Soren

Dainty footfalls drummed lightly just behind the white mare. The owner of these tiny hooves was careful where he put them; mud squelched between the cleft of his toes and sucked like it meant to swallow his matchstick legs. The swamp was hungry, he thought – and mean. Dutifully, he marched behind the trailing strands of his mother’s tail, watching them snag and flow over tree stumps and detritus.

Why did she come here?

Soren felt a heaviness surrounding his dam; he felt it like a stone in the pit of his stomach, and when he wasn’t watching his step he was watching her. Thinking. A tremendous curiosity burned in the pale blue color of his eyes, but he hesitated from asking her directly. Perhaps it was some instinct that held him back; like he knew better than to kick his mother or run very far away, he knew not to ask her about this, though in time curiosity promised to burn through self-discipline. He was still young, after all.

Growing quickly bored with the slow, melancholy pace Soleil chose, Soren ventured a few inches from the path. And then a few steps. His toes splashed lightly in the mud at the water’s edge, but he jumped back when he started to slide in. Tiny ears flicked back to pin against the top of his head defiantly. What a nasty place… What was that just beneath the surface of the water? A fish? A turtle? He leaned out just a little further, careful to keep his limbs coupled together on dry ground. Was it another horse? Light fractured off the surface of the murky pool, and Soren thought he saw mane drifting gently just beneath.

He leaned out farther, his whiskered muzzle straining at the end of a long neck. A sudden falter in his mother’s steps caught his attention, though, and Soren turned to see her blinking at the water, too. Something about the noise had broken his concentration, and now a fearful shiver ran beneath his fur. ”Mother!” His weight shifted, hooves slipping to bring him crashing toward the surface of the swamp, but with a handy twist Soren leapt away dry and skittered to Soleil’s flank once again. His white-tipped tail arched above his back like a flag.

”Mother,” he said again when he was beside her, his blue eyes keen and grasping. ”Why’s there people in the water?”

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Soren

For a brief instant, Soleil turns to look at her son and something in her eyes is far more worrying than the shadow of a stranger buried in the marsh. Is she afraid? Soren draws up close to the warmth of her side, his thin flanks heaving and his nostrils gleaming pink. The boy stands quietly under his mother’s questing nose, soothed by her attention and reassured that she would never let him come to harm. She must have just been worried because he yelled so loud… Yes, that was it.

Soren’s pale eyes rivet to his mother’s face when she speaks. She doesn’t know about the swamp; his face falls a bit, disappointed. Soren bites back a response, though, as Soleil follows the statement with a command: stay close. Something sharp and brilliant lingers in her tone – an edge that reminds him of the look in her eye a moment ago. Maybe she is scared… He turns to look at the trees and the water, expecting something to leap from the shadows, but no one’s nearby. He catches only small sounds in the distance: the plop of water, the crackling of a twig. ”I will,” he swears, voice little more than a whisper.

They walk a few steps but his mother stops again, attention straining down the path ahead. Soren looks too, but he only sees the trees and water and the dark. Dusk casts long shadows edged in burning orange light across their backs. Soren presses in close; his mother asks a question. “Would you like to have a race?” Slowly, Soren’s ears twitch forward. A race… What if he slips? Doubtfully, his pale eyes fall to the mud all around them.

”I want to go home,” is all he says, though he has no particular destination in mind.

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