The moon was high in the night sky, full as a saucer and casting everything in glistening blue light. Near the beach, under a rocky outcrop, she’d found a patch of shadows and had been sleeping. She liked to sleep near the beach, the lapping of the waves against the sand and the tang of salt surrounding her. There were seals, sometimes, and the ocean brought her shells and other pretty things to play with. The shore was active - something that couldn’t be said of the land attached to it - and the young mare had appreciated it almost immediately after she’d come to this frigid island over a year and a half ago. When she felt homesick, she would stand fetlock deep in the waves and fool herself into thinking she could just see the mainland on the horizon.

It was not the water giving her stir, nor the seals or the gulls or the wind. The noise breaking through her dreamless sleep was something different, yet familiar; she had not heard it since she’d come, but she knew it at once, deep down in her gut.

Hoofbeats.

Her dark ears moved first, sleepily, but within seconds her dark brown eyes snapped open and she lifted her head. The sound barely reached her, and she rose to her hooves and stepped out from underneath the shelter of the rocks, her slim body cast from darkness to glistening silver luminance. The source of the noise seemed far, barely within reach and moving, and she immediately started off inland lest she lose track of it. Her legs carried her, swift and quiet as a shadow, across the soft land of what she knew to be the Inlet, following the edge of the sea as the sand faded into grass and the slope rose into cliffs battered by waves far below. She could not see hoofprints, but as she moved the hoofbeats grew easier to hear. All else was quiet, just as it always had been.

Eventually, the ground grew flat again; the pied mare skirted around the encroaching evergreen forest, following the edges, until the soil turned again to sand and the large expanse of the bay swung into view. Though she couldn’t see it now, she knew exactly where in the horizon the island in the distance sat, and she paused at the edge of the beach to look for prints. Disappointment rose in her chest - nothing.

As a breeze blew back her white-striped mane, she noticed another scent mixed in with the damp of the sea and the crispness of the nighttime air. It, like the hoofbeats, wasn’t something she’d encountered in forever, but she recognized it in the same visceral way as earlier. Jasmine couldn’t believe it: equine, near at last. After searching for so long, she’d begun to believe she was the only one on the entire island.

She let out a low nicker and scanned the area for signs of life, her form completely exposed under the light of the full moon. Her dark eyes glittered like stars.

Would this be the company Larkspur had promised her?