Falls

The season is waning, and with it Arkana’s hopes of seeing him again. Caught up in the rush of her first heat, Arkana had allowed herself to fall under the spell of several handsome stallions, but they had been temporary distractions: no replacement for the infatuation that still burned futilely in her heart.

It’s when the first cold snap reaches Luthien, coating every leaf and blade of grass in a fine crystalline frost, that she knows she must brave the ocean once more, before it grows too cold to swim. If he will not come to her, she will come to him.

Alas, her trip proves fruitless, as she had feared it would. She travels the breadth of the meadow, asking strangers if they’ve seen a tall, dark stranger with pale freckles dappled across his skin like snowflakes, but they all reply in the negative. She even finds the little nook in the trees in which they had spent the night together, but his scent is long gone, as is the flower she had left him as a token to remember her by. She recalls him mentioning that he’s a traveller, never lingering in one place for too long, but she had thought surely, surely his travels would take him in her direction, as he had promised they would. Accepting that perhaps he had never intended to visit her at all, or that something terrible had happened to him, is a bitter pill to swallow.

Rather than travelling straight back home, however, Arkana takes a detour in the direction of the falls, in the feeble hope that finally seeing the grand veil of water her sisters have talked about will lift her spirits. The rumbling monster is a sight to behold, to be sure, and Arkana’s mismatched eyes are transfixed by the fine cloud of mist that swirls around it like the breath of a great dragon, but her heart still aches from loss. She needs her family.

She turns to retreat back the way she’d come, through the half-naked trees and carpet of rotting brown leaves, but as she arcs round the boughs of a great, gnarled oak, she nearly walks face-first into a stranger. “Oh!” she cries out, eyes rolling as she jerks her head up and shies to the side. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t see you there!”