throw me to the wolves & i will return leading the pack.
Keeper has kept to herself, even as a foal following at the flanks of her family.
She has kept to herself like a secret, quiet and small.
She knows secrets; the hush of predawn that scratches her back with fingers of pale light.
The Forest gives her up; the trees thin out around her as grass takes over - long swathes of grass brimming with cicada and dew. Night yields to morning, chill and grey, hushed in the absence of birdsong. A small shiver seizes her; it scampers down her spine and slides between her ribs making her dunskin fur dance along her sides. It will be a cold winter, she thinks as she tilts her head up to eyeball the sky. Winter might come early and Keeper will hunker back down in the Forest.
Right at this moment she is weaving her way through the dense brush and spies a darling little thicket that begs exploration. She pushes through the tightly woven branches in hopes of finding deer (she likes their wild grace, their small bodies caught in mid-leap, and the way their large liquid eyes seem to say we know you) but there is only the faintest trace of them - days’ old and fading and she huffs out a breath of disappointment. Keeper is content to remain in their growing absence; feels the same void open and empty inside her own heart - her family never understood, she wasn't like them, plain and ordinary and far too quiet.
A branch in the thicket quivers; she pays it no mind - thinks it is the wind’s doing though no wind has come to dance along her skin, but she supposes the Meadow is no less eldritch than the Forest is. She blows out a sweet breath that comes out as more of a sigh then she hears someone stammering out an apology and turns her head to regard him with a long quiet look. Keeper says nothing at first, then - “I'm sorry too, I thought you were just the wind.” Her blackberry-dark eyes trace the curve of painted cheek that has lain along the branch, fixating on the bark-roughened fur there in a way that Keeper’s eyes rarely fixate on anything but sky, forest, or deer.
She has kept to herself like a secret, quiet and small.
She knows secrets; the hush of predawn that scratches her back with fingers of pale light.
The Forest gives her up; the trees thin out around her as grass takes over - long swathes of grass brimming with cicada and dew. Night yields to morning, chill and grey, hushed in the absence of birdsong. A small shiver seizes her; it scampers down her spine and slides between her ribs making her dunskin fur dance along her sides. It will be a cold winter, she thinks as she tilts her head up to eyeball the sky. Winter might come early and Keeper will hunker back down in the Forest.
Right at this moment she is weaving her way through the dense brush and spies a darling little thicket that begs exploration. She pushes through the tightly woven branches in hopes of finding deer (she likes their wild grace, their small bodies caught in mid-leap, and the way their large liquid eyes seem to say we know you) but there is only the faintest trace of them - days’ old and fading and she huffs out a breath of disappointment. Keeper is content to remain in their growing absence; feels the same void open and empty inside her own heart - her family never understood, she wasn't like them, plain and ordinary and far too quiet.
A branch in the thicket quivers; she pays it no mind - thinks it is the wind’s doing though no wind has come to dance along her skin, but she supposes the Meadow is no less eldritch than the Forest is. She blows out a sweet breath that comes out as more of a sigh then she hears someone stammering out an apology and turns her head to regard him with a long quiet look. Keeper says nothing at first, then - “I'm sorry too, I thought you were just the wind.” Her blackberry-dark eyes trace the curve of painted cheek that has lain along the branch, fixating on the bark-roughened fur there in a way that Keeper’s eyes rarely fixate on anything but sky, forest, or deer.
Keeper