Andarin: The Mountains: otaktay;

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Sir Francis Bacon
A fox slinking through the bracken had marked of his passage with a sly glance.
A hare had warily raised its head from its burrow in the earth and matted bulrushes to mark his passage with a twitch of its whiskers.

A mare tracked the stallion’s trail through the mountains through the minds of the animals, through the thunder his feet struck from the earth as he ran and ran and did not cease running until exhaustion passed him along to sleep’s arms. Not once - as she had done with another stallion - did she near him in his sleep, curious and quieter than a mouse (or as practiced in stealth as the mouse that steals the last seed from the forgotten harvest) but she stalked other avenues of interest, prowled through the bracken and the bulrush, and what stalked her where the very animals that her mind (and her element) touched. She could feel her awareness touch theirs, merge until the two rivers of thought ran together and she thought as the fox did, sly and full of cunning, and thought as the hare did, wary and wise, and both of those animals hid as the blue (though she bore the distinction of both paint and roan too, beautiful in her blueness, wild in her dusky hue) mare did not.

Come morning, she forgot all about the stallion that had come in the night, running - always running, striking thunder from the earth with his feet. She passed the day in the company of stately elms and somber oaks that lent their shade to her, and lent too, the comfort of their stout wooden girths against which she reposed, lost to thought and dream both, drifting from one to the other. Now and then, she stirred at the sound of the wind in the leaves - heard within it, within the wind, the voices of the leaves as they shook and shivered and sang above her head until her ears, lulled back to their lax positions, focused distantly on voices within the voices - snippets of ancestors talking, of spirits too, for all things had a spirit in them - the birds, the trees, the grass, the bees… and like so, still and silent, the blue mare felt the grass grow up tall around her knees, felt the moss spring forth from branch to mane (much like her mother’s hair had been, full and heavy of mossy snarls), and felt the snippets of sunlight that filtered forth through the trees begin to warm her back.

She is shaken from her dreams - no, not hers, but the dreams of growth in the earth, of seedling’s revival and grass’s first sprout, and even from the dreams of the bear that shadows her, distant and hulking as he snuffles along the earth with his nose in search of berries fallen from the bushes, in search of the faintest scent of her mother as it still clung to all things earthen - by the thunder of his footsteps across the earth. The earth shudders and groans beneath the weight of the stallion’s passage and she feels it echo up her bones, through her blood, and sing out her nostrils in soft gasps of natural breath. She walks out of the wood into the moonlight, blue as dusk and wild as the wood behind her, for the brambles and moss that cling to her fur and mane, and for the moths that flutter close, kissing her skin with their wings. At first, she drank in the sight of him, thirsty to feel the earth beneath her hooves as he did, to strike that chord of thunder from the ground as he ran, as she imagined she too, could run.

But when she joined him, it was only after the wind had died down and so too, did his running. She joined him in the quiet of the night, in the moonlight that spilled across their bodies and glistened in the shine of their eyes as she looked first to the moon - to the night - then to him and smiled.