Things were not going well. Wendy had been the first to disappear, then Vaaco and now it seemed that her whole family had up and left as well; the forest was empty anyway. Perhaps if she wasn’t so self-involved she might have taken a moment to reflect on her, somewhat accidental, abandonment of her daughter on the shores of Atlantis. Dreadbite was not one to dwell in the past, however, or admit any wrongdoing on her part if she could avoid it.

Picking her way through the hollow carcass of the once slightly more boisterous forest, the two-tone mare followed the familiar path that led to the prairie. She recalled the times she had snuck across those borders as a child, meeting and spying on the neighbours. She wondered if everything had changed for them too, if the prairie was as silent and abandoned as her childhood home and Luthien now nothing more than a wasteland. There were still scents though - only a few - but they were recent enough to suggest that at least a few someones still lived there. Dreadbite, a social mare starved of company for too long, did nothing to avoid them.