The quiet pressed in on her. It filled the spaces between the trees, threaded through the pine needles and yellow-tinged leaves, snaked over the roots scattering the ground. It was everywhere, clinging to Brynja’s skin and soaking into her like fog. Ygritte was away, off on some adventure, and her typical crashing and breaking of branches was woefully absent. Nymeria had been gone for months, and her children with her. The ragtag bunch of loosely-banded souls in the Forest was dwindling, slowly but surely, and Brynja couldn’t handle the emptiness much longer.

She darted for the tree line, breaking through the trunks and coming out onto the small stretch of beach leading down to the sea. The water was brackish, a cool grey lapping against the dark beige of the sand. Smooth, hard pebbles speckled the shoreline as Brynja moved farther and farther from the cool embrace of the towering pines. She stopped just at the edge of the water, letting it kiss the tips of her front hooves, and gazed out over the horizon. The wind was cool on her face, and the feel of it brushing back her long russet mane and tail was refreshing. The breeze nearly never reached her in the forest. She hadn’t realized how much she missed it until that moment.

The open expanse of the beach helped to clear her mind, and calm her frayed nerves. Brynja had expected so much since coming to the Islands, and nothing had ever quite worked out how she planned. Her homeland was a sprawling expanse of life, and here... here it seemed to come and go with the seasons, with the tides, with no reason in particular. Souls she’d grown close to drifted in and out at random. The one constant in her life was Ygritte, and even she was becoming restless. It would be time for her to leave soon, to forge her own path in the world. When that happened, what would Brynja do?

She thought about it there, on the beach, and found no answer.