The Academy: your harried scintillations whisper;

Even if those foolish ones find themselves and return, they are never again right in their heads.
A mare bends her small head to sip from a stream. She then tenses - stands frozen as a doe at the moment of confrontation from a hunter (too familiar - fear wakens in her and rears an ugly head with eyes as bright and familiar as the moon).

She feels it: foreign - unsubtle - invasive; and shies on nimble feet from the stream’s edge, flinging drops of water from a tossing head that catch the light and splatter the grass. The mare expresses her consternation in a snort and shakes her head repeatedly to cease the wrongness of the mind that touched hers.

It was only wrong because it wasn’t

him - Pirate.

She shuddered and sickened and was glad when the unfamiliarity of that mind faded from her own. Part of her had forgotten all that had come before: moments in sunlit glade - moments in tree’s shade. Part of her remembered and her feet found a familiar albeit unused trail to the courts of learning though she balked first at the scent of age and man - man. She shuddered and the moment passed like sunlight breaking free of the clouds.

One step. It is enough - has to be. He touched her mind once; he’ll find her but because of that, she goes no further and clings furtively (as furtive as a pale horse can be) to the shade of a tree - perhaps the very one she first found Pirate under but she doesn’t remember that. Only remembers that she sought herd and found herd and lost it after that.