The plane was still. It held its breath beneath the last shadow of night. The grass unmoving, the horizon not yet visible. Everything was colorless. The world stripped to bone and breath to shape and waiting. Even the wind had forgotten how to move. The stallion stood alone on a rise of earth. His silhouette carved clean against the fading stars.
His coat, dark with dust, shimmerred faintly where the last of the starlight caught it. He did not move. His ears twitched once, listening to the small invisible sounds of distance, the shift of dry grass, the faint rustle of a beetle, the sigh of air cooling above the ground. He could smell the night fading.
The scent of cold earth, sharp and metallic, rose with the dew. Far off, the soil still remembered yesterday’s heat. a buried warmth that clung to the roots of the grass. The stallion’s nostrils flared as he drew it in, mapping the unseen world through smell and silence. His breath came out in small clouds that hung in the air, pale and brief.
Around him, the land stretched endlessly. Not a single tree, not a shadow of movement. The horizon was an unbroken line, the edge of the world drawn in darkness. For a long moment, nothing changed. Then the first color touched the sky. A faint stripe of silver, low and thin, spreading just above the edge of the plane.
The light moved like breath, hesitant, patient, revealing shape where there had been only outline. The grass turned from black to gray, the sky from void to stone. The stallion lifted his head. The breeze that came with the dawn was so soft it barely touched his mane, but he felt it. The first true sound of mourning, the whisper of movement after hours of stillness, stirred something in him that had no name.
He took a single step forward. The ground was dry and cold beneath his hooves. Small pebbles shifted. The sound echoed faintly, too loud in the emptiness. His muscles tightened, then released. A slow stretch after long stillness. Steam rose from his nostrils, vanishing as quickly as it formed. The sky brightened by degrees.
The stars faded one after another, swallowed by light. The silver turned to pale gold, the gold to thin blue. The plane came alive with distance. The illusion of movement where there was none, the slow awakening of space itself. He turned his head toward the east. The wind was changing, a new current rising from far away.

The scent of sage, the dry sweetness of grass still cool from night. His ears flicked forward. The light touched his eyes and they glowed, not with color, but with reflection. Behind him, the land fell away into shadow. Ahead, it stretched into light. The stallion breathed deeply once more, filling his lungs with the smell of distance, of the plane, of dawn itself.
The rhythm of it settled in him, steady and old, as if he were part of the land’s own heartbeat. He stood there, waiting for the sun to break. And when it did, a single perfect blade of light cutting across the horizon, the world found its voice again. The grass began to whisper. The wind returned, and the stallion, motionless against the newborn day, opened his eyes fully, and faced the plane.
The light did not reach him all at once. It crept over his back, his flanks, his legs, until he was no longer shadow, but shape. Not figure, but presence. He blinked once, slow and calm. The night had ended. The distance had begun. The first wind of morning carried the smell of life. It came across the plain softly, cool and uneven, full of dust and the faint sweetness of dry grass.
Beneath that, deeper still, was the smell of stone warming beneath the rising sun, the scent of distance itself. The stallion lifted his head and turned toward it. His man stirred, strands catching the light like thin smoke. The wind pressed gently against his face, tugging at the edges of his breath, and he stood still, reading it.
Every current carried a message of water, of warmth, of motion far beyond sight. The sun broke fully above the horizon. Light spilled across the land, filling the hollows between the hills, touching every blade of grass until the plane shone gold. The shadows that had clung to the earth fled toward the west, their shapes stretching and thinning.
The air grew clearer, sharper, alive. The stallion began to move. He walked first, slow and certain. His hooves sank into the dry soil with a hollow sound. Soft, steady thuds that echoed faintly and vanished into the wind. The muscles beneath his coat rolled with each step, smooth as tide. Dust lifted and settled again behind him, rising in small clouds that caught the light. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Movement itself was the purpose. Each step answered the horizon. Each breath a rhythm matched to the turning of the earth. His ears turned constantly, listening to the wind’s voice, the hum of open space, the whisper of insects beginning their day, the sharp cry of a hawk wheeling somewhere high and unseen.
That sound reached him, thin, clean, ancient. He stopped and looked up. Far above, a small dark shape circled in the pale sky. Its cry cutting the stillness into threads. The stallion’s eyes followed it unblinking. Between them hung everything the plane had to give. The vast space of shared silence, the measure of freedom only distance can offer.

He lowered his head again and exhaled. The air shimmerred with heat rising from the earth. Grains of dust floated like tiny sparks in the light, drifting in slow spirals before falling again. The grass bent and straightened with each pulse of wind, whispering against his legs. He moved forward once more, his pace lengthening, his stride now full and sure.
