He had to admit that he was tired. Gaston paused and searched the horizon for anything that was familiar. He had traveled so very far since that fateful night. The night that everything he had had in his old life was stripped away not by force but by a choice; the stallion had in a moment of hurt feelings snipped the threads that had bound him to his homeland. It had been a clean, yet painful task to rid himself of the life he had thought he led. Privileged from birth it had seemed until the veils of lies had been lifted from his eyes. Gaston knew without a doubt that everything he had known from his childhood was a sham. He wasn't all that anymore. He had been played with, batted around and finally he'd realized that he had only assumed that his friends were just that: ... friends and not traitors.
Now the shirt that he had left the beach with in that hasty departure was the only remnant of the life he thought he had known. It stuck to his back like a burr under the weight of the moisture that fell from the clouds. He'd at one point almost discarded the garment before realizing that it was better than going on without any sort of protective barrier from the elements. Rain battered his form, stinging as the harsh pellets struck near his eyes. The weather had gradually begun to change as he trekked further away from the tropical climate that he had been used to. Everything around him was changing: The weather, the foliage; even the fauna. Shadowy beasts flitted in and out of his line of sight; disappearing when he turned his gaze to follow the movements that he caught out of the corner of his eyes. No matter how hard he tried he couldn't pinpoint a single phantasm down. He was weary and wary; realizing almost too late that he had to stop pushing himself. The cliff had almost gone unnoticed by the blinding rain but there was some innate sense that told the stallion to STOP. Gaston felt his hoof hover in mid-air before his brain comprehended the signal it was receiving. With that signal the stallion's hooves backtracked so suddenly that he lost his balance. He toppled over onto his side and just lay there. His flanks rose and fell with the effort to regain control over the situation. A short burst of shocked laughter echoed into the night air before Gaston even realized it. His eyes fluttered shut as a brief remnant of lucidity dragged a snippet of song up from the depths of his mind.
You take a chance
You throw the dice
you risk it all
it's just a part of life
You hold on tight
to what you know
you can't hold back
you got to let it go
Every little step that you embrace
One road ends,
Another begins
And takes you to a better place
This would be the only thing he remembered when his mind began to function again. It would become his philosophy to live by. If things got too hard he’d just pull up stakes and change the scenery around him.
