She was practically a year and a half old, just a few months shy of it, which meant she was definitely old enough to go adventuring on her own. Iona knew there were so many relatives in the Prairie who would be more than happy to come along with her wherever she wanted to go, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she wanted to experience something that was all her own. She wanted to prove to her mother that she could be independent and that her mother was just being a worrywart.
So, after tricking her mother into thinking she’d gone into the forest, Iona quietly took a few steps back from behind the brush she’d hidden in, gathered her white, brown-black speckled legs under her and took off for the nearby shore, heart racing and grin wild as it stretched across her mouth. She gave a few hearty kicks as she tumbled down into the water, enjoying its cool sting on her skin against the high summer sun that’d been baking down on the yellowed Prairie grasses. Iona continued forward, pushing as the tide slapped against her chest, hooves scrambling against the sediment lying at the bottom beneath the water. Soon she couldn’t touch at all and had to strain her neck up to keep her nose and eyes above the waves.
She had no set destination in mind, choosing to just swim and wash ashore wherever she happened to, gleeful about the prospect of her plan for independence working smoothly thus far.
Then the ocean just… kept stretching.
Iona’s legs were getting weak. She accidentally dipped beneath the water line and came up coughing, exerting more energy as she frantically kicked her tired legs under her, trying to lift herself back up.
Shouldn’t she have touched land by now?
Though Iona had been taught what islands lay in which direction, her attempt to skirt away from Crossing Isle and swim opposite Tinuvel meant she’d swam all the way around the outside of Luthien and was now heading down toward Atlantis. There had been a few times during her swim that if she’d only turned westward, she would have found somewhere to get ashore in no time. But with her panic, she kept swimming the way she thought she’d been going and was now making her way down the line of Atlantis before she finally turned in.
She kept bobbing in the water. Her heart squeezed in her chest.
She coughed as she swallowed a mouthful of saltwater, accidentally inhaled more and dipped again beneath the water. Her long legs splashed with panic as she turned herself around, no longer clear on the direction she was swimming.
“Help!” She cried out in-between her coughs and ragged gasps for air, throat stinging. “Help! Please!” A few more alarmed cries, but Iona wasn’t sure how close or how far she was from anywhere. She was struggling to keep herself going and to keep her head above water, she no longer had time to look for distant land.
A strange current pulled her body and, weakened, she couldn’t fight it. She tried, but it tugged her under, she’d swallowed too much… she was going to drown. She was going to drown and she was never going to see her mother again, her grandfather, her brother, any of her family…
Then, her tired hooves found purchase in soft sand. Iona was barely aware of her surroundings, half crying out of fear, still choking on what sea water she’d accidentally swallowed. Her body collapsed into the shallows of whatever beach she’d washed up on and she barely had a chance to look at it (a blur of pretty turquoise, white-gold sand, and an explosion of jungle green) before her eyes rolled and darkness swallowed her, head smacking hard against the damp sand and mind pulled quickly into an exhausted unconsciousness.
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