rohan

how fickle my heart

Wild green eyes are pinned on the black mare, watching her, examining her, as if he could peel back the skin from her bones and reveal the secrets underneath. It is only when she fires back with her own accusations, screaming of ignorance and madness, saying that her child is certainly no child of his, when confusion flares violently across his features. “What—No!” The stallion settles back, his eyes still never leaving her. She denies his claims, cutting through the horrors that have haunted him as if they were smoke, sending them in a spiraling chaos through the turmoil of his mind.

Rohan doesn’t move as she strides closer to him, his body frozen in this haze of confusion and anger that has gripped him so tightly, that he stands like a statue in the wake of her fury. From her mouth she spits a string of words, sentences that are barely registered—still she denies any knowledge of his terrors, of their son, that he doesn’t know what to make of it all. “What—?” The Warlander stammers through clenched teeth, frustrated at her charade of ignorance (because surely she must know! He had seen it all).

Shaking his head, the antlered stallion squares himself once again, grasping at threads of understanding in an attempt to ground himself to his surroundings. With jaw muscles flexing, he fixes the black mare with a more focused glare, the fire of desperation and rage blazing behind his eyes. “Your big talk is charming, sweetheart, but you would do best to remember that you aren’t the only warrior here,” brown lips slide into a sneer, hardly intimidated by her threats. Of course, this is far from the type of physical interaction he had in mind, and he is still loathe to harm her, but the Warlander won’t hesitate to strike back if she bites first.

“Don’t play ignorant with me now. We—we had a child together! I saw him! He was right there, by your side,” gradually, Rohan’s voice shifts into a frustrated whisper, trickling down from the snarling bellow it had been when initially leaving his tongue. His eyes are narrowed in angered suspicion, lips set into a hard, silent snarl. She must remember.

Thrashing his long tail around his flanks, the large stallion releases a grunt of breath from his nostrils, his anger brimming. “You knew me,” he seethes at her, his breath a low hiss from his teeth. You knew who I was. Somehow, she had known his history, his heritage, and his secrets. He had thought that he had run away from all that, left it behind him to rot and wither away into nothing—yet here he is, left to face it all. “You judged me, condemned me like the rest of them, without a second thought, without even understanding the blasphemies you had spit!” His chest heaves with the force of his words, ears slicked back into the mess of his mane.

For several moments, Rohan just stares, his eyes shaded and wild beneath the shadow of his brow. The translucent puffs of his breath billow in between them, his panting loud in comparison to the tense silence. Finally, after who knows how long, the antlered stallion moves his lips—his voice wooden, almost desperate, with the rest of his body still unmoving. “We—we were there,” his gaze becomes clouded with the memories, images of rolling hills and bright, summer suns, “in Etherim.” The last is hardly a breath, a fraction of a whisper.

It is only then that something clicks inside the stallion’s mind—only then when he realizes how ridiculous this all sounds. Sialia? In Etherim? He is sure that he’d never met her before Helovia’s Threshold, and he certainly hasn’t returned to his homeland since. “It…” Rohan murmurs, shifting his weight back and his muscles suddenly becoming slack beneath his skin, as if he had just received a physical blow. “It wasn’t real,” it is almost a gasp, the words hinging on a question as he looks to the black mare, as if she would have the answer for him.