The scents of other horses -- mares, primarily -- hung everywhere on her island. It was terribly unnerving, but there wasn’t much she could do about it; the stallion had gotten to them first. She had only watched, nervous and shy, and then proceeded to wander around like she usually did, or explore the rocky shelter some more and try and grow accustomed to its strange effect on sounds. She was getting better, but having survived completely on her own her entire life until now, Mercedes had a long way to go before the place was comfortable.

It was during one of her wanderings that the lilac-tan mare caught the scent of another equine unmarred by the familiar scent of this territory’s stallion (whose name she had not yet learned). Immediately her ears pricked forward and she took several excited steps in the direction of the scent, prepared to drive off whatever intruder was unlucky enough to encounter her before her stallion. It wasn’t that she was immensely unpleasant, but since her island had been taken over, and even her intruders taken care of by someone other than herself, the mare felt the need to redeem her territorial-ness and scare away a newcomer or two.

When she blasted through the snow-covered foliage at the other mare and actually saw her, however, Mercedes hesitated. There was a tiredness to the way the girl held herself as she drank from the creek, and she certainly wasn’t waltzing about the place as if she owned it (which would have been most of the problem). Mercy had no idea how to interpret the body language of the mare, but it wasn’t aggressive by any means, nor was it particularly happy. So she slowed her charge and kept some distance, stretching out her neck with flared nostrils to try and catch the mare’s scent from afar.

“Who are you?” she demanded, trying to sound confident like a stallion didn’t just claim the territory she had been living in for the past two weeks, which was, of course, rightfully hers.
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