life unfolds in pools of gold
I am only owed this shape if I make a line to hold
Somehow, he finds his way back to Beqanna.
Under the reaching cloak of a dark night, Buckthorn pads his way through the last refuge of the forest. It is easy to remain hidden – not that he is actively trying to do so – because he is the embodiment of moonlight both cast and blocked by the gnarled branches above. He is alternating shadows and pops of white glow filtered through the needles and leaves. It is easy to be quiet, too, because his feet are hardy and tough and well-accustomed to the ever-changing terrain that holds up a nomad. This dirt is like any other dirt. It is made mild by spring, still soft and giving under his weight. It richly layers itself over all the rich history that is now nothing more than bones and memories underneath. It is like so many places he’s visited before but never stayed.
This dirt is like any other dirt, and yet, it feels different.
The monochrome stallion grunts as the last wayward branch scratches his hindquarters. When he steps out into the clearing, he lifts his handsome head into the air and breathes in. The faint smell of crisped prairie sage and summer sweet grass alerts him to a clawing rawness in his stomach. He ignores it. But absent is the pungent punch of the jungle’s passion flower, the dry, pervasive scent of the valley. He waits with his chin poised towards the twinkling stars for those smells to mix in with the rest, but they never come. Like his mother, like his father - they never come.
For now, he can pretend he came back for himself. The wild lands had become less so over the last few years (and he has the scars to show all that they once were: wild and dangerous and deadly). As civilization spread, so too did talk of a reborn Beqanna. Some said it was not as it was before. No longer were the lands regimented and divided by their respective histories. No longer were they like sheep, blindly following in the footsteps of those that went ahead of them. (“It is a precarious place now, a shifting world”) Buckthorn had gone right away.
He wants to see what perils the land of his birth now holds. But as he looks about the quiet field, he wonders if the others had been wrong. Nothing has changed, he thinks as his muscles quiver with exhaustion under a thick hide. I can go home anytime, he tells himself, again ignoring the protest of hunger that rumbles his ribs. But he doesn’t really believe it. Because along with the lush scent of the season still lingering in his nostrils, the newness of earth is there, too. It is a newness forged in destruction (not gently birthed) if the rumors are true. A part of him longs to find his family and set things straight, make sure they have all survived. The other parts of him (parts he’d rather not acknowledge) are far too eager to singe his heels on the scorched earth.
buckthorn
ooc: no Ischia please