The ground seemed to accept his rhythm, each hoofbeat joining the low thrum of wind and sun. The plane was no longer still. It had begun to breathe with him. He passed over small rises of earth across narrow channels carved by long dry streams. In one shallow basin, a pool of old rainwater mirrored the sky, perfect and clear.
The stallion slowed beside it, lowered his head, and drank. The water rippled outward, breaking the reflection of clouds into soft, shifting shapes. When he lifted his head, droplets fell from his muzzle, glittering in the light before vanishing into the dust. He looked east again. The sun was higher now, the color of fire through pale air.
The day was beginning to harden, edges sharpening, shadows shortening, the first taste of heat already forming on the wind. The stallion moved toward it anyway. He did not seek shelter nor purpose. He followed only the instinct of the open, the pull of space, the need to move simply because the world was wide enough to hold him.
Behind him, the sound of his hooves faded into the breathing of the plane ahead. head. The horizon shimmerred, endless and unreachable. And yet, as he walked, it felt closer, as though the land itself were folding toward him, as though the plane had begun to remember his shape. At first, there was only stillness between each step. Then, the rhythm began to change.
The walk became a trot. Short, deliberate bursts of power, dust rising in pale breaths beneath his hooves. The sun climbed higher, hardening the color of the land, sharpening each blade of grass until it shone like metal. The air vibrated with sound, not from the world, but from his body.
The thud of hooves, the beat of lungs, the pull of muscle against earth. The stallion broke into a run. It happened without decision. One moment motion was control. The next it was surrender. His body stretched, his mane whipped sideways in the wind, and the plane became a blur of color and dust.
Every heartbeat struck in time with the land beneath him. One sound, one force, one living pulse. The world began to move with him. Grass bowed in waves as he passed. Loose earth lifted in swirling patterns that hung behind like the trace of a storm. Even the light seemed to bend around his shape, breaking into flashes that slid over his coat like water.
He ran because there was nothing else to do. There was no pursuit, no flight, no purpose. The act of running itself was enough, an answer to the horizon’s endless invitation. The plane stretched on, golden and infinite, and he moved through it like a living echo of its breath. Each stride carried weight, but it was a weight he owned completely.
The balance between power and surrender, between ground and sky. The force of his hooves struck deep into the earth, sending tremors through the soil, through roots, through time itself. Dust rose around his legs, glowing in the sun like smoke. The wind met him headon. It roared against his face, tearing at his mane, flattening his ears. His nostrils widened.
His breath thundered. And still he pushed harder. The world narrowed to the rhythm of speed. Every thought stripped away until only motion remained. The horizon quivered in front of him, wavering like a mirage. He chased it anyway, though it moved as he did, retreating with perfect precision, always one breath away.

The plane had no end, but he didn’t seek one. The run was the destination. Time dissolved. The shadows beneath him shortened and lengthened again without meaning. The sun climbed, the sky turned white, and the air shimmerred with heat. The scent of dust filled his lungs. Dry, sharp, alive.
When he finally slowed, it was not from exhaustion, but from knowing that he could. The rhythm broke, and the silence that followed felt like breath returning to the world. He came to a stop beside a patch of dry sage. Sweat ran in thin lines down his flanks, turning dust to clay against his skin. His chest rose and fell, his heart still beating with the echo of the run around him.
The plane was still vibrating from the memory of his passage. The grass, bent and flattened by wind and hooves, began to straighten again. The dust settled, dimming the brightness of the air. The stallion lowered his head and closed his eyes. The sound of his breath merged with the hum of the earth, deep, even, and steady.
He had not left the world behind. He had carried it with him, each stride, a heartbeat of the plane itself. By midday, the plane had turned white with heat. The air itself seemed to shimmer, trembling waves rising from the ground, bending the shape of the world. The sun burned without mercy. A pale, unwavering circle pinned in a cloudless sky.
Shadows disappeared. Even the wind had gone quiet. The stallion walked now. His breath came slow. The rhythm deep and steady. Each exhale left a faint shimmer in the heat. A ghost of movement that vanished before it rose. His coat, once bright in the morning, was darkened with sweat. Dust clung to his legs, to his flanks, to his mane, forming thin traces of the miles he had crossed.
The land gave no sign of change. No tree, no rise, no sound. Only the ripple of air above the grass and the faint hum of insects too small to see. The horizon hung ahead, perfect, sharp, eternal, and with every step it shifted backward, keeping its distance. He stopped once to drink from a shallow hollow, but the water there was gone.
