Stupid, stupid, stupid, Kore thought to herself as she stomped through the tender new grass. She couldn’t believe it. Of all things - out of everything,
everything she had been through - a storm was what swept her out of Eleusis. Her dam had forced her there as they fled from Nysa, leaving the shelter of their lush oasis to travel across the sands to the coast. Kore hadn’t wanted to go. Hidden though it was from the antics of the other nobility on the Mount, it was all she’d known since birth, and yet the frantic cant of Demeter’s voice had hastened her. Sweet Kore was safer in Eleusis, with Artemis and Athena, while her mother saw to the threat at Nysa.
They had never considered the dangers of high winds and harsh waves.
Her last image of Nysa - stolen over her shoulder, utterly calm and lost beneath the darkness of the new moon - burned into her mind as she walked. A call roused her from her reverie, and though it fell soft upon her ears she yanked her head up, whipping around to lay wild eyes on a stranger. She spoke, and though Kore felt her muscles losing tension at the sound of a woman’s voice, when the other pointed at the spot of her earlier, erm, outburst, her gaze snapped quickly to the still-rippling water and back. “Can you tell?” she retorted, sarcasm sharpening every word into a fine point.
In the back of her head, Demeter’s deep voice rumbled like thunder. Manners…
Kore’s ears slid from beneath her mane to fall sideways. At the other mare’s apology, she shook her head. “No, my lady, it’s me who needs to apologize.” She sighed and looked towards the distant shore, awash in the golden light of the rising sun. “My emotions sometimes - they get the best of me, and I behave in haste.” Lucky, then, that she had spent the last night alone after washing ashore.
The maiden softened her steps to mirror the gentle pace of her companion’s. “Ember,” she repeated to herself. “It suits you. My name is Kore.” Her coat glowed like hot coals as it caught the sun, and though she was stockier than Kore, she carried herself with an ease that came only with being completely comfortable in one’s own skin.
What was it like to have such peace? To know such stillness? Kore’s emotions roiled and pitched like the waves that had swept her away, the weight of her mother’s - of everyone’s - expectations placed upon her chafing like sandpaper until the edges of her being felt raw and tender. She longed for a balm to calm the stinging.
“Ember,” she repeated, her tone more of a question as she glanced over. “Can you tell me - where are we? What is this place?” Someone as serene as her would surely have an answer or two.