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Gates are never left unguarded for too long; it’s a fact well-known by all, and today he wonders who will greet him, chase him down and stalk him through the night, keeping a cold, pitiless eye on him until his loyalty is proved time after countless time. The moments are scarce and precious, seconds to be counted, ticked off, before the promise is to be fulfilled, the hope to be granted. It seems the world is frozen, a glistening valley of old snow and new grass, surrounded by the mountains holding their heads tall, watching with chiselled faces the life moving below through the pine forests.
But when time falls still, when the world becomes a glossy, 2D photo, it never lasts for long.
There! Detaching itself from the shadows of the conifers, a bleak shadow that blends into the gray-and-white world perfectly, movement among the deathly still. Following him is fear, not from him nor for him, but of him; exquisite terror that seizes the grullo’s heart, perfectly matching the stone-eyed stare the youngling is given. Coward, he tells himself, but it will not change the inevitable drying of his mouth, nor can it erase how the stallion sees how the grass smoulders and fades beneath those black hooves, withering to a dry brown the precise color of a heart that’s curdled, unable to contain emotions no longer. Perhaps it is due to over-sensitivity, or his faint soul that comes and goes with the wind, the scents of dark and decay; but he feels the cold hands of the stallion running along his exposed soul, touching his chest and entering, settling in his bones. For a moment the world splinters and fades away, turning dull to his eyes.
A voice fractures the silence, cutting a keen edge through the glorious peace, fragments of glass burying themselves inside Carnesîr, and he leans back, about to step away, before appearing to rethink it, cautiously moving forward, eyes reaching up towards that dark face with the wonder of youth sparkling in his eyes.
There is something symbolic in reaching to meet the Reaper, to welcome death and not fade away from it, or so the two-year-old thinks to himself.
“Am I Carnesîr,” he murmurs, earth eyes looking for blue stars that are the winter; the arrangement of his words should suggest a question, but there is no heightening pitch to it, only a steady statement. “I am no-one from no-where.” There is, as the stallion would say, ‘an ask’ at the tip of his tongue, weighing down his head, but he shakes it off, clenching his teeth harder and pretending there is nothing that frightens him of this stallion, despite the slight quivering of his sooty knees and legs.
Some call me the Keeper of Memories, he almost says, but not for a long time; for this was his father's title, the title he would take up through tradition when the time came, no matter how far away he lived from Galathil or the silver forest. "Do have you a story may share me with, iseavé?”
What he wants to say is do you like me? Will you accept me? Have you ever had a nightmare of reality, and been living in its shadow ever since?
Never has he been good at holding conversations. All he wants is to learn, to remember the stories and the horses all others forget.
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[O] Moonlit gates bathed in spring cold