Only cracked mud remained pale and dry. He pressed his muzzle to it anyway, breathing in the scent of clay and memory. The smell told him of rain long vanished, of a sky that once broke open and fed the earth, of rivers that forgot where they began. He stood there for a long time. His sides rose and fell slowly.
the muscles beneath his coat twitching as flies circled in the heat. His eyes half closed, not in weariness, but in listening. The plane was not silent. It whispered constantly in small hidden ways, the hiss of grass rubbing against itself, the dry crackle of seed pods, the slow breathing of the ground beneath.
When he moved again, it was with patience. He knew now the rhythm of the day, the long silence between gusts of wind, the heavy stillness that came when the sun ruled everything. He walked along a faint animal trail, its edges blurred by time. The prince of hooves and paws had hardened into stone-like shapes. Signs of others who had crossed, then vanished.
He followed them without knowing why. The land curved gently downward into a shallow valley. The air there was thicker, the heat closer, like breath trapped between the hills. A single crow passed overhead, silent and low, its wings making no sound against the sky. The stallion watched it drift across the horizon until it became a black point swallowed by light. He kept moving.
The world seemed to repeat itself. The same grass, the same rocks, the same wide space. Yet with every mile, something changed, something too quiet to see. The color of the ground deepened, the air thickened with scent, and the silence began to hum with a low vibration that came not from the wind, but from the earth itself.
By afternoon, the horizon still hadn’t come closer. It had followed him, shapeshifting, bending its edges as though alive, always waiting, always retreating. He stopped and stared at it. His man heavy with sweat, his breath slow and rough. He realized the truth that all wild things learn eventually. The horizon is not a place to reach, but a mirror that moves with you.
He exhaled once, long and even, and the dust rose around his muzzle like smoke. The world shimmerred, blurred, land and sky melting into one. The distance no longer seemed far. It was everywhere, in every breath, in every heartbeat. He lowered his head and began to walk again, not toward the horizon now, but within it. By late afternoon, the light began to change.
The sun still hung above the plane, but its edges had softened, its color deepening from white to amber. The heat that had ruled the day broke, leaving behind a faint coolness that carried a new scent. Sharp, metallic, electric. The stallion stopped and raised his head. He felt it before he saw it. A vibration somewhere in the air, too low to be sound.
His nostrils flared. The smell of dry grass had shifted. Beneath it came something else. Faint but unmistakable rain. He turned toward the west. There, across the farthest edge of the plane, the horizon had begun to darken. A long, heavy line of cloud pressed low against the earth, rolling slowly forward like a tide of smoke.
Light flickered inside it. Small, silent bursts of white hidden behind the gray mass. The stallion stood still. The wind which had been sleeping all day began to stir again. It came in short, uneven gusts, lifting the dust around his legs, twisting his mane. Each gust carried more of that scent. Wet stone, iron, and the deep, almost sweet note of distant rain hitting dry ground.
The plane seemed to listen with him. The grass swayed, bending all in one direction. The insects vanished into the soil. Even the air grew thicker, heavier, as if waiting. The sky deepened from amber to rust, then to purple, then to something darker still. The first rumble came from far away, a soft, rolling growl that moved through the ground more than the air.
The stallion’s ears flicked back, then forward again. He felt it in his chest, a slow echo that trembled against his ribs. The clouds advanced, swallowing light as they came. The sun disappeared behind them, its edge bleeding gold before being smothered completely. The plane fell into shadow, the color draining from it until everything turned silver gray. The wind grew stronger, colder.
The stallion turned sideways to it, bracing his stance. The gust struck his body, flattening his mane and tail against his flank. His muscles tightened beneath his coat. Dust rose in spirals around his legs, dancing briefly before being torn apart. He blinked against the wind.
The smell of rain was stronger now, thick, alive, undeniable. It carried memory of rivers carving through stone, of nights filled with lightning, of the first storms that ever touched this land. Another flash lit the sky, this time close enough to see the line of light cut across the clouds. A heartbeat later, thunder answered, deep and full, rolling endlessly until it blended with the wind.
The stallion stepped forward, nostrils wide, eyes fixed on the dark wall ahead. He did not turn from it. He faced the wind directly, his chest rising against it, his body trembling not from fear, but from recognition. The first drop fell, a single dark circle on the dust, instantly swallowed, then another, then thousands. The rain came all at once.
It hit the earth with a sound like applause, like awakening. The plane came alive beneath it. Dust turning to mud, air turning to scent, silence turning to rhythm. The wind howled through the grass, bending it flat, sweeping sheets of water sideways. The stallion stood through it all. His coat darkened to black.
Water streaming down his neck and shoulders. The storm’s voice was everywhere, above, below, inside. Lightning flashed again, bright enough to carve his outline against the moving clouds. He blinked into the rain, eyes wide, unflinching. The wind tore past him, and he did not move.