Iftikhar
mare . arabian . chestnut . 15.0hh . 11
The sands Iftikhar stands on are so soft her hooves sink deep. Even if her belly had not been distended by the black breeder’s seed she still knows her feet would be hidden by the fine, pale grains above the tideline. Even the damp sand she’d just stepped away from feels different from the coarse grains of her home and of the territories on the island called Salem. The heat, too, is dissimilar to what she is used to. It seems to fluctuate abruptly from a balmy sort of heat to a sudden cool from the wind. The gale whips her hair with a ferocity she is unaccustomed to. There is no grit stinging her skin, only the snapping ends of her mane and tail, and the air blows cold off the ocean. She glances behind her at the thick bundle of blue-gray clouds amassing before the horizon. A storm has followed her here.
The red mare faces forward again and shifts her weight. She does not like the sand underneath her. It gives to easily, then seems to trap her feet. It takes much more energy than she cares to muster to stride up the gentle slope to— more sand. “Öf,” she mutters. Further along there is grass, and tall trees with knobby trunks just like the ones that surrounded her herd’s oasis in the desert. There are far more of them here than she has ever seen. The Arabian kicks up sand with intentionally graceless steps as she trudges away from the beach, as if the wind pushes her —however begrudgingly— along. Initially she had gone into the ocean to revisit Salem, and to confront El Halin (it is all the High Seer’s fault that this mission has taken as long as it has and, due to its lengthiness, the breeder Gabbar has decided he is for some reason allowed to reject Iftikhar’s authority despite his innate inferiority), but the winds had lashed the waves to frothing around her. Iftikhar was loathe to lose her life to something as pathetic as water and so she set out for the nearest mass of land.
This is an island she has not been to before. Picking up both her pace and her feet, the red mare moves further inland both to explore and to find a place to avoid the rapidly approaching storm. She has no idea what the clouds behind her will unleash when they billow overhead. At home, it was wind-whipped dust that threatened her people. She has seen a white, almost insubstantial substance gather in heaps on the common island here, one that bites when it melts on her back, and she does not care to feel that sensation again if she can prevent it. Rain is not unfamiliar to her, but it is not something she is yet used to— and these clouds look as ominous as the wrath of the Gods.
“Senden korkmuyorum,” she hisses into the wind as the first drops of rain splatter the ground and her hindquarters.
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