Vadim had experienced vastness before. In his life, vast was a word for rolling seas of golden sand shining beneath a brilliant sun or silvered by the full face of the moon and stars. So much like his home, the Mors Desert held a token of such vastness and yet... and yet it was different. The very sunlight seemed a little queer as though his eyes did not behold it in quite the same way. The sand was both sharper and softer, dirtier and brighter.
The wind smelled wrong.
And so he had fled the echo of his home for a place that was totally alien to him. A lush plain, the grass turned amber by the changing of the season and the sweet smell of hay and wildflowers thick in the air. The color was largely robbed from the plain by night but it began to trickle back in as he waded through the tall grass. Dawn colored the horizon in a gentle blush of rose and lavender, lightning the ink dark. One by one the stars winked out overhead. The sickle moon sank low behind him as he strode towards the rising sun. Each step was light, a dancer's gait, the gentle breeze that bowed the heads of the wild grains buoying him up. Though he had no power of flight, sometime he almost felt like he could take wing. Like he was weightless.
Sometimes he wondered, in placed like this, if he couldn't just walk into the sun. Walk and keep walking until the fire of it consumed him in heat and brilliance. Carry him up into the brightness of the sky, above any veil of clouds. He tossed his head, a gesture that seemed incomplete on the mane-less equine. Pale eyes the color of a clear, bright day stayed fixed on the horizon. Abruptly he lept forward, long legs flying. The wind was not so strong as to draw him along but he could create a fragment of his own, whipping back his ears and bringing tears to his eyes as he raced across the flat plain, body low and long as he whipped through the grass.
The headlong sprint came to an end as abruptly as it started, slowing to a breathless halt beneath the shade of a leaning, sparsely foliaged tree. His golden coat darkened near to bronze where sweat soaked it in the joints and on the angled planes of his neck. The white on his face remained pristine, unmarked by exertion or heat. His thin, sparse tail whipped back and forth, slowly fanning his lean muscled hips. His ribs expanded in great breaths to oxygenate the hot blood that rushed close beneath his thin skin. In his flight, he had left behind the unease and anxiety that had plagued him from Solterra, leaving his mind whipped clean by the wind.
He felt empty and light.
It was a fine day to be alive.
