Common

Violeta stares at the end of the world, and the end of the world stares back at her.

Its siren song rumbles, sonorous in her chest, like the beating of a drum from deep beneath the blue-black surface. Foam-flecked waves hiss and grasp at her hooves, and the chilly sea wind, brisk with spray, buffets her face like a hungry lover.

It is here, on this stretch of sand, that she and her brothers have raced and dug for crabs; here that she and her mother have watched the moon rise and exchanged fevered whispers. It is here, also, that more than one soul has met their end under the cold stare of a watchful crowd. The beach is empty now, but its ghosts linger, poking and prodding at Violeta with spectral claws, urging her to make her choice.

She blinks against a veil of unshed tears, and wades into her exile.



Violeta wakes to a canvas of night sky and the rhythmic hush of the tides. For a moment she's flooded with the relief of being safe, of being home. Then cold prickles at her skin, and her throat aches with the memory of grief. Vivid snatches of her hubris-fueled flight resurface: the vast emptiness stretching in every direction; her nostrils burning with salt; her legs, heavy and numb with exhaustion. Strong, ice-cold hands pulling at her, easing her into the feather-light comfort of her ocean bed. Quivering shafts of turquoise sunlight cutting through the water, receding into shadows.

Burning. Choking. Sky. Sand.

Safety.

It's that same sand before her now: silvered by moonlight, fine and powder-soft rather than the gritty pebbles of home. It clings to her as she struggles into a standing position, the stiffness of well-used muscles giving resistance, and a sharp pulling sensation shoots up her front left leg. Inspection reveals a fresh gash, shallow and no longer bleeding yet gleaming angry and crimson against the blue-black of her fetlock tuft.

She lets out a deep, bone-rattling cough and moves inland with the slightest of limps, her back to the mocking hiss of the ocean and the full curve of her crest hanging low. The beach carries her uphill, past great dark rocks like hunched beasts and tidepools glistening with reflected starlight, and she emerges onto a wide clearing fringed by the ominous black silhouettes of ancient woodlands. Crickets whirr; a cold breeze sends rotting leaves skittering around her feet and shivers rippling down her sand-caked back. All else is still. Yet, beneath the heavy odor of damp earth lies the scent of something else.

Others.

A slurry of emotions rises in her belly like disturbed sediment, sitting uneasily atop the remnants of swallowed sea water. Life, outside of Liber? Outside of the Family? For a moment the shadowed landscape swims in her vision and her knees buckle, threatening to fold beneath the weight of exhaustion and overwhelm; then the memory of her father's face on his last living day, crestfallen with grim acceptance, fills her with spiteful resolve and pushes her onward.

Violeta finds some shelter from the cutting wind within a nearby copse of thick woodland, where wintering shrubs bursting with berries cluster at the feet of naked trees. The rough bark of an old lightning-blasted maple helps curry away the sand clinging to her side, but it's a meager comfort while her body still grapples with the hundred pains and discomforts of near-drowning. Weighed down by exhaustion yet wired with adrenaline, her eyes soon flutter into cycles of half-sleep, her consciousness repetitively dipping towards blackness before jerking back into sharp awareness.

As a thick blanket of cloud swallows the near-full moon, thrusting the strange landscape into complete darkness, strange shapes and sounds emerge. The creak of swaying trees becomes the groan of dying animals, their clustering trunks the walls of a prison. Fallen branches, long and sinuous, become hundreds of serpents nestled in the leaf litter.

You are safe, comes a gentle memory of her father's voice, and Violeta exhales some of her fear with the cloud of her breath. She leans a little heavier into the solidness of the broken tree at her side, cocking her injured foreleg. She is safe. She defied, she survived, and she is safe.

Then, a stick moves.

Violeta holds her breath, cups both ears forward.

The rustle of a leaf.

A tiny, flickering tongue.

Violeta jettisons forward, stumbling over the grasping arms of the half-dead maple, and is near-jerked off her feet as her mane catches on a jagged branch. She flails—tugging, straining, pawing at the ground—but she is a rabbit in a snare, her struggling feverish yet futile. Her wide, dark eyes scour the mud and leaf litter, but the slithering predator is lost to the shadows like a wraith, just as the stories of the Family had forewarned. Violeta's skin crawls; her frantic breath clouds about her; her nerves vibrate with the need to get away. Then she pulls hard enough at her tangled mane that something rips.

Her scream is high and thin.