Uru walked into the clearing he usually found Kara. Ysa had gone into the ocean to look for food and he felt like the welcoming sight of a familiar face. His curls were a little out of place and his eyes a little red. It had been a long night.
The sun warmed her back as she basked in the sun. It had been a long couple months for Kararti; it had been so long since she'd seen her parents. Since before she had met Uru - it seemed like so long ago. It could not have been more than three months since she'd wandered, trapped, down that long stretch of beach, but she was loathe to leave the area. She'd made such great friends here, and Uru needed her. Or so she told herself. He'd probably go nuts with only one person to make trinkets for, she thought, and snorted. She'd been lying in the meadow since dawn, hoping that the light and warmth of the sun would let her sleep. The last week had been horribly depressing and filled with homesickness, but she was beginning to feel better now. If she had really been a cat, she might have purred.
Usu smiled as he saw Kara laying in the sun, a little light entering his sleep deprived eyes. He walked over to where she was and fanned out his wings. Softly comenting "Wow, you certainly have found quite a nice sunning spot." He looked at her from the corner of his eyes, smiling again "Mind if I share it with you?"
Kara cracked an eyelid and almost grinned at the halo of neon brightness of the sun shining on Uru's coat and curls, though the latter looked a little mussed. "Don't mind at all, nope, but you better get out of my sun before I swat you with my tail," she said, growling playfully. Her tail flicked and rolled across the warm grass. "Bad night? Your hair's messed up."
Uru eyed her twitching tail. By the looks of it, it was itching for an excuse to swat at someone. He gladly moved to her other side in hopes to dodge any layful pokes it might send his way. He fanned his wings again and curled his claws into the ground. Lifting an eyebrow as he looked down at her "Do I really look that bad?" and nodded. "I had a nightmare last night..... and decided to look up and down the beach and cove because of it." He gave a little sigh at his stupidity. "And when Ysa woke up and me missing, she spent half the night searching for me since I didn't want to wake her, and the other half of the night apeasing my mind and helping search." He could still see the shimmer of her scales in the moonlight. It calmed him slightly durring his rough night, but for some reason, he had felt it was the only thing he could do at that moment.
Kara opened her other eye to get a better look at him as he circled her. Now that the sun wasn't making him a silhouette of purple and gold, she could make his hair out better. "It's not... bad," she said slowly. "Just doesn't look exactly like it usually does, is all." Lifting her head and shifting so that she could sit up, Kara listened with ears forward, then frowned. "What were you guys looking for?" she asked, concerned. If Uru had gotten up in the middle of the night to look for something, let alone enlist Ysa to help him after she woke up, something significant must have been misplaced. At least he had Ysa, though - searching in the dark by oneself was probably pretty dangerous, especially on the beach with those slick rocks. He has toes, though, so that probably helps, she thought, watching his talons rake at the soil.
Uru winced slightly as he took a breath to start his story. Before he did, he laid next to Kara so that she didn't have to hurt her neck to look up at him. "Well, you see, I had a......" He looked at her, giving a little cheesy grin. "I had a nightmare about a ship wreck. Not just any ship wreck..... but the one Ysa and I had been on when coming to this land." He took a moment to look away, not focusing on anything as he continued. "There were two small girls on the ship. Ones I hadn't remembered seeing or knowing about when I had been with Ysa. Like they had been kept in a different part of the ship." His gaze shifted as he got a little uncomfortable with how the dream had made him feel. "I couldn't get their faces out of my mind.... So... I decided to take a walk and see if I could find any trace of them." He looked to the ground now, knowing it had been at least a year since the ship wreck and that the only sign of two foals from that ship wreck that would have lasted would to find hoof prints in the back of the cave, or the bones themselves. Bones of two lives cut short. Part of his unease and his search was to prove to himself that Ysa and himself were not living their lives as two bodies lay in a dank cave.
Kara laid her head back down as she prepared to listen, the soreness in her muscles from holding up her head strangely fading. If it weren't for the seriousness of the nightmare - it had woken him up, after all - she would have made some weak joke about story time. Had she been upright, she would have tilted her head at the grin he gave her about the shipwreck. Why did that made him grin? She nodded, though, when he said that it had brought him here, her skull brushing the grass beneath her head. She would probably have a green-brown stain there now, but oh well. "The shipwreck is near here?" she asked, eyes widening. If there had been foals on the ship, well... If they had not been injured in the wreck, they would have known that grass meant food, and there was plenty of that in these lands. Should they not have grown up and wandered off somewhere? "If they were old enough to be on the ship, they should have been old enough to take care of themselves once they got off of it, right?" If they did not go down with the ship, her mind told her.
