Falls

When Oberyn left the Islands, he did not immediately feel any type of way. He returned to the Mainland, but not to his old family. One thing he had come to realize on the Islands was that his old life was very decidedly over, even if Oberyn himself was not over his old life. He did not particularly want to move on, and for a while, he ran away instead, although he would not admit that fact to himself. Moving on and running away were not the same thing, but at the end of the day, it didn’t matter.

Eventually, without really realizing it was happening, Oberyn started to move on.

It began with a growing feeling of unfinished business. Most of it was, of course, the festering resentment and anger he held for his brother, that would simply not go away unless it was cut open and exposed. A lot of it, though, was the Islands themselves. There was something about them that called to the dark dappled stallion. He felt drawn to the archipelago, despite the feelings that surfaced when he was there, like infection being drawn from a wound by a poultice. Discomfort awaited him there, he knew; but so did relief, somewhere beyond the horizon. Here, on the Mainland, he could bury his feelings indefinitely, but he knew they were slowly poisoning him.

It was early morning when Oberyn found himself staring out over the waves, toward the dark storm clouds that veiled the horizon, and the mysterious Islands beyond. He entered the waves almost absently, as though his legs were moving of their own accord, and not long after he was fighting the thrashing surf as the storm raged around him. For a time, he thought he would not make it, and a panic seized him — not the panic of death, but the fear that he may leave this world with burdens unresolved, having never known peace after the tragedy of his childhood, and of his brother’s.

Oberyn did not drown, however. He washed up on the familiar shores of the Crossing (though he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen this particular beach, the entire thing was somehow, deeply and instinctually familiar) with trembling legs and heaving breaths. He collapsed there in the sand, feeling that his survival was a small triumph — the first step in a long journey of unraveling, and then stitching himself up again once more.