Keeper-
Keeper can feel the spring swirl around them in warm breezes and the scent of blossoms opening their perfumed insides to the world. Either of them has but to look amongst the grass and find the swaying heads of flowers fat with scent and color, attracting myriad bugs to them to feast on their pollinated guts. But neither has eyes for the flowers or insects; Keeper looks over the black, notices the wings lift inches off the ribs and how they are as membranous as a bat’s. She has nothing else to compare them to since she has never seen a dragon in her life - the scaled stallion might be the closest to it that she’s come, but he was nicer than a dragon had a right to be.
The black laughs, and it draws Keeper’s eyes back to that bright amethyst gaze set inside such a dark face. There is no menace in the laugh but her head tilts further to the side just the same, her curiosity deepened by the fact that the black seems as surprised by it as she is. “You don’t laugh much do you?” she blurts out, unable to hold back from questions such as these. It wasn’t that the laugh sounded strained or forced, just different, like it hadn’t happened in a long time. Keeper likes laughter; she laughs when she hunts for mushrooms by moonlight, when she is quiet and quick enough to snatch mouthfuls of grass beside a doe and her two spotted fawns, when she is gliding her lips through fur black as night and finds the patches of white on him like spread out constellations.
She cannot seem to look away from the charming spell that is the black mare, from the sheer magnificence of the black horn spiraling to a sharpened point up from her brow to the sparkling jewels of her eyes that held Keeper still. One might say it was like looking at a dragon, beholding some piece of forgotten magic found again in the world but then Keeper laughs, ducks her head just a little because no one has ever said she was fragile. “No one has ever said that about me before.” she chuckles, thoroughly amused by the idea of it. If she had to guess, her bones were fragile enough that gopher holes could snap them in two and her skin might rip easily beneath hungering jaws but Keeper had never seemed fragile. It tickled her to think that she might be seen as such and she couldn’t keep the smile off her lips.
Magnificent. She could imagine no other moniker that fit the black mare as perfectly as that because she was magnificent from the tip of her horn to the tip of her tail. There was no denying that and Keeper did not even try to dim down the dark brilliance of the mare before her. One thing she was good at, was poking bears especially ones deep in the throes of hibernation - it had started off as a squirrel’s dare but Keeper had gone too far to just come back and lie about it. She had actually sniffed the moldering skin of a bear snoring in its den and brought back a nut from its stash as proof and prize for the squirrel. Keeper just does things like and the other beasts don’t seem to mind her because she’s not quite like the rest of them. “You are certainly that,” she murmurs, enchanted by Magnificent’s magnificence.
Little beasty. It makes her smile to hear it. She belonged with the beasts than with them. So why then, is she here? Keeper never comes to this place, this field of hopes and sorrows that has pockmarked the land and the very air about it so that it reeks of things promised and broken. Because she had been out wandering, took a different path than usual and come across Magnificent who stopped her in her tracks. How could someone like Keeper ignore someone like her? Her fascination showed plain on her face, as did the quickness of her mouth as it moved between smiles, some broader than others. But for a moment, she thinks of Hyaline and decides that Magnificent should see it - she’d look regal amidst the wisteria with the mountains rising up at her back.
She gives no answer to the question of herd and farness; an idea takes shape in her mind and burns hot in the back of her throat so she says instead, “Come with me!”
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless