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Happiness is so often sought, yet the majority of the populace spends more time fretting over how to acquire it than they do enjoying the joyful moments, reveling in the brief flashes of mirthful serenity, choosing rather to obsess and preoccupy themselves with the idea perfection and solemnity. Larkspur is one of them, an individual lost in her own abyss of aversion, tangled into the intricately woven web of guilt and disparity that taints her courage, darkens her ambiance, makes up the storm of uncertainty and insignificance that roils and festers, disparaging in quality, destructive in its intensity. Washed in the obsidian shadows of the night, like ebony silk fingers stretching their way over her skin, Larkspur watches Lena in curiosity, not knowing how to return the mare’s vibrant smile of affability, unable to reciprocate the generous, benevolent sincerity with which her trilling, musical voice reaches out to her through the haziness of the night time murk. But she remains in place, perhaps drawn to the merriment of the lady’s warm, inviting eyes, the ease with which she seems to exist in her world, content and already having found life’s simple bliss. Dark cobalt ears rotate atop her head, the mess of her stormy forelock hanging in lacey, tangled wisps and obscuring the gilded glow of her eyes as she watches, a moth contemplating the flame.
What do you seek in the Basin?”
The question surprises the mare, catches her unprepared and off guard, because it is a topic of indecision that she has not been able to answer even in her own persistent meditations. She doesn’t respond right away, and her voice of reason begs and demands for her to shy from broaching into such a conversation, to revert to reclusiveness and ambiguity, where she knows how to hide so well. She justifies her distance in her head as a means of preservation, validates her seclusion with walls built around her heart, constructed with foundations of doubt, mistrust, and foreboding that completes the tumultuous anguish that haunts her. Hope is a thing with feathers, but she feels that she is far too weighted down to aspire to catching it, too scarred by her history to ever consider forgiveness, jaded by an ingrained arrogance, an unwavering audacity fueled to her as an impressionable child by a father’s blazing intensity, his fiercely determined passion. And now she wallows, drowning in her scornfulness, submerged in the calamity of the disquiet that rages and riles her spirit, turbid and tempest like as it squalls across the substance of her soul.
“If I knew, I would be sleeping instead of traipsing through the dark.” Her sarcasm means no harm, but the cynicism in her voice is unfettered, the biting tone to the bitterness in her words as normal as the sun rising and setting each day. She shifts, trying to settle with the feeling of discomfort lying on her shoulders at the prospect of conversation. She had grown used to her own company, to being alone, and she stands before Lena in a configuration of awkward insecurity, unable to discern how to treat a perfectly amiable stranger. Diplomacy has never been a part of her disposition, and likely never will. In normal circumstances she would have fled the scene, avoided further embarrassment, but she does not. Instead she watches the bay mare with the glimmering curiosity of a child, unknowingly fascinated by something – someone – so different.
“What troubles you?” She asks without reservation, with more sincerity than she has ever bothered to muster. “Not many linger in the midnight hour , at least without reason.”
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