When sorrows come,
they come not single spies,
but in battalions.



It is by ripe, orange light that she finds her way here. And by the scent of horsehair, so closely knit with the soil, there can be no doubt that this is a place of gathering. And she is lonesome, so in need of the contact it promises. An outcast to the wind, the plain bay finds herself flaring her nostrils to take in the admixture of earth and equinity with greed.

“Hello?” The sound of her voice is surprising in the night. Disruptive. Like rattling old chains in the dead quiet, and just about as neglected: dry-throated and unpracticed. “Oh..” she whispers apologetically to nobody, her ears quirking to the sides as she peers through heavy, mossy dark. Nothing stirs. Now and then the orange moon peeks from the clouds, and it is impossibly bright even in the woods. Like dim lightening; she can see nothing, though she can hear the shuffle of something nocturnal in the underbrush. And then clouds move in and blot it out again.

Hello? There is an utterness about extended solitude, it becomes whole and all-encompassing. Some thrive in it, completely their own—unbeholden; their freedom is paid for, but the price is worth it to them.

The wildness is written on her in weariness: in the hollows of her eyes, the healed over wounds, and the windblown tussle of her hair that is not carefree but bedraggled. Only so much time can stand between wanderlust and contentment before the gap becomes unbearable.

Once, when she was still silly and foolhardy, she thought she was simply rebelling—that had been an attractive prospect. It took her a while to realize that she was escaping, turning away from the collapse of her family like looking away from a gruesome accident. The scar tissue that peeks, now dark and long healed, on her bridge was the first intimation of her vulnerability. In that moment she had awaken, yawning and limping, to the life she had chosen to forge for herself in iron and isolation. Many now map out conflict on her body like a general’s battle plans.

It was girlishness (and more) that sent her scattered to the wind, and maturation (and forgiveness) that brings her back now. Back to this place where years ago she had been born to a roamer, then part of something thriving and safe...

The weave of her sire’s pains and hard work had already begun to unravel when she had left, not long after weaning from her mother’s milk. She was used to saying forever goodbyes to her young brothers and male cousins, customarily chased off to build something of their own in time; but the departure of her aunts and sisters had been a completely different kind of severance. They had been the constant backbone of her world since fillyhood, but after the death of their figurehead they all sought out protection like moths to flames. She cannot say she didn't think them weak.

Those eager bachelors and established herdsires, drawn to the scavenge by the meaty smell of opportunity, came to pick at the carcass. By then she was already gone. Gone to collect scars and revel in the messiness of youth.

Her mother had moved on, too, driven by unfeeling instinct and practicality. But she did love father, in her own way, Morvana thinks. For her, it had been a catalyst. Like an errant ember thrown from a flame, she cast off, hot and heady.

She is cut from a nomadic cloth, and so this place (though she knows of it, vaguely) is not familiar to her. And the sprawls of civilization, broken up by the hinterlands of her childhood, are equally as foreign. But every cycle is meant to be broken. Morvana turns her eyes to the sky again, and ponders this thought as the orange moon shows its own predictable tendencies, beginning to dip behind the gnarled tops of trees to relieve the sun of its rest. She picks through the feet of lean birches, until the tiredness set deep into her bones stills her. She finds she cannot sleep, not in the folds of unfamiliarity, so she leans against the smooth, bone-white bark and hums. She lets her eyelids drift lazily down over her golden eyes, before she jerks back into lucidity and tracks the path of the slowly waning moon.

Someone will come. She repeats in her head like a mantra.