01-12-2020, 07:38 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He saw a sliver of redemption, and it haunts him. He’d been in the deserts, had seen her again, had changed the sequence of events. She did not die. She did not die. That means there is a timeline where he did not rend the eyes from his skull, where he did not come close to dying, there on the sand, where there was no gray magician to act as savior and slaveowner. Where he never bore that magician’s son, where he never met a black mare, where there was no boy, lost and trembling on the shore – It is too much lost history, glorious and terrible both, and he drowns in what-ifs and might-have-beens. He will never know, of course. But he does know that there are rumors, that Craft has been spotted. He has looked, but has not found her, and perhaps he is glad for this. He is unsure how such a meeting would go. If she tried to hurt him, he would let her. He knows this. He deserves this. Still, his eyes look for the golden sheen of her coat. He does not see her, but he does see something else, a mare of orange and yellow and red, a sunset manifested, wings of fire at her back. Striking, even in a world where many of the horses are multicolored, a rainbow of them strewn about Beqanna (and he, black and boring, save for those blazing orange eyes). He should move on. He does not start many conversations, does not want to inflict them with his presence, his ever-present despair. But oh, how he sometimes longs for light. “Hello,” he says, careful, the flicker of her flames reflected in his orange eyes. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |