Keeper-
Keeper thinks she is chasing after deer.
She might as well have been chasing after shadows and stars.
Once, she swam across a river that took her by the drowned forest and the howls of wolves that did not belong on this earth. The kind of howls that made real wolves shiver deep down to their very bones. She hid from those kinds of howls, tucked herself quiet and away into the bracken and the brush until the earth stopped shaking from the slap of their unnatural paws. How many hid as she did? How few were not quite as lucky? She couldn’t concern herself with those questions, not as she chased the deer towards another river.
Twice now, she has swum rivers and run from eldritch wolves.
Twice now, she thinks she is chasing deer but she might be chasing after a peace unattainable.
Keeper has never really stopped to think about what it was exactly that she always went chasing after. She knew it was the deer, slender and wild in their grace but it had to be something else too, something disguised by the deer that instinct and a primitive part of her brain recognized but the civilized side of her couldn’t comprehend. For all she knew, she was still chasing shadows and stars and the scent of lakewater on the air. Something stopped her at the second river but she knew not what - it made her turn her head and sniff the wind that blew the hair back from her lovely face. That same wind tickled her ears and all she heard was the rush of it going by and the rush of the river in front of her that she turned her black eyes back to, considering. If she crossed it, this would be the farthest she has gone in these new lands. If she turned back…
She crossed the river.
Found herself on an uphill climb as the earth grew more pockmarked by boulders and maple trees that formed a forest of their own on what seemed to be a mountainside growing steeper by the step. By the time she crested the top of it, she was almost out of breath and huffing more than a little mare like her ought to be. Once her eyes caught sight of the beautiful mountainside vista and the shimmer of the lake in the distance, the breath had gone right out of her until her lungs gave her a painful reminder to breathe. She sucked in air like something caught underwater as her eyes took in the view, it was stunning! If the deer went anywhere, it would be to here - here was a little slice of heaven on earth.
Keeper found herself half-sliding down the mountainside on her haunches and half-rocketing down it at a gallop until she caught herself in the headlong rush and slowed up in a tumble of smaller rocks and dust. She was otherwise unscathed as she moved amongst the trees and the more open pockets of sky that showed above and gave her glimpses of the lake. It never occurred to her that her jaunt here might be considered a grievous thing of trespass. She was just a small dunskin mare that looked for all the world like she had not a care in it. Really, she was mesmerized by the landscape that she walked softly and almost reverently through.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless