Sometimes Ravnur thinks she is being punished for returning to the islands.

She had never found her family after all, even after all that time she’d spent on the continent after the landslide, searching and searching and barely sleeping each night before searching some more. Every morning she had awoken alone; every evening she had drifted on the outskirts of unconsciousness, listening to the whirring of crickets and worrying about the herd.

She had eventually found one of them, a quiet grey mare whom she’d never known very well, dying alone in a thicket. Ravnur had only managed to exchange a few words with the poor girl before she had passed away along with her unborn foal.

“I never found them,” the mare had told her with breath sickly sweet. “They are gone, scattered. Forget about them.”

And so Ravnur had returned to start her life anew, the only memoir of her loved ones being a crescent-shaped chunk missing in one ear from when she had fended off a yellow-eyed mountain lion just after the landslide.

And as soon as she'd returned, she had been raped.

The dun mare has always been a strong individual, however, repeating the mantra, I am my mind, not my body, in times of turmoil. She had told herself as much when she had lost part of her ear, and she had told herself as much when the golden-brown stallion had taken her. She had fought him, of course, but he had been a determined little bastard, and in the end she had simply stood there with teeth clenched in derision and let him have his way. If she was lucky, she would not fall with child.

Of course, she doesn’t know just yet that she had, in fact, done just that.

The peak had seemed the most natural place for her to go. She had only ever heard rumors of it, of course, but it had been the perfect destination. Never again would she entrust her safety or sanctity to another stallion, after all.

So she stands, scarred and proud, in the green lowlands, and simply waits. There must be another here somewhere. The amazons cannot simply be a myth.