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 Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2016 11:43 pm
This is a private roleplay with Horse (Teh Cheryl). Please do not post unless given permission.
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Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2016 3:13 am
Horse blinked, taking in the foreign landscape around her. She had wandered far from her home, so far. Her home was long expanses of desert and rock, all in muted tones of sepia. The Browns and reds all blurred together in the burning unrelenting sun and time came to a standstill. The stone and land was ageless and desolate and she had wandered in her isolation for so long. So so very long, she considered.
She had been so used to being alone, cloistered away in her cave. She hadn't seen another soul for years, decades, only the occasional skittering of lizards across her hooves or the flap of wings above. She lived off the meager clumps of dried grass and plants should she could scavenge within distance of her cave in the night, sleeping in the shade of her rough home during the day. She had grown used to the cycles of night and day--sleeping during the hottest hours of the day and emerging in the twilight hours to find enough food for the day. It had been a rough, monotonous life but she had never imagined another.
Her cave, despite her years of occupation, was barely more welcoming now than it had been when she had first found it. The walls had smoothed down throughout the years--some in part because of her own effort and some due to the naturally wear if the stone over time. Some many years ago, she had mixed crude paints with charcoal, clay, and water and had spent many early mornings covering the main wall with nonsensical scripts and paintings, spending hours carefully outlining each image in the harsh black edges of charcoal.
She would miss those drawings.
One corner of the cave held her sleeping pallet, which was little more than years of gathered straw and grain piled into a corner and carefully lined with rocks. The rocks themselves were a mix of common and uncommon, collected whenever something interesting caught her eye. Her favorite was also the smallest--a hunk of rock no larger than her eye that was marbled with reds and terra cottas and a line of silky white running through the center. It was one of the few things she took with her when she left.
Even now, she doesn't know what possessed her to leave her cave. She had been comfortable in the familiar, the monotony. Perhaps not happy but comfortable.
But now it was as if a dam had broken. In a day she had seen more new faces than she had during the rest of her life. And they were odd faces, both similar and dissimilar to her own. She was used to the clawed talons of others like her, their long reptilian tails, feathered plumages or tough scales hides. These newcomers though, they were...soft. Like her.
Their flanks were covered with soft hairs like her own, with equally long or longer tails. Her legs were still an anomaly, thin and dark while others had full muscles ankles and gorgeously thick fetlocks. But...
Still.
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Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2016 5:48 am
She had followed these loud, noisy colorful strangers. She had followed them out and away from her cave, across the desert dunes and canyon walls, across the dead river and the murky lakes. She had continued, onward and onward, until the barren land slowly gained color and life. The once hard, unforgiving dirt slowly turned into sprawls of thick green underbrush. The ominous canyon walls turned into the thick harden trunks of trees, their evergreen leaves providing shade and shelter. The first night, Horse had curled herself underneath the smallest tree she found, cuddled uncomfortably on the underbrush and tried in vain to sleep. It was too soft, the spongy miss that covered the moist ground felt like the softest feathers against her bones. She was used to the harsh ground and the scratchy straw of her normal bed--this, this was too...too comfortable.
She tossed and turned the first night, unable to relax in the unfamiliar environment. Every rustle of leaves had her on alert, and the chirping of insects kept her muscles tense. Her cave had been quiet, eerily silent while she slept and all this noise... She didn't know how anyone could stand it. She woke up at first light, still tired and body aching and wondered if she had made a mistake. Her body was covered in a fresh layer of morning dew, the foreign feeling of freshwater setting uncomfortably in her skin. The coldness seeped down into her bones, making her legs ache even more than normal and her short cropped mane was flat and damp against her neck.
She continued onward though, her pace slow but steady. She took her time, resting whenever she felt bottom of her hooves ache or whenever she could feel the strain against her brittle legs. The first few days, she took care to drink heavily at each spring, relishing the taste of the cool clean water. She had grown used to the faint metallic taste of the water in the desert just as she had gotten used to the murky brown color of each shallow pond, each gulp carefully cherished because one never knew when the next would come. Here though, in this lush green place, water was abundant. It was obvious, Horse could easily see, in how tall the trees grew, how dense the underbrush was. She struggled her way through section of the jungle, areas where she couldn't carefully pick her way through but instead had to painstakingly bulldoze her way through.
Even the food was different, she had mused. She had subsisted off the sparse dry grass of her homeland, her energy carefully conserved each day. She always took care to never eat all of what she found, carefully packing a few choice stocks for safe keeping in case a drought came. (A drought always came.) She was always equally as careful never to eat all she found but instead often marked her trail back so she could return at a later date with the hope that what she had left had continued to grow and thus feed her another day. These bits of grass here were...moist. Soft and not nearly as chewy as her dry grass but fell apart with a few gentle chomps and didn't scrape its way down her throat.
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Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 1:01 pm
She had even found a few brightly colored flowers, their petals shining in dew and all sorts of colors that Horse had never seen before. She had sniffed the first one she had found, its silken petals a bright magenta and it smelled...odd. Sweet and gentle, with a smell that she was rapidly discovering was the scent that lingered after the rain, heady and dusty and wet and wonderful. She hadn't eaten that first flower, but she had tentatively tried the second, a bright yellow flower with a center the size of her nose and found it pleasing to the taste. The center crunched against her teeth and the petal broke apart easily on her tongue, leaving a refreshing taste in her mouth. Still, they were so beautiful that it did seem like a waste to eat them when there was so much other greenery around.
Slowly the jungle gave way into a forest, the air no longer oppressively wet and heavy against her, stifling. The dense underbrush of heavy moss and brush slowly became grass, still lush but with a different taste and sweet smell. The heavy canopy of the trees with their shiny, waxy leaves slowly faded into smaller, thinner specimens, equally as green but with leaves the size of her eye instead of her head. Sunlight shown easily through the gaps in the branches above and the song of the birds changed from the cloying overabundance, plumages blindingly bright, to just the whistle of the morning bluejays. The morning dew, that still made her legs ache when she woke, was accompanied with the slightest of chills that made her ankles ache even more.
But still.
This land was so strange. The air was light, a breeze running casually through and the tinkling if branches and leaves was its own music. The temperature was so mild, temperate, and Horse reveled at the lack of the usual hot, burning against her back and neck. It was a relief from the jungle, with its oppressive wet hear that made her feel like she was wading through a river without the relief of the cool water running over her back. Her skin had long gotten used to the harsh desert sun, he coat cropped short to keep her as cool as possible and her skin darkening and thickening over the years to ease the burn. The skin around her brittle ankles had long toughened, used to treading on the hard packed dirt that made her knees ache more and more as each year passed. This lush wonderland, with its soft fertile dirt and abundance of life was a change that she welcomed, however tentative she was.
She continued onward, walking straight forward and keeping the rising sun to her right flank. She did not know her final destination except to move further and further away from her old home. This time, however, her scenery did not gradually change as it had before. One moment she was in the dense forest, shadows cast over her body and trees surrounding big side, and the next moment she found herself in a open meadow filled with tall grass and wild flowers.
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