Even in the face of her defiance Maslakhat remains calm. He doesn’t yell, doesn’t chide, doesn’t even look angry, his face as cool and featureless as still water. It only serves to incense Kore further. She is a slave to her emotions, as driven by their whims as the sand is driven to move by the push of desert wind, and to see him rising weightless above them while she struggles beneath their gravity makes her furious. She wants to strike out with her hooves and break the mirror of his composure into a million shining shards, and slice up her dark skin in the process. At least then they’d both be feeling something, instead of her feeling everything and him seeming to feel absolutely nothing at all.

Kore notes the softness in his expression, and her ears pin back as he comes closer. She bristles a bit under his soft touch, the light pressure of his muzzle on her shoulder icy cold upon her skin, but she doesn’t move away, holding almost eerily still and fighting the fervor roiling like tidal waves within her. Isn’t this what she wanted? Hasn’t she spent the better part of this season wishing, against all evidence, for some sort of attention from the golden stallion? Why, then, does it make her so angry, and sad, and still, incomprehensibly, full of yearning? This hint of a caress feels almost too little too late. Her trust in him, in the truth of his words and his insistence that she somehow deserved better, stands now on shaky ground. Deserved better than what? Than this?

“Why do you care, Maslakhat?” she spits after a moment, the anger in her words laced with grief. “Why now?” Because of what he’d witnessed on the beach? Because he could sense the thing, unseen and unnamed, that threatened to pull her away from Salem and out from under his grasp? It cannot be the result of any affection he has for her; she has noticed, whether he meant for her to or not, the time he’s spent with the other mares in their herd, and the difference between how he interacts with them versus herself. The sting of his rejection, even as he reaches for her, hurts like sharp cactus barbs poking into her fragile heart. Kore breaks, now, from him, wheeling back around to look over the Dunes once more.

“And how do you know what I deserve?” she accuses, her voice low with simmering indignation. “You don’t know me, and you haven’t tried to. You don’t know where I’ve been, what I’ve done.” What I’m capable of. Would he think she deserved better then? Or would he hate her, cast her out to die alone, just as Demeter had threatened the gods of Olympus and all of her loved ones in Nysa would do? On the Islands, Kore is nobody, a nameless mare of no importance. Even as she balks at Maslakhat’s attempts to soothe her and lashes out with her pointed tongue, the deep well of sadness at her lack of any meaningful place here paints her hardened expression in shades of melancholy. As she stares across the horizon, half-listening for Maslakhat’s response, she wonders if there will ever be a world for her where she doesn’t have to hide parts of herself. Where she doesn’t have to weigh the bonds she builds against the scars of her past. Where she can relax, and grow, and thrive, and soothe the storm within her into one of calm, still, smooth water.