A point of sunlight in the velvet dark, Vadim pranced at the edge of the surf, letting it chase him back and forth across the beach. His narrow hooves flung up plumes of wet sand as he followed the water out to it's farthest point. As it rushed back in he fled, white tail flagged behind him and white masked head tossing. Air blew harsh from rose blushed nostrils, ribs expanding and compressing to drive air in and out of powerful lungs. In and out. Like the waves that beat against the sand.
He stopped.
The small cove was walled with cliffs that amplified the sound of the crashing water. As his breathing began to slow back to normal, his ears flicked forward. Listening. Was this ocean the skin of the world, rising and falling with every breath? Like the golden hairs that decorate his own skin and rippled with his inhalations. The night was so dark he could only truly see in shades of grey, and the water was black except for the crests of white foam. No starlight. No moonlight. It stole the golden sheen from his coat, darkened now by sweat and fleck with sea spray.
As he listened and breathed, he heard another sound mingled with the crashing of the waves. A similar sound but dissonant- it broke the rhythm of the world's breath like a cough or a clearing of the throat. Curiosity compelled him across the sand without hesitation, though he picked his hooves up high to avoid getting his feet any more wet than he had too. He waited for the surf to withdraw again before he skirted the curving wall the separated his little cove from the next strip of beach. At the edge of the wall, he could see the cause of the sound.
Another equine in the surf, a black shape against black water only really visible because of the breaks in the sea foam and the flashing of white teeth and pale eyes. Following the urging of the wind at his back, Vadim leapt forward. The ocean was foreign to him, as alien as the rest of this land he'd only so recently found himself in. Fear slapped into his chest as he crashed into the water but exhilaration quickly welled up beneath that. The waves pushes him, unlike the way they parted around the larger stallion, and his hooves scrabbled for purchase on the drowned sand he could feel but seemed to provide little purchase. The white masked head lifted on an arch neck, a trumpet of sound escaping his throat in a wordless greeting of one wild soul to another.
@Reichenbach
