07-06-2021, 07:00 AM
The moon that floats on the horizon is full and round, and Malik’s mind is humming with anticipation. Only a few more hours and the sun will set, and then his first adventure can finally begin.
Malik does not understand why his mother had asked him not to talk about their trip, but he is good at following directions, and so he has not. Perhaps if Wishbone had not done so well raising him, Malik might have slipped up, might have told his mother the tale of the imposter who’d worn her skin and told the boy to leave home with no guardian.
It does not occur to him to wonder how Mother would know that the quickest way through the softer hills in Loess’s northern lands was as a red kangaroo, or how she’d put an image in his mind of where they were meeting.
He’d been too excited to ask questions, and his pride in doing so well at keeping it a secret from Sickle had distracted the weanling from the more questionable details.
Gale is standing at the Edge of the forest, waiting for the boy to arrive.
He’d seen the colt only briefly, had given him a hurried excuse and a quickly invented lie, and he is not entirely certain that the colt will even arrive. A few hours past midnight, a kangaroo leaps through the stone archway, and Gale grins.
Malik, expecting to see his mother, instead finds a golden stranger.
And then he finds only blackness, the blue-eyed horse having bent his neck with something that feels a little like his mom’s powers.
The pair of them - father and son - disappear.
Malik does not understand why his mother had asked him not to talk about their trip, but he is good at following directions, and so he has not. Perhaps if Wishbone had not done so well raising him, Malik might have slipped up, might have told his mother the tale of the imposter who’d worn her skin and told the boy to leave home with no guardian.
It does not occur to him to wonder how Mother would know that the quickest way through the softer hills in Loess’s northern lands was as a red kangaroo, or how she’d put an image in his mind of where they were meeting.
He’d been too excited to ask questions, and his pride in doing so well at keeping it a secret from Sickle had distracted the weanling from the more questionable details.
Gale is standing at the Edge of the forest, waiting for the boy to arrive.
He’d seen the colt only briefly, had given him a hurried excuse and a quickly invented lie, and he is not entirely certain that the colt will even arrive. A few hours past midnight, a kangaroo leaps through the stone archway, and Gale grins.
Malik, expecting to see his mother, instead finds a golden stranger.
And then he finds only blackness, the blue-eyed horse having bent his neck with something that feels a little like his mom’s powers.
The pair of them - father and son - disappear.