A/N: Written for the If You Dare Challenge, level DARK and prompt #004 – reality bites, and for the non-human character boot camp, prompt #032 – question. Also written for the 100_poems challenge on livejournal, poem 14/100 and day 13.

Of the Forbidden Forest
1. Centaur

Centaur hooves echo
on a distant dirt floor

(They still choose to look up to the moon
and the stars that frame it in the sky)

And they run
through thickets and nests
without aim

(Why are they running then?
From what?
What for?)

As the stars stretch out –
a halo beyond sight
leading them to an answer that exists
nowhere…in the stars

(For they are creatures of the land
and that is where, ultimately, the stars lead).