She had left Koi dropped on the doorstep of the Lagoon, gone before anyone would be able to insist she remain but not before sending her brother in to find their half-brother Diomedes. She had scented him near to the border before releasing the yearling into the jungle and bayou… just like mom said, survivors would do just that… survive. She at least made sure he made it within calling distance of someone who’d protect and help raise him.

She, instead, sped through the commons, then up through the falls, and finally into the Peak.

Her mother had not been one for the leadership and personality of the Peak in her day but Lysimache didn’t much care about the emotional and political landscape of a place so much as the defensibility and potential for growth offered by such a place.

She was young, only just turned two years of age - and yet here she was - a capable fighter with already a trio of scars along her haunches where a cougar had tried to leap atop her back and missed all but the end of her rear end thanks to her mother’s training. The hate in her mother had been matched in herself - and the ruthless belief in survival above else had only intensified when her mother had asked for death beneath her two year old hooves.

It hadn’t been a cougar, or any other cat -- her mother was notorious for killing those, after all. A bear. Kodiak and huge, looming and yet still unable to truly down her warrior mother. It had found itself unconscious but beneath the river water and it had drowned… while her mother had bled on the bank. Bled with two broken legs that no longer could be pretended to be relied upon. “Kill me, Libya.” She had asked, the young mare reminded herself over and over. She had not wanted to die as food, but as a warrior felled by another she had trained herself.

“You are Lysimache, now. The deciding blow of battle, the release from war.” And then it had been over with a crack and squelching sound she wouldn’t soon forget.

She whinnies when she arrives, nostrils flaring as her eyes glance up to the high rocks and branches that might hold her mother’s favorite nemesis. Her ears flatten, then swivel to catch any approach that might come.