She could be the keeper of his happiness and his heart. It was her very namesake! Perhaps she had been named well and truly made for this right here: to heal a broken soul with the one thing that she had so much to give of - herself, and her love. She knew that if it came down to it, she could love enough for the both of them until he found a way to come back to himself. Or remake himself.
Keeper would be that light in the darkness; that compass moon by which he could always find himself. She would stay constant; maybe not always fixed in one point, waxing and waning as she gave way to the bear inside her or some other whim but she’d be there for him. Or she’d come find him like she always does. Somehow, some way, Keeper would make this work because that’s how much he meant to her.
For now she delights in his embrace, soaking it up like sunshine on the first warm day after winter. Not thinking about how it could all go so wrong or end. Finalities were never her strong point which is why she never said goodbye. “No you’re not,” she assures him with a light laugh and a nuzzle. “And even if you were broken, I’ll be the glue that keeps you together because not all broken things need fixing.”
Keeper allows herself to be pulled deeper into that natural cave- darkness. It doesn’t scare her and never has. If anything, it makes the bear inside stir and stretch its claws against her insides in a slow scratch that suggests it wants out. She settles it with a promise to do so soon but it grumbles a sleepy protest before subsiding back beneath skin that roils with imminent change.
He says her name and she muses aloud, “Hm?” in response to him as the bear subsides and her skin stops twitching.
(She has enough sense and self preservation, she likes to think, to not follow him off a cliff. Then again, she just might if it meant spending the afterlife together. Or she’d just pine away for him inside this cave until there was nothing left but a jumble of bones that came from both a bear and a horse as she shifted time and time again, fighting herself to death over starvation and lost love. It’s almost romantic but certainly tragic.)
His affirmation that it’s always been her too, makes her heart take wing and soar. Love lifts her up though she’s never really been down or so far down that she couldn’t come back from it just by walking in the moonlight, staring at the stars, or munching on mushrooms in the forest. But it’s always been this part of the forest that led to this cave and to this stallion inside. Like she said, it’s always been him.
“I won’t,” she promises with the full weight of her heart backing her words. Not this night or the next, but she doesn’t say it aloud. Instead the nights blur together into pinpoints of starlight that prick at her eyes behind the kids, bright and beautiful and sharp enough to hurt, to make her suck in a breath then let it out in a dreamy little sigh afterwards.
That night led to so much more. More affirmations of love and then that age-old dance that mares and stallions have been dancing since the first pair came into being. All inside the cave or just a bit outside of it when she could coax him into looking at the treetops brushing against the sky or the way the moonlight shined down on them. But there was that dance and more that came after it.
Her barrel blossomed, ripening with life and she couldn’t have been happier that they had a child to look forward to. It was something that she knew would worry him and she gave him every assurance that it would be hearty and hale, and not succumb to the darkness in the world around them. Not that Keeper could truly know but all her moments in that cave with him were gilded and sweet and she had no reason to believe otherwise.
So minutes became hours and hours became days and she grew fat as the foal grew inside her.
For a time, even the bear let her be. No animalistic desires to shift and hunt and hibernate. Just Balto and the cave, and Keeper’s contentment deepened like a river until that moment when she felt the first shift in her womb like a tectonic plate sliding, causing a resultant earthquake. She stayed near him for as long as she could, denying her instincts and even the bear’s to seek out somewhere secret and safe.
Keeper paced and wore her hooves down on the stone floor until at least, he subsided into what she thought was sleep and she took her leave of him to birth their child alone as it has always been done in the way of mares. She found a patch not too far from the cave in the forest that had a bed of moss cradled in the gnarled roots of a cedar tree that had broken up through the crust of earth. It held some of that same cave-deep and must that soothed her.
There, without the light of a single star to guide her, Keeper squeezed and squeezed until the foal slid out between her thighs. She took but a moment for herself to catch her breath before staggering to her feet and licking the foal clean to reveal a smoky blue girl that was a blend of both of them. Keeper encouraged their daughter to stand and nurse and in time, the girl did. They stayed like that until the pale pearling of dawn came to the sky.
That’s when she knew it was time to go back home, and so they did. Only home was rather empty by the time that Keeper and the child got there. Balto was gone and even though she looked for him as much as she could, she couldn’t go too far at first because of the child. Once the girl was a couple months old, Keeper would often shift her shape and pick the foal up delicately by the nape of her neck and carry her around. She could cover more ground that way.
But every time she uncovered his scent, it was old and stale and she couldn’t tell which way he’d gone. She’d begin again the next day and kept to that routine until their daughter could keep up with her mother in either shape, bear or horse. Keeper never gave up. It’s just that their daughter started to grow up and the mare knew that she couldn’t spend every waking moment chasing him to the ends of the earth.
It was a shift in priorities that made her heart constrict and slowly sink like a stone into some tucked away part of her. If she ever cried, it was always when the girl slept. She’d awake to find her mother fresh faced and eager to take on the day. So they’d tackle it together and have adventures and story time and life lessons. But the one thing she couldn’t learn about was how to take away the faraway look in her mother’s eyes.
Keeper never stopped looking for him. Even as their daughter grew. She just didn’t know to venture outside the Forest and start searching elsewhere. The mare remained within a day’s walk of the cave he’d previously inhabited in case, by some miracle, he’d return there. Day after day, nothing happened but she never lost hope even if her coat looked a little duller and her hair more unkempt than before.
She just couldn’t give up and put everything she had into hoping against hope and pleading with the stars at night to show her the way. Such pleas fell on deaf ears of course, and as Keeper lost a bit of that familiar plumpness she usually carried and became more pared down by her love and her longing; her eyes remained bright, almost feverish.
And the child?
She thrived under her wild mother’s care. Blossomed like a weed despite roving alongside what was sometimes a horse and sometimes a bear.
So it was that Thistly grew up but couldn’t leave her mother in that condition and Keeper didn’t know how to tell the girl to go because she was all that she had left of him.
By moonlight, two small mares dart around the vine-toothed mouth of a cave in the forest, sometimes laughing but usually quiet as mice and the older - she’d often pause and look about with wild faraway eyes and her face would become a little less equine and more ursine, or her hooves would shift to paws that clawed up the dirt. And by morning, they were usually gone. Gone back into that damp familiar dark that had replaced his embrace with its own.
The cave, like them, waited.
Waited for him to return.
@[Balto] yep, a novel. until it died at the end lol ❤️