Meadow

Home.

The single word curdled her blood, and made her feel cold. Colder than the soft winter breeze that brushes against her red skin under the dark sky, and colder than her flesh when rising out of the waters upon arriving here. Her pale legs feel weak and they tremble unseen under the thickness of her hair. Home. It had been whispered in her ear hungrily, black lips promising to bring their family home.

To her, it did not exist.

Her home had been swallowed up, as the sea had ravaged her father’s body like a vulture to a corpse. While the stones still lay in the distance, the ice collecting on the coast and the waves frothing tantalizingly at the pale grey sands that lay there- to her it did not exist anymore. “No…” She says, turning her face of red and white stripes back to the sky, feeling the sting in her amber eyes as she feels the desire to cry.

Not because she had no home, but because she could never return to the only one that she had known. “No, I suppose I do not anymore.” She wonders silently to herself if there would ever be a day when the ocean rose up and swallowed Tinuvel, as it had ripped through Cimarron and swallowed it whole- just as the storms had rushed in from far away and turned the Arch to ashes.

The smallest part of her little butterfly heart wanted to see the end of her ‘home’ and to watch it crumble into the sea, as it’s once great neighbor had before. “And what of you? I think you are too young to be wandering alone for so long.”