a new world hangs outside the window
beautiful and strange
it must be I've fallen awake
I must be

The dark mare continues to amble down the path toward the shoreline. The sides of her belly ached from a full day spent grazing on whatever she could find, knowing well that the cooler weather was rolling in, and Wasp wasn't so sure where she'd end up after she departed Tinuvel. The journey thus far away from the Peak had been a curious one. She appreciated the time she'd spent with Liland and his family. She enjoyed getting to know the land of Tinuvel, which was as far as she knew, was where her sire hailed from. But the trek had been was a lonesome one. Much of the time, she explored the forests and the boulders by herself. It really didn't feel all that different from what she'd left behind in the abandoned Peak.

And it certainly didn't make the ache she harbored for her missing mother any easier to bare.

She was feeling that familiar sense of downtrodden and dread wash over her now, as she toiled around in the light layer of snow. Her wide, flat hooves sunk into the muddy earth. Her dark feathers around her fetlocks were caked in it. Wasp breathed a heavy sigh as she looked out over the dark turbulent ocean. She dreaded the swim she knew was before her. The one she made from the common isle to Tinuvel had almost gone dangerously awry.

A nicker breaks the otherwise cold silence around her, and Wasp's heavy head snaps high up above her withers. Her dark ear lobes flick forward and back as she registers where the call came from, and she cranes her neck to look out behind her. In the distance she spies the frame of a stallion, one she hadn't seen before, and her heart drops. This must be the stranger whose masculine musk she'd gotten wind of earlier. The Peak mare pivots on her haunches so she's facing him as he approaches. He seems friendly enough, and not overly aggressive in his casual stance. But Macabre was still in the back of her mind, warning her to be cautious.

As such, Wasp snorted at the stud, with ears pinned, and pawed aggressively at the wet earth beneath her hooves.

W A S P