She wasn’t scared. It was as if the mare had a genetic predisposition to shut the door on fear. Things like despair and hopelessness just slid away, a fried egg on Teflon. There was nothing that would get inside Earthshine’s head, at least, she was fairly sure. So long as the mare could shut the door everything scary and ugly and bad would be on the other side. Things could be chased off fairly easily, now couldn’t they? She could get rid of them if she tried hard enough, could she not? The black mare was fairly certain that anything was eventually possible. If she believed her mother anything was a possibility in theory.

Did she believe her mother? The woman that had left her cold and wet behind the ears one mid spring morning in the Tinuvel? The woman that had let her stepfather raise her? Earthshine had been closer to Finn than she had anyone… and she’d looked for him. She’d looked high and low for her stepfather even after Ivan was long gone the first time. It would be Finn that she’d go running back to, because who didn’t want their parents when they were cold and alone? Who didn’t want the comfort that had been around in the early days, the days of old? They hadn’t been that long ago, had they?

Earthshine had been a princess, a child, a lover and a queen. Things had gone by so quickly, and in such a short period of time. It was with Finn in her mind that she numbly made her way from the summer heat of the desert back to the thick of the cold—she’d been raised in that cold. She’d been taken from a verdant creature and allowed to age and mature. The latter part of her childhood had been on an island that had sunk to the bottom of the ocean… that wasn’t important now. It was her childhood home that she found with the last remnants of the Hills clinging to her coat.

She was a queen then… what was she now? The creature stood on the beach of the Inlet itself, looking out over the lands. It was the same temperature in the north now as it had been during the winter in the south. Sure, it was early yet, but the cold was already starting to haunt her. The mare would continue to remind herself… this was the trip her body and her heart wanted. This was where she needed to be now, for some reason. Earthshine stood with her eyes peeled, watching the shining green area for any signs of life. The black mare just didn’t want to be alone.