A stranger looms before Charybdis, her face starkly pale bearing a mask of death. The half-blind mare quails for a moment, shrinks back, believing this to be some kind of omen. She fears for Faolain’s life, for why else would such a premonition manifest before her, except to warn that the kind soul who saved her would not be spared from what was to come. But then the vision speaks, dispelling all fear, and Charybdis raises her bowed head, and finds convincing evidence that this was no spectre come to warn her of that harrowing fate.
(It would break her, even when all else she’d suffered had not. To be the cause of the death of an innocent, one who had family, and had bound herself to those she loved… No, no, Charybdis could not bear such a thing.)
It was the ears, the ears and the voice. Unearthly, it was like nothing Charybdis has ever heard, except from the mouth of the dreamwalker that always held a part of her heart (wild and restless and deep as the ocean). And this stranger, her hide like the void of the night sky, asks something of Charybdis something that draws her even as gravity draws water back to earth, dispelling whatever remains of her apprehension, and stirring a feverish interest. “De darkness? It lurks in de deep, where de eye of de commonfolk cannot see.” Despite herself, the ghost-white mare with her large patch of red-brown starts shivering, even though the sea, and the wind coming off it, do not have the chill of the northern most island in the chain.
“Once, dere were another, an island of rock and stone, riddled wit’ passages and tunnels and winding canyon walls. ‘Im rose above de water, mighty and proud. Cimarron, dey called ‘im, before ‘im were broken in pieces and taken by de sea.” Charybdis bows her head once more, tilting her head to peer down at the furrow carved into the seashore by her companion. The memories shared with her by the one she had lost eddied about her hooves, invisible to the eye, but she felt them, and in their wake whispered the echo of her telling to Faolain. Ancient and strong, great caverns and canyons of stone, dat caught every sound and sang back to dose who walked ‘im winding chasms… “So much life lost, and reclaimed… De ‘alf of me, ‘er dreamed of Cimarron, and de brother-islands ‘im left behind. We come together, but de ghosts in de water… Would not leave us be. ‘Er give ‘erself over to dem, and I was granted life and safe passage.”
The morgan mare falls silent a moment, mourning for all that has been lost. The islands suffered as she suffered, and she felt it, felt it with every breath she drew. “T’were ‘er sacrifice which saved me,” Charybdis admitted, her words weighed down with grief. But she did not grant the pain mastery over her. To do such a thing would diminish the life that had been given so that she would survive. And too, it would cheapen the gift that had been given her by the shadowy Guardian of the Ridge.
“De darkness of which you speak, eidolon, I believe it kept equilibrium wit’ all life 'ere. Enabled de impossible to coexist – sand and snow and jungle and woodland. But I fear it be growing and spreading, festering in de very hearts of dose born upon dese lost shores.” Charybdis could offer no clarification, for she had beheld only a fraction of the islands with her own eye. The place where the fates dictated the paths the commonfolk would follow (for however brief or lengthy a time – it was up to them after they left the Commons), the edge of the open expanse of the Meadows where a river of sweet water ran clear. She had beheld the silhouette of the Peak to the north of the Crossing, and the hazy smudge of the Lagoon to the south. As for the Ridge, it had been touched by darkness before Charybdis had come ashore, and even tendrils of it lurked in the thick jungles beyond Faolain’s domain.
But darkness did not reside in the place that Charybdis had come to think of as home, except, perhaps in likeness only. Touched by shadow as she was, Faolain served as a guiding light to the morgan mare, and perhaps the others of her herd besides. Darkness would never thrive in the Guardian’s heart, for there was a humble strength to her, or so Charybdis determined, that would ever be unrivalled except for a very extraordinary few.
“I believe it 'appen dis way before, when Cimarron sink to de depths of de waters in de west,” came the whisper, trembling in the air between the preternatural pair. With eyes wide behind their veil of white, the salt water still drying on her skin, Charybdis ignores the niggling pain of her seeping wound in favour of something that was, in a sense, more real to her than her physical existence.
The flesh and bones that form the pallid body were as a reflection upon water, and the real essence of her was what lay beneath – hardly ever seen for what she truly was, just as wind rippled the surface of even the body of water that stood still, and light scintillated and refracted as it travelled towards the truth. “Dere were a war on de one called Lut'ien on’y a short time ago. De islanders t’ink dey have peace, but dey are wrong. Eidolon, I t’ink de war were not de end, but de beginning.”
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