Common

Her head is high, her blue eyes seeking. It is not a difficulty to imagine her the sun come down in the flesh, her mane and tail whipped up by the wind like beams of brilliance about her. The warmth of summer seems to sweep into the land again - the last vestiges of summer trying desperately to fight the changing of the leaves and the crisp morning frosts growing more and more potently in the night. She is a ray of light in a backdrop of thinly veiling clouds, the brightness of the overcast still lending a satin shine to all the curves of her form - enhanced by the soaking sea water that clung to her despite her initial shake on the sandy beach.

She is a creature of firm, though kindly, countenance - brightened only the more because she wore a smile in spite of that nature. She is glad to be ashore, freed from the watery strait between mainland and islands. Her dainty body throws a second shake from poll to toe, shedding a new rainfall of droplets to the ground as she made it to the first earthen-bound blades of grass and took her first small sustenance from the land.

Shimmering, she takes up a lively gaited progress, tail bannered out like a pennant and mane taking similar flight in her wake. She moved for the joy of it, jolting into a canter only when a pair of rabbits made their last springing dance about her feet, celebrating before the long dreariness that would encase them in suitable somberness. She is too pretty a creature, so of the summer and sunlight, that they dance in spite of themselves and she picks carefully where hoof might do them no harm.

The earth calls up to her, ‘peace, girl, be at peace’. It is what ends her levity and sends the little creatures back to the safety of their warren. ‘it is a time of rest, of waiting.’ it reminds her quietly. She takes the chiding in passive adherence, sighing a soft breath and looking to the horizon for the one she was told she would meet when she came at last to the end of the world.

Fire, the seer had spoken. Fire and burning, heat and conflagration that would threaten to eat her alive. She would be the balm, the healing of honey and the softening touch of milk. She was not told much more than the gabbling babbling that came from seeing too much to the fore or hind of present - but that part she knew.

It was not in her to dwell overmuch on the words of those not meant for this world, they rarely spoke out of riddles, but when life had stolen her home and she had lost all to the sufferance of mortal whims, what other direction ought one take except the last direction offered? Why would the seer have spoken of Fire to be her future if the present were precisely where she ought to be, if the present was destined to continue onwards? Surely there’d be no need to speak of things to come if Fire would have come to her anyway? She had not even had a choice in being betrothed to the throne, saving that such seers had witnessed her betrothed to the lord of the land.

Then those came who would have destroyed her home entire if they’d found her in their midst, and so she had gone and left to find her Fire at the End of the World. Save a country by the mere fact of her ‘not existing’ seemed reason enough to transplant.

She moves with a high stepped gait, not as exaggerated as some of her heritage but high and lovely all the same, looking for the respite of space amidst the throngs of the place she had landed.