The sky ahead cracked and split open. As lightning flashed and lit up the sea, there was a scream that cut through the air. The silence that followed the scream was tentative and heavy with the charge that had jutted out into the air. The earth rumbled beneath her feet, and the waves rolled like boiling water just over the edge of the cliff. Everything was dark and the air tasted like metal. Once more lightning slashed the sky, this time splitting open the clouds and dropping from their torn bellies a fresh and heavy rain that pounds against the sand around her. The static is enough to pick her hair from her neck, making it float in a dark halo around her face as the storm rages on. Once more the earth beneath her feet begins to shatter and fall away, chunks of earth rising up and falling not unlike the ocean that boiled fitfully before her.

She heard the shrill scream of a horse dying, a sweet little bay creature that had wandered too close to the sea before the storm. The poor creature found herself grabbed by the inky black tendrils of the ocean and was screaming as great tentacles tried to drag her back into the sea.

With a jolt, Leviathan awoke from her dream to find that the sky was the pallid, purple colour of early dawn, and the air was filled with the sounds of a soft, spring rainfall. Despite having been tucked away under the wide, low hanging branches of a great evergreen, the black mare stood and found that her sides were damp with sweat, and her hair clung messily to her neck. With an irritated sigh, she picked herself off the ground and moved out from her temporary bed.

Once again, she wandered to the edge of the shallow river that she had claimed as her own, fending off the large, spotted woman that had tried to remove her from the clear, cold waters when she had first arrived here. Slowly, Leviathan noticed, her easy living in the shadow of this great, foreign mountain was having its effects on her, and she found that where her sides had previously been bumped and ridged with ribs that protruded and spoke of extreme hunger there were lean muscles that twisted under her dark skin when she walked. Soon she would be strong again, and she would be able to take flight to whatever sorry island was next on her agenda and closest to this unnamed spit of land in the middle of the ocean.

Meeting the edge of the water, she noted the way her hair clung damply to her face in the reflection of the running water and narrowed her eyes. Not someone to care about her appearance, she did little more than scoff at the sour, lingering memory of her dream as she leaned forwards to take a drink and clear her mind.