Sometimes, when she is alone, she thinks of the family she had lost. She can remember it like it was yesterday: the screams and the cries for help, the dull crunch of bodies being crushed beneath boulders, the feeling of the earth trembling beneath her hooves, the scent of blood and piss and fear, the hot, sickly feeling of a cougar’s claw tearing one of her ears in two. Still she had no idea how many had died that day, or how many had simply fled into the sunset and died from exhaustion or starvation or internal bleeding. I will never know.

Ravnur, despite her many flaws and her occasionally brutish, callous nature, is still a social creature. She still longs for the contact of skin on skin, of teeth gently grooming her hair, of light whickers of laughter from fillies and colts alike. They are the sensations she knows as proof that everything is as it should be, even when all she ever does is stand at the edge of the herd and watch the goings-on like a statue. She needs others like a shepherd needs sheep. I need this peak herd. I need to make a new family.

When she pictures her idyllic herd, however, there is one thing that is most certainly not a part of the delusion: stallions. Ravnur had never known her sire, had never known a man she could trust. On the continent, before her family had been scattered in the landslide, they had been all female, with only the occasional male coming to sniff around before being chased off again. Her rather… unpleasant experience with the sooty buckskin on the crossing had only cemented her deep, instinctive distrust of them. When she thinks of men, she thinks of mindless, selfish fucking machines, things that spill blood needlessly and spill seed thoughtlessly, things that this world would be better without.

Fate has lain a ticking time bomb for her. Ravnur is exploring her new home, hooves gently hissing through the autumn grass and shoulders whispering past pine branches, when she finds them. She has no idea who Anath is, or who Thane is. She has no idea that she might even be stepping out of her station. She’s even apparently blind to the fact that they’re quite clearly sharing a tender moment. She knows only one thing: that he is about as welcome here as sticks in eyeballs.

“What is going on here?” Her voice is a whiplash of natural authority as her dark eyes scour the scene before her. In particular she eyes the obvious culprit, who is filthy and stinking like a swamp monster, her ears pinned back flat against her raven crest in apparent fury, and her tall, muscular body taut with expectation. If it must come to blows, she is prepared. She is the battle-born bastard daughter of Het Vuur.