Keeper-
Keeper dreams;
Sometimes, she finds herself as a doe following her sisters through the fields.
Sometimes, it’s just the dreams of a horse that has found a good patch of clover to eat.
Most of the time, Keeper doesn’t remember what it is that she has dreamed of. She never questions if she does dream, because she comes awake with a good feeling as if the world is as right as rain. Sleep does her good, refreshes the mind and the muscles. So it is good that she has found the staunch shoulder of the red maple to hold her up for the length of time that she dozes off.
It never occurred to her that she might have taken a few liberties since she’d come here. Such as shacking up beside this tree and snoozing without so much as a by your leave from the bronze king she’d met her first day here by the impossible blue of the shimmering lake. His scales had contrasted beautifully against the lakewater and the backdrop of a kingdom caught in the blush of a mild Spring. She liked it just as much now in the autumn, ablaze and almost shorn down to bare mountainside and tree-bark.
Regardless, sleep had beckoned and Keeper never thought herself less than safe here.
She might have stayed asleep had it not been for the faintest rustle of leaves nearby that caused her to crack open first one black eye than the other, trying to blink the heavy pull of sleep from them and not settling her gaze on the shadows that seemed too many and too few all at the same time nor the stallion half-hidden in their midst.
But a flash of black stippled with white causes her to notice him and for a moment full of breath held back as she stopped breathing, she almost mistook him for someone else - but he was older than first thought, not in a bad way, just more seasoned than the someone she had hoped it would be. Disappointment does not flash across her face, just a slow easy smile as she calls out to the stallion trying to hide in the shadows (she doesn’t realize this is a greater talent for him than it appears), “Hello there.”
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless