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Slowly, she took a step towards him, and Jericho found himself holding his breath, subconsciously aware that this strange and timid creature might startle at any second. There was something transfixing, however, about watching her slip closer. It reminded him of a game that he used to play when he was very young: he remembered lying very still in the valley grasses, scarcely even blinking as he watched the mountain hares emerge from their burrows. Sometimes, if he was quiet enough, curiosity would lure them towards him. Once, one had come so close that he could have reached out and touched it with the tip of his muzzle. Then, a shadow had flickered over them, and the hare had dashed away, diving into the ground to escape the hawk that hunted from above.
She reminded him of the hare, and of the deer, with those large eyes, somehow both guileless and suspicious at the same time. When she spoke again, it was the same—as if every word were a test. His ears flickered forwards to hear the soft, whispery voice, but other than that he remained motionless, the only acknowledgement of her words in the gentle swivel atop his head. He was rewarded with the flash of her blue gaze, and though he has never seen the ocean, the look crashes over him as a wave might. He considered even such a small gesture a victory, a brief and unspoken act of trust, and were he not focused on keeping so still, he would surely smile.
When she asked him if he was afraid, he could not help but wonder at the question. Afraid? It had not crossed his mind, to fear the earthquake. Of course, he had a healthy sense of self-preservation, but the trembling of the earth had not resulted in any trembling of his heart. The young stallion considered himself brave, but perhaps that was only because his sense of courage was limited to the physical. Jericho did not worry over natural disasters or personal injury: he was young, still young enough to retain the naiveite surrounding his own sense of mortality. His concerns were relegated to the more abstract, to things that he still could not fully articulate. Failing the bridequest, that was fear. Never returning to his family, letting them down, that was fear. But because he could not name them, they remained ghosts, vague dread that only tugged at his heart in the darkest of moments and easily brushed aside in the light of day.
“No,” he responded simply, daring to break the silence that had stretched between them and praying that she would stay. “It’s too big to fall. I’d guess this mountain has been around for years and years—it’s not going anywhere. At least not that fast. I grew up on slopes like these,” he told her, breaking the blue gaze to look around at the surrounding peaks. “They used to say that nothing was older than the hills. We were born there and buried there. Generations and generations,” he murmured, trying to suppress the sigh that blossomed in his chest.
"speech"
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