The moon had changed many times as it watched over the mare who had once been Loyal. She found kindred spirits that she stayed awhile with; mares from the desert like her, and a wanderer returning to the place of her birth.

All three, like Senu, spoke in varied degrees of accented tones. None were able to help her brave the stretch of ocean that lay between her and Home, for the winter waters were treacherous and cold, and all three carried life within them. But Senu? All she had was her fire - the same one that had kept her alive when the rest of her world had been swept away and drowned.

The three had left, to find themselves places safer than the Commons and the thin band of trees that bordered the open plains of the Meadow. But Senu was not content to go with any of them. She had to get back to the Hills, back to Marceline, and she should have been back there already. If what she suspected was true, it may not just be Marceline who needed her, but Azalaïs too.

And it rankled, it burned her, that the obstacle that lay before her was such a simple one in the eyes of so many. What made it worse was the knowledge that she had made the journey months before, in desperate pursuit of Azalaïs, who’d spontaneously taken to the sea after the young stallion Atreides had been pulled away by the tide. A series of misfortunes, which left Senu stranded alone, imprisoned by her suffocating fear of the water, when the three she’d befriended, and the three she’d followed, had all moved on.

- - - - -

For days now, Senu has lingered near to a stretch of the land-border of the Lagoon, where it spread ranging roots toward the land belonging to no-one, upon which the the unwise who wandered too long could be caught unawares and claimed. Senu has no such fear, for she Belongs to someone. But she is apprehensive about what is to come, for regardless of whatever is said of the Lagoon and whether some or any of it is true, it is a land where bachelor stallions gather, and Senu has had little to do with men before.

She thinks of the journey she and Marcelina had made across Salem, shoulder-to-shoulder, and of Rafe, the stallion who governed the Badlands. He had been pleasant enough, and Senu can only hope that at least one of the bachelors carries a measure of decency, and holding fast to this, she dances forward, movements strangely graceful and her steps almost feather-light for how quickly they touch ground. And there, right upon the boundary line, she lets loose a cry that beckons any souls lurking nearby to her.

"You," she calls out, when she hears the first sign of someone approaching. She shuffles, uneasy being so closed in by mangroves. The way the ground beneath her shifts, unstable, is so like the sands of Salem (and of the place, far across the sea, where she had been born), and yet, the humidity and dampness of the air, and the way the marsh sucks hungrily at her hooves, it is so foreign to the desert mare. Just as everything about her, from her scars to her suspicious squint to her strange way of talking, mark her as foreign to these islands, even after the handful of years she has spent here.

"Please, you listen," she calls again, and she cannot help but jostle restlessly, her muzzle twitching this way and that as she scanned incessantly, determined to meet the gaze of whoever it is she has summoned as soon as they reveal themself, to hopefully glean something of their intent in answering her bellow, and whether they mean her harm. And if she learns nothing, then at least she will teach - it will be clear from the first that, nervous as the brindled buckskin mare is to be here, encroaching upon the borders of the dreaded Lagoon (even as the Lagoon itself seems to encroach into her space in return, from all sides) she knows what she wants, and will hold her ground if she has to. But it is only determination in her honey-brown eyes, glinting like amber illuminated by flame, not ill-intent, and definitely not a challenge.

"Do not want trouble. Want to go down the sands by the sea. South, to Salem." It is only this little thing she asks for, and in her mind, she does not see why she should not be granted passage. After all, the Lagoon does not belong to the bachelors, it was they who belong to it, and though it is their right to protect the place that is home to them, Senu has not come for a fight, but if those of the Lagoon make her presence here, and her request, into one, and make themselves enemies to her, well…

If what is in Senu’s heart and mind proves to be true, there will be a reckoning coming for them from the southern horizon.