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“I am a soldier.”
His statement is simple, words curt and sharp and short as they leave his mouth, slither past gleaming ivory white teeth that glint in the moonlight. There is something dark about this stranger and it’s not just the night time shadows playing tricks on the cerulean mare’s mind. He is a soldier indeed, she can tell by the way he slides and glides across the damp Basin ground, muscles coiled beneath crimson and ivory laced skin, intimidating, menacing, and daunting. Gilded eyes appraise him in diligent silence, but she does not respond immediately to the conversation he has offered. Instead she ponders the chance of meeting him here, two souls alone in the darkness, happening upon one another as they trail aimlessly through the night time hours. She is the one that is aimless though, not this great red creature, who seems to watch her with eyes that hide beneath them a vicious, instinctive intent. There is nothing aimless about him.
Curiosity killed the cat. Generally she would be content to leave him well enough alone, return to her solitary wandering of the valley floor, traipsing through the scattered trees and jogging through the ridges of the mountainside, lost, continuously searching, but for what she did not know. Tonight bravado beckons her out of hiding, draws her from her reserved musings and ramblings of a wayward spirit caught in the twists and tangles of fate. She approaches him, eyes watching carefully, unwaveringly, her slender black and white brindled horn slicing through the darkness as she moves in smooth, catlike strides, an apparition beneath the glimmering glow of the constellations and other heavenly bodies just above. She stops, close enough to hear the sound of his breathing, to see the silver wisps of air take flight like the ghosts of birds as they spin upward toward the star strew sky. From beneath the wild, tangled mess of her forelock, an aureate gaze lingers on him, questioning and inquisitive. The mare flicks her tasseled tail along the cool ground, ensnaring blades of grass and other debris along the way, until the fine obsidian hairs curl around her pasterns in a lazy, twisted mess.
"Do you have a name, soldier?”
It is a simple question, but there is more to it than meets the eye. More to her. Larkspur is a soldier too, strong and resilient, meticulous and conniving. Perhaps that is what allows her to linger, the resemblance she sees in this shadow shrouded stallion is too tempting to look away, the malicious glint in his eye like a shiny object fixated on by an easily distracted child.
She will learn.
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keep coming back to the scene of the crime; any
