I don’t mind the rain. Do you?

Temblor faces her, his eyes sweeping over her for a moment before approaching. Celestine stays where she is, the rain running down the length of her face, dripping from the whiskered curve of her chin. She tilts her head, cat-like.

“I don’t hate it,” she says with a roll of one shoulder. “When it’s warm, anyway. Getting soaked and not freezing is still a novel experience to me.” Before the Lost Islands, before the Lagoon, Celestine had been a creature of the mountains and snow. Precipitation that soaked through and weighed her down was a rare occurrence, and a dangerous one. It had taken some getting used to in the warm, humid Lagoon.

Her mind skirts neatly around Rehoboam and their child, and the life the two of them had led on the Crossing. And then it circles back, apparently unable to avoid the subject. It hadn’t ever really been a partnership, or at least such a title had not been discussed. Celestine understood her position as a Companion in the Lagoon was more of a clerical formality than any true attachment, and yet, Osiris had introduced a bond that need not exist within the boundaries of the Lagoon. Celestine had never been one to settle and grow complacent, but the uprooting of both Rehoboam and herself had rattled her more than it should have. She wonders, now, if she had gotten too comfortable, without even realizing it.

And there is still the filly to consider. Celestine dislikes the extreme sense of attachment she has to the child, and yet, attached she has become. Irritation prickles the hairs along her crest, weighed down and darkened by the rain. Her sense of choice feels fragile, now, as though her freedom is no longer inconsequential, nor truly free. She can no longer simply pack up and flee any situation she dislikes. She does not even dislike Paradise, or Temblor, and she has never disliked her arrangement with Rehoboam, but the child has placed a weight to her choices that did not exist before, and Celestine rebels internally against it.

What does she think of Paradise, he asks? Celestine pulls herself back to the present, and thinks about his question, her eyes flicking from him over to the wall of greenery that marks the end of the beach and the beginning of the jungle. “It is a far different world than the one I grew up in,” she says, “but not in a bad way. The forest feels… protective. And dangerous, all at once. It’s like hiding in the mouth of a dragon who might choose to swallow me if I step on his tongue. It does make me nervous, sometimes, but it feels magical in a way.” She glances back to Temblor, her gaze curious, unassuming. She wonders if he will laugh at her for seeing magic within Paradise.

“What do you think of Paradise?” she asks in turn. “What made you choose this place?” There is a very slight emphasis on choose, but it is not a conscious effort. Celestine’s mind still lingers on her own illusion of choice, but as it turns out, such a conflict has little to do with Temblor at all.