Keeper-
Keeper likes Keiran; the red mare is amiable from head to hoof to the point that even the silences that befall them are enjoyable enough. Smiles are shared between them like secrets that old friends familiar with one another keep, and sometimes, each of them seems to look into the river as if to find the pebbles mirroring them somewhere on the riverbed. What must the conversations of rocks be like? Keeper can all but wonder as Keiran answers her. She laughs, “I should hope not! My father often left me to my half-brother’s care, he seemed to be the only one able to corral me long enough at his side.”
The memory of a broad wing full of snowy feathers comes to mind. She used to nestle underneath it, tucked up close to his side as he’d bend his nose down to hers and blow the fuzzy little forelock off her face. Yellowstone would then laugh and give a shake of his head in mock horror at how muddied and mussed she always came back to him as. He’d ask her where she’d been and what she’d gotten up to, and she always told him outlandish stories about chasing hares into their warrens and squirrels up trees, or how she’d stand so still that she dared not even breath as the deer moved by her, shy and quick to flee if she even nickered to them.
Keiran’s voice draws her back and up from her memories of her older half-brother and pulls her gaze back from the river to the red mare’s face. It is like looking at a red reflection of herself - their eyes hold memories that both of them wish were not just that, memories, but something altogether more. Keeper can relate; not that everything had come easier to everyone else because she had no idea but she understood best that underlying want for purpose and somehow, Keeper had found it. Except that it had been like reaching for the moon, and she felt the light of it as a constant slip through her teeth.
“This world here is different too, but you probably noticed that.” she murmurs, because Keiran seems bright enough to have noticed that the face of Beqanna had changed, somewhat. Parts of her (she thinks of the land as female, of course) were still the same but so much of her had split, shifted, took on a new shape. Keeper laughs too; thinking that they could turn this into a contest of who could talk the other’s ear off the longest. It tickles her just to think that as the red mentions it has been so long since she last talked to someone. For Keeper, it is usually only a matter of hours - she’s got too much of that ancestral blood in her that makes long for the social structures of a herd of horses.
“No, no.” she is quick with her assurance. “I don’t think you’re talking too much, maybe you’re not talking enough if it’s been that long?” Keeper is also quick to encourage Keiran to talk more, to share of her time outside Beqanna and of her earliest moments inside it. Somewhere in there, she thinks, lies the key to Keiran finding purpose or at the very least, Keeper dragging the red mare home with her because Hyaline could stand to benefit from someone like her as much as Keiran might benefit from the beautiful landscape and kind souls that walk it.
But in due time, will Keeper work up the courage to mention this.
In due time.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless