Desreal: sterling;

I will leave in the hills a bit of myself--
The heat of my eyes which saw them bloom;
And cicadas, nesting on thorny branches,
Will sing out the shrill cry of my desire.
- Anna de Noailles

Acacia awakens with the dawn; awakens to small pearls of dew that adorn her pelt and cast its paleness into damp circumstances of sleeping in the grass. Still, she thinks it is a good way to wake up to the world or this world, at least. All else before, pales in comparison to this moment where she draws in the first breath of morning and manages to - having forgotten all else that came before (hounds, fear, pain, herds, horses, him, heartache) - smile as the sunlight flushes red along her shoulder and the willowy curve of her spine.

With the sun, she also rises and starts to stretch out the sleep-addled tendons and muscles that had stiffened throughout the night and the dreams that plagued her. These were not sweet, sweet dreams meant for mares to dream in the night; these were the dreams of things that haunted her and the haunting left her forgetting more in the end because it was better that way. Deny. Forget. Thus, it - they - could not exist and she could slumber on, unaware until the morning light kissed the bad dreams from her eyes and left her wakeful and restive and eager to explore the uncharted green of this glade that she called home.

It was that eagerness - that sweet, sweet buildup of anticipation in the blood and the muscles - that made her strike out that rich dawn that filtered in through the leafy shade of the tall, tall trees. But it was by the river, where she too, stopped to quench her thirst, that she found him - the buckskin stallion and she shied from his desert-smell (though it beckoned through a haze of memories far too distant to recall) and more so, she shied from his stallion’s scent that plugged her nostrils with its musk and made her shake her head in violent regret.

But she calmed herself with a swirl of simoom that spread in thin, dusty whirls about her pale flesh and playfully tangled the pale strands of her mane together. She calmed herself and approached the river again, where she bent her head and began to drink, ever aware of the stallion nearby but she did not shy from his presence again, though she did not call to him or look his way (but small glimpses of him were stolen, when she slid her gaze sideways to look under the fall of pale forelock that tumbled across her black, black eyes).

Acacia;
perambulating dust