she hardly remembered ever being a part of the lost islands. fluttering memories of the harbor dashed across her dreams as fleetingly as ashes of paper dance through the air as they burn. family, as far as she was concerned, meant abandonment, loss, and disappointment. she had no mother, no father. she was lucky to have survived at all. echoes of the night of her birth would sometimes flit across her mind, leaving a trail of bitterness and hurt that seemed to eat away at her soul. it hardly made sense that she ever return to the islands but she has, and now it hardly makes sense that she had ever left. but there were no choice in such matters she supposed. we are all merely driftwood floating in the sea and it is our fate to wash ashore as the tides bid and just the same to be pulled from the sand in the same manner and thrust back into the brine.

it was dark, raining, hot, and the air was thick, sweltering. she could hardly breathe. as her eyes opened for the first time she could see nothing but blackness, all consuming, terrifying blackness. slowly this faded and adjusted until there was just light enough to make out shapes and figures. bathed in this eery darkness was her own tiny ivory form, struggling through the mud to rise on her spindles of legs for the first time. the second form was larger, and unmoving. the pale golden body of her mother, from which the warmth of life had just escaped. and so it was that she was born an orphan. for the same night that her mother brought her into the world and left it, her father gave himself to the sea. with the warm rain soaking her back as she struggled to stand, she watched the mud and dirt that clung to her mothers body slowly wash away. she stood alone in the darkness for a long time.

it wasn’t until the rain subsided that she heard the cries and frantic crashing of hooves stampede toward her. she could hear wave after wave of sobs, heart wrenching cries as her sister and brother wept over the lifeless body of their mother. and then it was all very sudden. they pushed her into the sea, and each abreast swam as far as they could. and then, somehow, she became separated, lost. and when some merciful wave pushed her tired newborn body to the shore she laid there until she was found by a band of mares that cared for her until she could fend for herself.

this was her past.

presently, she stood, not knowing if she would know what to do, where to go, and how to get there. she only knew one name. encantador. it haunted her memory like a ghost as she remembered the cream colored mare,ave, who she might have come to know as her sister if she had not been lost, crying out to enamorado how she could not find him as they dashed together into the churning sea the night their parents died. one of those that had cared for her as a babe, gestured out over the sea one day and said the lost islands lay there, and it is from there that you must have come you poor child.

and so she has come, wandering in like a ghost through a half cracked door, the pale ivory of her gaunt frame in the silence of dawn bobbing through the surf and finally staggering up the beach of salem. the rising sun fills in the shadows of her protruding ribs and the hollows of her hips and like some nubile apparition she slips into the desert and stands, solemn and alone, and waits.