Meadow

Arkana left as the last of the spring blooms shrivelled in the summer heat. Strangely, she felt nothing: not at the last look on her mother's face; not even as the forests of Luthien were swallowed by the blue horizon. She was numb despite the warmth of the sea, and it was not until she arrived on the shores of the Crossing that she felt something release inside her. As her mismatched eyes roamed the rolling fields and lighted briefly on each stranger, a lump rose in her throat. I should be crying, she thought, yet no tears came.

Weeks passed in much the same manner. At first it was strange, waking to a landscape that could have passed for one of the clearings of her home, were it not slightly off. For several days it took Arkana a moment to remember where she was: that this grass was not the grass she had chased her sisters across as a girl; that these trees were not the trees that had witnessed her birth, her tears, her laughter, or that had watched over her and her family as they slept. These trees were near-strangers that knew her only as a naive two- or three-year old who fell in love with every stallion that crossed her path. Yet Arkana grew to know them, tracing the hoof-beaten paths that snaked beneath their boughs, listening to the whispers they spoke in the breeze, and noting which ones were the quickest to lose their color as the days grew cooler and shorter.

Occasionally, inevitably, her thoughts turned to the girlhood she'd left behind. She thought of her mother - poor hypocritical Evren, who might have potentially destroyed the sanctity of their family forever - as well as her sisters, who were all in the process of fledging the nest. She thought of her disappointment of a father, and in turn, thought of the stallions she had disappointed. Kaiju Blue, Fearghas, Roheryn... one way or another, they had all been extricated from her life, potential futures lost to her like a dream after waking.

They had that in common with the child she'd given away.

Perhaps she was never meant for love after all. Perhaps she was meant only for this: a quiet, lonely life, haunting the edges of this no-man's-land until her eyes became cloudy and her knees creaked. I could become the Old Hag of the Crossing, she thought to herself one cool evening, as a fine, drizzly mist dampened her skin and turned the last of the slanting sunlight into an ethereal, milky glow. I could scare the children and tell fortunes to those who were brave enough to speak my name.

The thought brought a soft smirk to her lips, but it faded as quickly as the dying light. She lowered her head to snatch a few mouthfuls of grass, but hardly tasted them.