Ni'Srilan: The Desert: i do it for the rhymes, really

In the face of such broken, unbridled youth, Kinh cannot help but remember death.

To be a horse means to know death; at least, it does when you are a normal horse, as Kinh is - or was, until the fates brought him here; he wandered the forests and fields, sometimes briefly alone, but often with other young stallions, traversing the plains and finding troubles that should not have belonged to them. For them, death was no less offensive than new life; in ways it was even a blessing, not because they could leave the cage of their mortal lives, but because it was an opportunity to join as dust in the wind a part of their world they had never known before. Death offers the promise of immortality, after ones bones have been plucked clean by ravagers' beaks, and even after that, when bones become trapped under layer and layer of dirt, part-eroded, no more memorialized than a buried stick, and yet -

eternal.

Beautiful, perhaps, if you are like Kinh and lent to beauty where others will find none.

This belief will make Kinh an exceptional warrior.

It also makes him severely underqualified for social interaction, at least here, in these sparse, desperate sands.

"I would be dead?" he finishes easily, smiling a little as the water drips from his blackish lips, his whiskers glistening like liquid sun. He'd seen the soft explosion of flame at the child's feet, more like fear than wild abrasion, as Baraqel's display had been, but he said nothing. As far as wild creatures go, Kinh is sound and not easily startled; he's seen that before, that wild fire, and it doesn't surprise him that it hates water. It's something that doesn't matter to him now, but he realizes that it will matter later, so he tucks the information away in some place where it won't be eternally lost.

Kinh's brown head, plain and not exactly expressive, cranes around to watch the child with his pain and small doses of self-pity, his crippled leg and curious, curious eyes. "I will not forget," he says, self-assured in that simple, easily confident way of his, that half-smiling manner. "Besides," and his tail flicks casually against his hock, thoroughly innocent in his broken understandings, "death will have you first, I'd think."

If there is a yearning in his voice, well, it's not on that bland, quiet, mud-brown face.