So don’t leave me here on my own—

without you I’m so lost

“You promised—”

Her words suddenly cut through the silence that had settled between them, piercing through the haze of emotions and striking him like a knife. Instinctively the stallion bristles, his selfish, swollen pride flaring in foolish and blind indignation. How dare she ask anything of him now, as if he had ever been one to promise himself, ever been one to give in to responsibility and chain himself down. She should have known better than that—she should have known. The acerbic bite of barbed words rises to his tongue, stinging and sharpened, wanting to be rid of his guilt and shove it into her face—to cut her down and bite back—

—but…he can’t.

He can’t. Not to her.

The fiery anger suddenly dissolves into smoke, callous words dying on his lips and leaving only a sighing, broken exhale to seep into the cool air. From a guarded expression, he watches her, unwilling to give in to the shame and reveal—unwilling to admit—just how much he is crumbling inside…how broken he feels, with the pieces of him cracking and shuddering beneath the weight of his bitter remorse. It is better this way. He is no knight, he is no hero, and he certainly is no prince. He is nothing that Enna deserves.

“You promised. Does that mean nothing to you? Do I mean nothing to you?”

Deeper the knife is pushed, twisting and carving to find his shattered heart, severing strings he hadn’t even realized had been tied. Some part of the stallion aches to reach out to her, to hold her, and release her of the pain and anger that clouds her eyes and sharpens every line of her delicate face (an agony that he had thrust upon her—). ‘You mean everything to me, Enna!’ He wants to scream, to declare from somewhere inside the abyss of his heart, but the words only grasp at emptiness. He can’t say it, he doesn’t realize it, and even if he did confess that there was some part of him that needed her (like he needs oxygen), he would refuse to believe it.

Once upon a time, bathed in ruby waters and in the throes of disease, he had dared to think that things could be different, dared to allow himself a fantasy of simpler, more remarkable things. That he could change. But no—wild, impulsive, proud, unattached—these are what he is. What he has been. And what he will be. He knows no different.

Surely there is no changing that.

She needs a man who will stand at her side, and he—he cannot. Not in the way that she is asking of him. Even so, the stallion doesn’t understand how his heart hurts when she turns away, how his body yearns for her touch, how the pinprick of tears sting the back of his eyes, with a single one escaping to leave a lonely stream across his cheek. ‘Wait, Enna!’ his mind cries desperately for her, ‘come back!’ Words leap to his throat, explanations and endearments and apologies—but what would all that mean now? She is gone. And so the words are choked into nothingness, dying with not even a whisper left on his tongue. Only long after she has disappeared is he able to speak, the murmur of his voice stiff, broken, and painful:

“You are better off without me.”

And yet, the pain only grows. Desperately, he can feel himself clinging to her knife, pressing it deeper if only to feel some part of her, to somehow hold her close one last time. Gritting his teeth, the stallion fights off what little part of himself cries, what little voice echoes and swells through the space of her absence. From the deepest fragments of his heart, it demands a solitary, poignant question:

But what will I do without you?

“Speech.”

without you I’m so cold

rohan & enna