A whisper in the wind, a shift in the shadows
Autumn. It was such a beautiful time. The trees were turning from green to varying shades of gold and red, before falling to the ground. The colt was quite partial to the season, despite the underlying theme of death. He loved the colors. But most of all, he loved to play in the piles of fallen leaves that get caught between the trees. He dances through them, now, prancing and leaping, leaving a wake of crunching and rustling behind him.
After a moment, he stops. He looks off into the distance, outside of the forest where he knows his mother still lingers. Even though he was now a year old, Aqorix still never strayed far from her, though he did not blatantly hang around her, either. He was old enough to know that he had to start finding his own way. However, he worried. For all of his life, she had not once shown him any kind of emotion. She did love him, that much he knows, but that was the one thing that had returned to her. Everything else was a blank void. She had told him as much. She sometimes tried to smile for him, but it was with an emptiness in her eyes that spoke far more to Aqorix.
Blasphemare had once told him that he was wise beyond his years. What she had meant by that, though, he wasn’t quite sure of yet.
The colt huffs a large sigh and turns away once more, though now his mood did not warrant playing in the leaves any longer, so he takes to wandering. The shadows around him flicker softly, almost imperceptibly as he passes through them, a flicker of his own making, the remnants of the frustration he feels. He wanders to the edge of the forest and follows it for a time, lost in his own thoughts.
Every time he returned to his mother, she would try to smile and reassure him that she was fine. But was she? After all, the smiles were fake. He could see it in those cold, dead eyes. It made it difficult for Aqorix to let her go, to leave her on her own (and had he known what she was getting up to in his absence, he might have second-guessed himself even harder). Every step was like torture, should he turn around, or should he continue forward, away from her and onto his own path? What if there was a solution that could work for both of them? What would that solution be, though?
Suddenly, he stops. Something had definitely moved from within the shadows of the forest. “Hello?” His voice rings out into the stillness surrounding him.
aqorix
