PEDRO

Pedro snorts softly and pricks up his ears — sharp, like arrow-leaves poised for flight. He listens to the mute call of the steppe. The air vibrates with a heavy silence, like the breathless pause before a thunder that never arrives, a stillness draped across the earth like an invisible curtain. From afar, only the whisper of scorched grass can be heard, brushing against itself with the aged gestures of a weaver counting her threads without haste. Pedro is born of a chosen lineage — strong, proud, with storm in his blood and lightning in his gaze. His coat, gleaming like bronze under the harsh sun, breathes with the land itself. He stands motionless, yet within him stirs a restless yearning — for the gallop, for flight upon the earth, for the dance with the wind in his mane, for the surge through milky clouds where slumbering gods bathe their dreams. Every sound draws him taut — a fleeting ripple in the grass, a lost wingbeat, a leaf tossed by the warm morning current. He watches with eyes deep as ancient wells, in which roads, battles, and waiting are reflected. He blinks rarely, like a sage who knows every glimmer is a question. Muscles trace living arabesques beneath taut skin — a monument to motion, paused for a breath of the world. He waits. Calmly. With the patience of those who know that time does not halt, but walks beside. The wind wraps his mane like a wisp of smoke, and the strands dance in the hot air like prayers spoken in a forgotten tongue. Pedro dreams of leaping once more toward the horizon, where sky rests on mountains and the air carries the scent of cold stone and freedom. Beneath him, thistles yield to dust, and the cracked earth sighs softly, like skin scorched by sun. The sun lifts its broad face above the horizon, sniffing out another day of glory and toil. The dew has vanished like a forgotten thought, leaving only the trembling memory of its shimmer. The grass, pressed beneath his hoof, resembles an old wound — scarred, but still alive. Everything is dry and pulsing, like a heart beating beneath a merciless sun in a body that does not yield.

From the shadow of the yellowed forest, half-lit by the late dawn, Akili emerges — the one who climbs into the saddle with the longing of departure in his eyes. His dust-stained cloak flutters in the lazy wind, and his step bears the certainty of those who know the path but not the destination. When they see each other, the world takes shape — round, strange, like their shared thirst for the road, like an unfinished thought writing itself as it moves. Akili whispers to the horse unknown words made clear — spoken not from the mouth, but from the heart. Between them, no explanations exist. They share a language — silent, profound, born of an understanding as old as the world. They set out. Stirred by both emotion and stillness, their hearts full of beginning, they allow themselves to be carried forward by their shared steps on the path that leads into the distance. Each step shakes the world from slumber. They ride slowly toward a reddish dawn with shades of violet — like the guilty joy of noon that knows it will die in dusk. When the sun reaches its zenith, harsh and high in the sky, the road carries them to the edge of the world, where the air begins to lose its clarity. A gentle wind, smelling of scorched earth and ancient bark, wraps around their motion. On either side, trees gather in sparse groves. In one of them, a cluster of reddish trees — as if burned by a cold flame — rise in silence: the Red Grove, as it will one day be called by an old man beside an evening fire. Pedro halts. Without signal. As though the earth beneath his hooves speaks an old, cutting tongue. His nostrils fill with a strange scent — not fear, not danger, but something so ancient that even time dares not speak its name. Akili dismounts. Not from fear, but from an instinctive reverence. The place has weight. Every leaf, every shadow seems to harbor a secret. He approaches Pedro, strokes his neck, then steps into the grove, drawn by a strange light — like a shard of moonlight lost in the noon of the steppe. Beneath a large tree, its trunk twisted like a petrified cry, lies a black, porous stone — like a dried wound. Upon it, a symbol: a circle broken by three lines, like an eye half-shut. Akili touches it. Nothing happens. But in his mind, an image appears: a woman dressed in white, her face covered by a wooden mask, standing in the midst of a steppe filled with foam-flecked horses with ember eyes. Around her — light. Then darkness. Then nothing. Pedro snorts, and the sound echoes strangely, as if under a dome. An echo — but not theirs. Akili turns. A child stands at the edge of the grove, appearing out of nowhere, barefoot, long-haired, ageless-eyed. He holds a hemp satchel and a flute. He says nothing. Only watches.

— Do you know what this place is? Akili asks, sensing the question is not meant for the child, but for something else.

— This is where a story was born that was never fully told, the child answers, his voice clear as a deep well. A man died, a horse fled, and a woman remained between worlds.

He falls silent. Akili takes a step. The child vanishes — doesn’t flee, doesn’t hide. Simply disappears. Pedro awaits him at the grove’s edge, his eyes deep and uneasy. Akili mounts again. They say nothing. But their footsteps sound different now, as if they are treading on a story. That evening, when the fire burns low, like an eye half-shut, Akili runs his hand through Pedro’s mane and sits in silence, watching the flames. The wood crackles in short, uneven rhythms — like footsteps on an old floor.

— You saw her too, didn’t you? he murmurs.

Pedro doesn’t respond, but a gust of wind rustles his mane like a shiver. Akili remembers. When he was a child, his grandfather told him of a nameless woman, wearing a mask — carved from the wood of a tree that grows nowhere now, polished by winds a thousand years old. She appears in the dreams of horses before parting, or when a road becomes a circle.

— She guides those who do not yet know they are lost, the old man had said. She sees what man forgets and what horse remembers.

The legend tells of a rider named Nahor — Akili’s forebear — who once ventured into the endless steppes with only a horse and a vow: to find the spring where dead horses return as wind. He never came back. Only his horse returned — worn, with a red mark on its brow and eyes burned by the sun. Since then, every two or three generations, a man from Nahor’s line awakens with a thirst for the horizon, a nameless unrest, and dreams of the woman who reaches out her hand and says, "Not all roads lead to something. Some must simply be followed." Akili has told no one, but he too has had the dream — on the night Pedro was brought to him, an orphaned colt, with eyes warm and wide, like centuries locked in a young body. Now, on the edge of the Red Grove, legends no longer feel like stories. Places carry a memory deeper than men.

— Perhaps she called us, Pedro. Not toward something — but toward who we are.

The fire dies slowly, and the night gathers its stars together like a host of silent witnesses. Pedro and Akili sleep beneath the veil of the tale, and beyond the dream, a mask turns toward them — faceless, but full of age.