He’d met the fire-colored stallion once before, a chance meeting in the Threshold – fate propelling them together, leading their paths to merge. Both had sought to win a feathered one over, and to the same herd, a very strange thing if you knew the heart of the white one. Pale and pristine, a breath of winter in the darkness, his heart was frozen over and his soul a bleak landscape; loveless, some thought, but that was neither true nor the point. Mauja was, supposedly, the Lord of the Basin, the unicorn realm far to the north, yet there he’d been, recruiting in the name of the red sands and Kri.

I guess you could say he’d taken a vacation from the snows – but it wasn’t a holiday where he laid on the beach and relaxed. It was the kind of holiday where he was always looking over his shoulder, expecting someone to shout out or leave a knife in his back. Sumati had so graciously sealed the fate for them all when she’d taken the white beast home, and he was careful not to lose the position he’d earned with a few lies and smiles. And so, there he was, skulking on the outskirts whenever he dared, always an eye or two or four on the surrounding lands, making sure no one he didn’t want to meet met him. He’d been so very careful, and for almost a whole season he’d managed to keep up with the game, and the darkness was both a blessing and a curse. It cloaked him, but it made him more vulnerable because he couldn’t see as well. It was easier for him to melt into the shadows and flee, but it had begun to grate at his mind, and wear at his spirits. He’d gone from simply assuming the sun would rise again, to yearning for it with each passing day, a fervor he wasn’t familiar with, and yet it never rose.

For a few days he’d still known if it should’ve been noon, or sunset, maybe even the darkest hours before dawn, but as far as the passage of time went, he was completely lost these days. He had no idea at all, and he felt like a dead fish being tumbled around by a playful stream. Uprooted, and not just because he lived with the enemy and skulked around where no one saw him, but because he was lost in a darkness that never yielded to light. It wouldn’t have surprised him at all if he’d suddenly lost touch with the ground and floated into the starless sky.

Faint firelight washed a diluted red-and-orange against the contours of his body, turning his white coat a rather unidentifiable shade. He could’ve been anything, or anyone, really. Just another nobody, not at all infamous. Irma patrolled the skies for him, though she’d stuck close ever since the darkness, and still did; she saw what she saw, and it was probably more than the horses saw, and if she saw something they didn’t want to see.. well, he’d just get out of there, and lurk where no light touched him. He just had to run away, and the darkness would swallow him up, just as much friend as it was foe. Heaving a quiet sigh, and knowing that no white smoke plumed from his mouth in these southern regions, Mauja turned his blue eyes away from the distant bonfire, and back to the borders. He’d exchanged the sands for the gently rising and falling red rocks, their smooth surface scoured clean by wind; each step he took was soft, the muscles in his legs flexing to cushion the fall. He was not quite sneaking, but neither did he want to broadcast his whereabouts to Helovia. He didn’t want the company of just about anyone – no, there was a certain stallion he sought… a red beast that towered above even Mauja, horns upon his face and wings upon his back, a miasma of things. He’d met him in the Threshold, that great crimson beast, and as they’d turned back home to the Throat, they’d decided on patrolling together some day. While Mauja was careful not to mingle too much with the herd, knowing how dangerous it was, it would be good to have some sort of ally, and Hector seemed perfect. Not only was he physically impressive, but he didn’t know who Mauja was, so he’d swallowed the Dreven thing whole. Some part of his damnable conscience pricked at deceiving the stallion, but he was already deceiving everyone, so what did it matter if he added another burden?

His soft hoof-falls echoed among the wavy rocks, every sense straining to find Hector in the compact darkness.

[ for Hector, only. <3 ]