06-15-2017, 10:24 PM
the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
“Very well then,” she tells him and inclines her head in a follow-me gesture as she leaves the river that they’ve just cooled their heels in.
“I’ll always be here,” she promises him as she grasps a strand of his mane in her teeth and gives it a gentle tug before turning back to the volcano.
Her first inclination was to circle the base of the volcano and let him get a good look at it close-up since his eyes strayed there as much as her own had. The crown of it sat wreathed in smoke, and sometimes it spat embers and ash that burned much of the land around it until the ground sat smoking and black beneath their feet. Spark realized that she liked this part of Tephra best, perhaps because there was a bit of danger at playing around the volcano’s base.
She did not think she needed to tell him to be careful; trusting that he could see with his own beautiful green eyes the dangers that lay in standing here for too long, how every ember and ash spewed above them could burn and blind. Except that she did not seem to mind. The ash dirted the pale hairs of her fur and her skin drank greedily of the embers that ought to have singed her, instead they seemed to melt and merge into her as if the fire in her core just absorbed these smaller flickerings as offerings and orphans from a greater source of the same stuff that lurked in her.
It occurred to her though, that he will not be as fortunate and she touched her nose to his brawny flank to urge him back a distance out of the spiteful cone’s circumference. She knew the wind could still blow things their way but few winds rose within Tephra, leaving her static and hot. “Beautiful isn’t it?” she asks him, thinking of how next she’d show him the sea. Spark knew that she had never asked him to stay, never exacted a promise from him other than to look, explore and enjoy all that her home could offer him but part of her could see in the carriage of his head and the look in his eye that he warred with his own nature.
Spark could tell that he was a creature of habit and to know anything but was challenging and frightening. She saw how he thought of it all, to stay or go and she smiled at him, once again touching her lips to his neck in a friendly gesture. “It’s okay, you know... To want something other than what you’ve always known but so too, is it okay to go.” The pale mare could not imagine causing him to harbor ill will towards her or this place because he was meant to go wherever the wind blew him, she’d known what that life was like and it had vast appeal but she had taken root here, touched her feet to this soil and known, much as the immovable volcano had, that it would take earth-altering forces to make her leave again.
Spark