Dexter
Salem was about as barren as Tinuvel. Though Dexter preferred the cold, any place where life was scarce was a good place to hide. He didn’t want to be completely alone, but the stallion needed to be more alone than he was while living in the Crossing. He needed a home.
The hot Salem breeze sucked the water from his coat in record time. The Hills seemed to have been swallowed up by sand, or maybe Dexter was on the complete wrong side of the island. Either way, he saw little sign of life in the dunes that rose before him, and he was in fact rather pleased by this discovery. He spotted a few odd tracks in the sand and the pale bleakness of the landscape was broken every so often by clumps of dusty greenish vegetation. The scent of stallion hung faintly in the dry air, but otherwise the place seemed silent and lifeless.
Time seemed to slow as Dexter climbed one dune after the other. This place was a wasteland, and he might have even been discouraged had it not been for the scent of horse. If someone else could live here, so could Dexter. It was even a bit better that the territory was already owned, he thought. If anyone went looking for him, they would probably only search for a territory under Dexter’s name.
As he traveled he learned to keep to the peaks of the dunes. It was a waste of energy to slide down one and struggle up another, and though this meant his path was not the straightest nor the most convenient, it was the most efficient. He didn’t plan on going very deep into the territory anyway, not when he could see across a good portion of it from the outskirts. It was hard to tell, but there seemed to be a couple small bodies of water somewhere in the territory, as Dexter sometimes spotted copious amounts of green stuff in valleys between dunes. He had only spotted the vegetation twice, and it might very well have been the same body of water, but it explained how the other stallion lived here. Perhaps the oasis was where the stallion was now, or could be found at some point today. Dexter thought about altering his course toward it, but ended up just climbing the tallest dune within his reach to be stuck upon when the sun sank down into the sea.
