Andarin: The Mountains: the fires see us to the end; fehazathant

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Sir Francis Bacon
What he heard in the coils of storm and air, she felt in the earth that trembled underfoot as if quaking internally from underground volcanoes that threatened to spew ash and fire. She thought she could feel each quiver of leaf and flower echo her own sentiments: is this the end? Is this how it ends? In ash and fire? The passions of the elements colliding and our passions too, until we are naught but nothing - but the tremble of ash and dust on the wind? Memories that spin from tree-tip to tree-tip? She was struck by fear then, mute and astonished as she took in the scent and sensation of the coming storm that just now seemed to reach the farthest reaches of her awareness, as if the expansion of such to cover more than just him and her had taken so long that in her thoughts of passion and element and earth, she had discovered there was more out there - beyond the mountains, in the sky that hemmed them in, where it brewed and built and brooded.

If a fine tremor stirs through her flesh and through the blue fur that meets black - tip to tip, just touching, mingling like their breaths in the cold, cruel wind that blows about them and tells them that the storm is near, nearer to them than the horizon’s edge, nearer than the beating of their two hearts, and in this closeness of what she deems to be The End, that tremor is a thing of fear that races through her and causes her to shift ever so slightly that the minute details of their bodies brush and tangle so that the lines of them become blurred, indistinct, and they are not two but one in those dark storm-tossed moments. It can’t end this way, she thinks. Not now, now that I’ve found… but even that is a thought that she has no hope of finishing because she is as conflicted as the storm that churns atop the mountains, and yet… the earth finishes the thought for her in a flourish of bergamot that blossoms underfoot until she smells of it and it marries itself to her horse-scent. The bergamot says, him, and she nods her head - him.

She turns her head to him at the sound of her name tripping on the air and the stormlight that grows there, like a strange lichen glowing in the night that crowds the stars out of the sky. His eyes hold hers until she glimpses the subtle workings of his throat as he swallows and she wonders at the lump there that he has hastened down to his stomach and silence. But it is as if they think the same thoughts: I know, she wants to say and to say further that, there isn’t enough time - we didn’ t have enough time, as if her protests could ever be enough to halt what has already begun in the churning of darkness and element and time. It might have been the spirits - her mother’s spirits, in plant and stone and animal - that started to talk to her then, to whisper and pet and console as she lent her head close to his and shared a breath with him, or two, as if she thirsted and hungered both for his air and his scent. Something told her that it would not end here for them, not here.

“Dance with me,” he says to her; she feels him spin with the grace of whirlwinds and the allure of the storm (of something nameless) and she feels too, the snow that flies about them in a thick lacing of cold that catches at her breath and pulls it from her lungs until it spirals up to the stars, invisible. These are the last breaths I take here, she tells herself as he spins and darts forth to nip at her and she finds herself caught up in the moment - yes, doom be damned, as she joins him in these last moments of merriment that they make. Like him, she is no longer bound to this earth and her feet fly through the sleet and the snow that cascades around them in a charming, endless white that seems not to dispel the end but merely, the quiet before the storm. So she dances with him, eyes alight and mane aloft as she follows him, promising too, as these moments grow as fleeting as the snow. The blue curves of her that contort and delight the dance tell him this: yes, I’ll dance with you, because she has no more words now - not after glimpsing the small band of her family that she should be joining but doesn’t because her path lies not with them now, but him.

(In the distance, a painted mare treks towards the mountains. Following is a mare that burns, then smokes, and burns no more as the fire subsides into the earth though remembrances of it will twinge forever in her blood, memories that smoke and wheeze through arteries and thought, and she will never forget that it was fire that sired her and earth that bore her here. Trailing them, is a bear that walks upright than on all fours, then parts from the two mares to take back the forests that were his - he might die there, he might go elsewhere, but he is freed from his bonds of being a familiar to the painted mare - she frees him, tells him to go, but distantly, he trails her and will forever for theirs’ is not a bond to be broken by this world’s end. Farther along, a mare and a stallion join them - cousins, she remembers, cousins to herself but family still. Later, they cross paths with a stallion that combusts in a brilliant flash of lighting and is forsaken to the fires that start to rage across the land and those that chose to die with Legend. He chose his death, the mares whisper together, their heads close, breaths and whiskers twining and out of the dying flare of lightning and fire, a small foal steals after them. That foal is kin to her, the blue mare that dances with the black stallion, but she does not think of family now as they gallop off into the night, their tails streaming behind them and the foal struggling to keep up.)

She dances with him, dances out of the end and right into another beginning, elsewhere and beyond.