The girl obeyed immediately, and Şahin followed her out of the water with a relieved sigh and a backward glance at the outgoing tide He had a proper fear of the ocean, both because he’d felt the power of it many times before and because he’d known the terror of being submerged, and the heart-tightening anxiety of watching the waves for a friend’s head to emerge above the water rather than a floating, bloated corpse. Children had not yet experienced much of the world, and that somehow made it all the more terrible when a colt or a filly got sucked out into the water and drowned. The blanketed palomino had no intention of letting that happen in his territory, as long as he was guardian of it.

He dropped his eyes to the filly. She was staring at him, her expression open and unashamed, and a half-smile crept across his dark lip. He missed foals. Her explanation pulled his ears forward, and he drew his chin back in surprise. “Well, I had better escort you back,” he said, with no trace of rebuke in his voice. To punish the curiosity of a foal was to stifle it, he felt. Better to warn of danger and raise a child to use common sense than to punish it for trying to learn. He moved further up the beach as she continued to speak, and he laughed. “Come along. I’ll answer your questions as we walk. Do you remember which way you came from?”

His heart dropped a notch in his chest. So. Yusif had not ventured further into Atlantis, or if he had, he had not encountered the filly. Şahin’s hope that his friend remained alive somewhere on the island dwindled a little bit more. “My name is Şahin,” he said. “It means “hawk” in my mothertongue. What did your mother name you?” He glanced sidelong at his white-dusted companion, tipping his ears back in a sly expression. “Little Tide Chaser?”



[so, so sorry about the wait. :c]