12-14-2017, 08:39 PM
Alone and loneliness; two distinct feelings melting into a pot of anxiety the likes of which hadn't brushed the mare's hide in months. Familiar and aching in her bones day in and day out, every step potentially taking her farther from the brief sense of familiarity and home she only recently grew accustomed to. Craving it, missing it. The shape, the smell, the feeling. Once that luxury is found it is difficult to shed, its absence leaving in its wake a jittery, desperate thing who knows not how to escape its embrace. Home is not a place. Rather, it is an idea that clings to the ashen figure who kept her secure from all this loneliness. Alone is hardly reality she wishes to face again.
The earth is bright under her hooves, the mulch soft and squishy. Or maybe she merely thinks its squishy in fear the ground might swallow her whole. She felt as if she might be, for what other fate was there for those who wander lost for so long? His brief interruption into that existence hardly makes her immune to the fate of those who go missing, never to be seen or heard from again, and Suli very much feels as if she could scream out her lungs yet not be heard by a soul.
Her head swings up toward the trees, inadvertent teeth gnawing a twig from a branch that grows too low to escape lost creatures like her. A tiny snap! and it relents to her insistence. There she chews, spitting the contents once the bitter taste bleeds into her tongue, only to repeat the process a while later. The moon is high in the sky by the time trees give way to grassland. She halts, wide eyes scanning, teeth mulling absently at a spindly branch which drags across the ground. She steps forward, nostrils flaring as they had been the entirety of these past many days. If she could merely catch a thread of home then perhaps she could reel herself in.
There. As if abruptly cast in ice she freezes, afraid to miss where the scent is coming from, before her body aligns itself with the direction of the wind. And then it's gone, the breeze shifting out of focus from where she is. It's as if her eyes go with it and all at once Suli feels as if she might be shrinking under the weight of a noiseless night. Ears swiveling she spins. One way, then the other, pausing to look out across the sea of grass until suddenly she finds herself galloping in the first direction her gaze takes her. Up a hill, then down, then over another. If she runs fast enough maybe she can leave the aloneness behind. She doesn't know - she's never tried the technique before.
Only at the crest of a third dome does she skitter to a halt, hooves slicing chunks of dirt this way and that but she pays no mind to the dust clinging to frantic legs when her consciousness of the situation slams to the forefront of an equally frantic mind. A shape looms along the forest edge, dark yet not so dark under the moonlight that she cannot make it out. Speckled in all manner of ashen greys and blacks that send her heart all aflutter in equal measure panic as relief. She just barely catches the word.
"Leave".
Leave? The shadow isn't looking at her, yet her eyes swarm over her surroundings like she's been put on the spot. Her skull dips slightly, hardly cognizant of the spindly branch still hanging from her mouth until it drops, the wind carrying it only partway down the slight incline. It does not reach him but her attention pins on his figure as if he might disappear in the puff of smoke he resembles.
The earth is bright under her hooves, the mulch soft and squishy. Or maybe she merely thinks its squishy in fear the ground might swallow her whole. She felt as if she might be, for what other fate was there for those who wander lost for so long? His brief interruption into that existence hardly makes her immune to the fate of those who go missing, never to be seen or heard from again, and Suli very much feels as if she could scream out her lungs yet not be heard by a soul.
Her head swings up toward the trees, inadvertent teeth gnawing a twig from a branch that grows too low to escape lost creatures like her. A tiny snap! and it relents to her insistence. There she chews, spitting the contents once the bitter taste bleeds into her tongue, only to repeat the process a while later. The moon is high in the sky by the time trees give way to grassland. She halts, wide eyes scanning, teeth mulling absently at a spindly branch which drags across the ground. She steps forward, nostrils flaring as they had been the entirety of these past many days. If she could merely catch a thread of home then perhaps she could reel herself in.
There. As if abruptly cast in ice she freezes, afraid to miss where the scent is coming from, before her body aligns itself with the direction of the wind. And then it's gone, the breeze shifting out of focus from where she is. It's as if her eyes go with it and all at once Suli feels as if she might be shrinking under the weight of a noiseless night. Ears swiveling she spins. One way, then the other, pausing to look out across the sea of grass until suddenly she finds herself galloping in the first direction her gaze takes her. Up a hill, then down, then over another. If she runs fast enough maybe she can leave the aloneness behind. She doesn't know - she's never tried the technique before.
Only at the crest of a third dome does she skitter to a halt, hooves slicing chunks of dirt this way and that but she pays no mind to the dust clinging to frantic legs when her consciousness of the situation slams to the forefront of an equally frantic mind. A shape looms along the forest edge, dark yet not so dark under the moonlight that she cannot make it out. Speckled in all manner of ashen greys and blacks that send her heart all aflutter in equal measure panic as relief. She just barely catches the word.
"Leave".
Leave? The shadow isn't looking at her, yet her eyes swarm over her surroundings like she's been put on the spot. Her skull dips slightly, hardly cognizant of the spindly branch still hanging from her mouth until it drops, the wind carrying it only partway down the slight incline. It does not reach him but her attention pins on his figure as if he might disappear in the puff of smoke he resembles.
Suli
"Imagination shapes reality."
![[Image: G7jA91b.png]](https://imgur.com/G7jA91b.png)