hasn’t had a love of country or home to chisel him down. He hasn’t pined for a place with searching eyes and road-weary feet. Not even the burst of soft light setting the land to glow on a new morning stirs him. He is cold to the sun warming the angular slope of his back, blind to the brilliance of a fattened moon rising over the horizon. Only women have worn at him like the river to a rock.
One especially.
She climbs over the dunes with a nimble grace he cannot match. Her movement displaces sand still cooled by the night, and some of it cascades down to cover his front feet. The palomino shivers, matches her smile. “Hi yourself.” And while years usually separate their conversations, they have never tip-toed through them. Now, though, seeing each other daily changes everything. Walter feels bared and vulnerable. He pulls phantom wings closer around him before realizing there is nothing to put between them anymore. There is nothing to hold them back from each other, from becoming…whatever they are.
But what are they? Time spent apart has always brought them together, the silence of the years easily filled by their same song and dance. Now they have all of the minutes to spend in the world, and he doesn’t know where to begin. He swallows heavily, looks to the shore and back, and decides on honesty. “It’s too easy now,” he says with a hint of humor (he grins even, one corner of his mouth lifting, wondering if she agrees or if it hurts her to hear).
But if the convenience of their shared lives is its own curse, some changes are a blessing, too. Walter reaches forward with his muzzle and brushes a strand of her wayward hair back against her neck. His motions are still clumsy, still learning, but he lingers for a breath in her mane. She smells like here, oat-grass and the bright tang of sea-salt. But he scents the forest on her, too, the heady mixture of fallen leaves and loamy earth. It’s enough of the Chamber to spark his memory, but there, he doesn’t care to linger long. He would rather be here, even if he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Even if he worries it isn’t enough for Djinni.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long