Uru nodded. "It was at the beach Ysa and I stay at." He looked at her to smile into her rested face. "Ysa and I were just a wee older than foals when we were put onto that ship. We had grown up together on a farm in a different land. Still just a couple years old, then man who cared for us couldn't afford to keep us any more. So he sent us on a boat, along with some others and a human, to hopefully earn money selling us." Uru's eyes had gone soft with the memory. He did not hate the human for wanting to sell him. The human had always been kind to him and cared for them. They way he looked at it, if it weren't for the human having them in one herd on his land, he might have never known Ysa. The only sadness of the story to him was that the storm had kept his old human from gaining the money he needed to keep his farm alive. He could only hope there had been some other way he had found to keep the farm and the rest of their families safe and happy.
Uru rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the thought of happiness back into them. He decided to continue on with his story "Ysa and I actually lost each other after that ship wreck. We had both thought the other perished in the waves. But, she had survived." His smile gracing his lips again at the memory of him seeing her again. "After more than half a year, we finally found each other......" He looked back to Kara "But, if there were more survivors. Or just....more. Isn't it my duty to find them?" His eyes searching her muzzle for any kind of advice.
Kara's head tilted involuntarily then, her ears flicking against the grass. A human had owned Uru? Why hadn't he fought or tried to escape? Soquili were not for keeping, they were free creatures, just like humans. Kara couldn't imagine being kept as a pet, to sell whenever the whim struck her owner. She would fight tooth and hoof before that happened. But it seemed as though Uru didn't see it that way, though; there was no enmity in his voice when he said it. "That's a long time to be lost," she said, deciding to leave the humans out of the conversation. She didn't want to upset him or anything... "They've probably found others to belong with, by now, maybe started families," she replied. "Maybe they don't want to be reminded of the past?" She said it gently. After all, if they hadn't been searching... But what if they had? It was a good question to ask herself. She shouldn't shoot down his dreams when she didn't know anything about it. "Did you guys bond on that ship?"
Uru's claws relaxed in the soil he had unknowingly turned up with them. Ysa had been telling him such things all night after learning his nightmare. And hearing two soquili coming up with the same solution somehow made the calm sink in deeper into Uru. He let out a long breath and nodded. "That is what Ysa was telling me. I just... I wouldn't have felt right just trying to go back to sleep after a nightmare like that." He shook his head at her question. "Nope, we were born at around the same time on the farm. And we grew up together. The human that took care of us used to breed horses for showmanship. So he would keep some of us and sell the others to other humans." Uru tried to remember what would have happened to him and Ysa if they had stayed on the farm. But it had been so long, and he so young, he couldn't click a memory into place. "We spent the first two years of our lives playing with eachother and the few other foals who had been sired at the same time as us. Then when we got on the ship, we were glad to be going with eachother. But when the ship wreck happened, ew lost each other. I looked for her, but all I found was a few casualties......" Uru went back to turning up the soil under his claws, trying not to picture the few soq he had found and the time it had taken him to create graves big enough to fit them.
"How sweet," Kara said, about how he and Ysa had grown up together. She didn't know what to make of the showmanship piece, but at least he had been loved. "Were they all soquili, or common horses?" she asked, genuinely curious. But when he said casualties... Kara's heart was in her mouth. He... he had seen dead people. Of course he saw dead people, idiot, her common sense told her. He was in a shipwreck. But her heart wanted to cry. Poor, brave Uru. "What... what happened to those you found?" she asked, afraid that he had had to give them back to the sea, only to have them come back again in the tide.
Uru went back through his memories. He had never really seen a difference between the regular horses the owner had kept and the soquili he had been with. "Well, they liked running with us, so mainly we just played little horse games and felt the wind in our hair as we ran as one." He took a moment to look back to her and give a wide smile. "You don't need to speak the same language to have fun with each other. The only time we weren't allowed to be with them was when mares were able to breed." Uru shrugged at the memory of his mother being separated from their family when she was 'in heat'. It had devastated him at first, but with his father and Ysa's clear words and loving support, he had soon understood. "But that was normal for all the mares that were......." He suddenly blushed deeply and couldn't help but have his bangs fall over his muzzle at the thought of mares being in heat and what that led to. About Ysa being in heat, and the foals that would result if he wasn't careful.
Kara snorted when he couldn't spit out the rest of his sentence. "Got it, yup. I'm surprised they didn't look at you funny," she added as she thought about the horses that had run from him. "You'd think they would shun you guys because you would attract predators or something, but... nope."
Reply
