Andarin: The Mountains: a fool in thine eyes ; michabou

On any other night, he would have slept soundly; he did not care enough for his life, though he enjoyed living it, to give much credence to the threat death stalking him in his sleep (and if he were so taken, then, perhaps it’d be more peaceful than if he were awake and aware) – She still called to him, in the depths of slumber and night, such that he yearned to join her in nothingness. But it was not any other night, and under the shrouded moon (and he wonders if it is colder when the moon is unsheathed by cloud, as her silver light wove through the strands of his black mane) he dozes fitfully, in short catnaps struck by the sound of his own breath and each strange scent that knitted a tapestry of strangeness; unlike the strangeness of the terrain he passed through like water, the finality of Andarin – staying, and finally belonging – frightened him still, and he did not sleep well.

Fehazathant has the fitness of long travel, and his sides are leaner than most (too lean, perhaps, for lack of moment in the chilly katabatic spring winds rolling off the snowy mountain slopes): at the peak of the moon’s slow course across the sky, he shivers himself half-awake, and in the delirium of too little sleep and the phantoms of fading dreams and half-conjured shadows, he feels a breeze, warm and short, kissing his shoulder like sunshine –

It comforts him so, and reminds him of Her, that he drops back into deep sleep for a few precious minutes as the moon passed her cresting azimuth and the wolf-howling winds died to a whine; it is then that he can finally scent her, a stranger next to him, and feel the warmth of her body radiating into his own. He comes awake quickly, but quietly, and for a moment he wonders if she would notice the shift in the pace of his breath, and he stills it.

But then that, too, is unnatural, and he feels the hesitancy of it, the unknowing, and finally he can stand himself no longer, locked alone in his head, with her warmth cascading into him. He turns to her – and he knew she was female as soon as he had smelled her, the sweet jasmine of a mare – and smiles, for she has her head bent to the flickering moon, even as her light catches in her slate-roan skin and shines in it. “Hello,” he says in a whisper, for anything else would be too loud in the music of the loons, and the mingling dance of their tails in the wind.