Was this all she had left? A wasteland? Looking around, the mare could hardly believe her eyes at how very barren, how dead it was. Even less could she believe that she was going to make an attempt to live here.

Yet she could not return to the forest lands, or the cold lands (where her heart truly resided), or even the mountain lands she had been born in. In these places she was either unwelcome or uncomfortable, to say the least. Even the plains of the continent, so large and sprawling and full of possibilities, held nothing more but memories of violence and hurt.

My son... Remembering was hard, but Nymeria would survive, would endure: as she always had.

It was not a good start, though. Nymeria was exhausted from her swim, as well as famished: and, most importantly, she was overdressed, bearing a thick fur coat that might have served her well on some other island, but here... It seemed this was a place too far for the reaches of trivial things like winter, or snow. For a brief moment, as she strolled past the skeleton of a bird half-buried in sand, the mare wondered if this was a place where things came to die.

Had she made a terrible mistake?

Fighting the urge to shake the water from her coat was important, she knew. Staying soaked for as long as possible would help keep her cool until she found shade and fresh water. But as she moved further inland, she felt herself sweating even before she was dry. Away from the coast, the land began to undulate in a loose sea of dunes, and while strange and almost beautiful to behold, Nymeria was not used to earth that shifted beneath her feet like warm clay: even snow was less tempermental. Struggling through the sand made her muscles ache far sooner than she would have liked.

Eventually she saw a shape on the horizon that was unlike anything else she'd seen before. As she trotted closer, her breathing haggard and her sides caked in a foamy mixture of sand, sea water, and sweat, she realized: it was a huge plant. A twisted alien plant covered in needles, but a plant nonetheless, and it was tall enough that, at last, she had some shade to shelter beneath.

Perhaps once she had cooled down she would attempt to find some water.