Common

━━ ❧ ━━


Needless to say, Pippin was well and truly lost. He hoped that one day he could laugh along with his loved ones at the retelling of these events, but at present he felt mostly a cold, wet knot tangled up in his stomach that was about as far from mirth as he currently was from where he needed to be.

When he made landfall, he promised himself he would trace the shoreline back the way he'd come just as soon as he could dry off and warm up. But the ordeal had drained him of every ounce of his strength, and it didn't take him long to fall quite involuntarily to sleep. And now....

Now it was dark.

There would be no surveying the shoreline in this darkness. The young stallion had scarcely trusted the landmarks he'd been given before all this mess occurred; he wasn't about to trust himself to recognize them in the dead of night. He had to weather the storm in his mind at least until dawn. Thus, he'd spent the past few hours vacillating between curling up in the tall grass like an abandoned fawn and standing in the open as proudly as he could in hopes that anything large enough to frighten him might get frightened first - based entirely on the tone of his internal monologue.

Pippin was finding it difficult to act proud at this particular moment.

Arching his thick neck to nibble at an itch on his side, he drew in a deep, steeling breath. If he was fortunate, he'd only been dragged a short distance down the mainland, and he'd be able to rendezvous with the others before sundown. Hell, if the current had carried him the right way, he could even catch them up before midday. All he had to do was keep his wits about him until sunrise.