02-27-2017, 07:01 AM
It was not the first time she’d found herself here, though now she roamed the fringes of these grasslands with purpose when once she had drifted across them lost. The seasons had turned from cold to warm to cold again. She was no longer that faceless child, aimless and hollow. She’d found herself a home, and in the safe harbour of those giant redwoods she had grown. Taller now than before, more elongated, and the dusky white of her soft fur had been replaced by hairs that grew fairer, a milky type of pale. She flitted through the tree trunks that ringed the field more ghost than real. The swarms of dancing insects stealing most of her attention as she shimmied amongst them. Shimmied and cavorted until something else caught the focus of her eye. Out there in the wide open, exposed. Him. Shimmering more than her in the darkening dusk-light.
She paused, her delicate head at first curiously tilted. She watched as he moved further into the open. Each careful hoof-fall taking him further away from the trunk rimmed edge. It felt off. And her curious demeanour slowly altered into a look of fear. Her pulse raced for him, her breaths becoming shallow. She feared for him not because of his fears – of which she did not know – but for fears of her own. This place, the field, it had broken her, drowned her, here she’d become a hollowed-out shell of herself. Did he really want to be lost in that sea? Did he know? She had to tell him.
She swallowed back the fear. She willed herself brave. And then she went to him. Peeling herself away from the shadowed safety of the tree trunks and into the vast, hollow open. She ran lithe and quick and with urgency. And when she reached him her lungs heaved and her breath was ragged but she tried to warn him all the same. “This place does things to you, please don’t stay.”