It had happened suddenly, as these things often do in the desert. He had been drowsing in the heat of the midday sun, only barely awake, when a shadow had fallen over him. Then he smelled it. The sharp ozone and dust smell of sand driven hard before the wind. The kind of storm that created life, and stole it away. The white masked head lifted quickly, all trace of weariness lost. Energy animated his body as if struck by lightning, limbs dancing and throwing up sand with his small, round hooves. The wall of sand drove closer and he finally turned from the glory of it and fled. His limbs stretched out in a wild dance, chased before the wind like the first horses of Veter. This was not, of course, the Veter Wind. It was a cousin to it though and he could feel it in his bones as if it would seize him and carry him before it as though he was little more than dust.
He stumbled at the edge of a rise, nearly falling disastrously down a sudden spill of sand skirting the edge of rocky columns. His legs flailed for balance and his head tossed. Eyes wild and white he managed to check his momentum with a surprisingly graceful curvette to the side. A few more quick strides took him into the lee of the rocks near the waterfall that sprang like blood from a wound in the desert. He had not been here before.
Though shrouded in shadow, there was a surprisingly lush beauty to the place. A tiny paradise hidden in the desert. This, he wondered, was this the true heart of Solterra? Not the crumbling walls and claustrophobic courts, but this? The spring that fed it's life's blood to the desert and created a place to feed and rest and shelter.
The stallion sidled closer to the waterfall and closer to the rock face, glad for the reprieve from the sandstorm. His skin shivered, the grains of sand driven under the fine hairs of his coat uncomfortable. They turned the golden hide into a dusty yellow, and dimmed the brightness of his white face. Sand was all-consuming. It wanted everything to be like itself and so it tried to change you to be like it, or to bury you if it couldn't.
One striped hoof stamped the sandy ground, then he lowered his head to drink. The energy of the storm had not left him. Not while it raged around him like this. But it had abated, leaving him shivering in his own skin and restless but smart enough to wait for it to pass.
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