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Autumn was beautiful. Gone were the laboriously hot afternoons languidly spent beneath shady trees and singing brooks. Now, the afternoons were brief, and delightfully perfect, following mornings that were crisp and pure. When night fell, the heat of those afternoons swiftly dissipated, leaving a crystalline chill to the air that promised great changes yet to come. Dancing among the falling, orange, red, and yellow foliage of the forest, the healer’s daughter leaps and pirouettes, giggling as the rough, dry leaves drag across her body, and kiss her ginger nose; the afternoon sun trickles through the beams overhead and warms her back, obscuring the slight chill of the wind that tousles the leaves loose from their weakening holds. Under hoof, the crunchy song of those already fallen coincides with her capricious prancing, and it is to this stamped and tramped beat that her childish, sing-song voice invents what is surely her one hundred and seventy ninth unique (and imperfect) creation. “Red leaf, bright leaf, fallin’ from above,” sings Maude, in her less than pleasant (but none the less enthusiastic) voice, “dancing in the leaves, in a perfect, uh… grove!” Attempting a particularly daring aerial dance move involving leaping off a nearby stump, the young doe almost manages it; stumbling over a loose branch as she comes back down, however, she is sent tumbling gracelessly to the forest floor, her cheerful song dissipating in an adorably piteous, “Ooomph!” Sitting back on her haunches, and shaking the leaves from her mane, the darling scowls heartily at the branch for its unjust and sudden betrayal. Rising all the way to her feet, she stomps over to it haughtily, the pearls Ultima had given her at her birth jangling around her ankle, where she was keeping them safe, until the cremello filly had grown in a proper set of antlers. “How rude, sir!” she condemns of the imaginary-fellow of a branch, giving it a playful shove, “Taking a nap in the middle of a dance floor. Who does somethin’ like that, anyway?” |
Hold onto this lullaby, even when the music's gone.
