The meadow dripped honey gold in the autumn afternoon. Far stretches of yellowed grass swayed against a cool breeze. She left the ocean behind in the night. Washed up on shore under a full moon一an omen, some might say when she rose up from the foam. Her gold and cream coat was heavy with salt, a long forelock sticking to the span of her broad forehead.
She had been here before but it lasted only a short time. Echidna could change her restless nature, the subtle need to pull up any sort of root. Far, far away her homeland burned in war. It was probably ash by now and all the ghosts of those she wronged were coming after her.
Let them, she thought.
Let them come and see she was not afraid. Not when they lived, surely not when they died. It was not in her to be afraid. No, her father made sure of that. He had driven fear out of her marrow when she was a filly under the tutelage of a spotted stallion, taken from her dam’s side too early to remember. Echidna could only imagine what her dam might have looked like, who she might have been一her brothers and sister many, like grass seed.
The spotted mare shakes her hide, salt and sweat crusted against her neck. Along the curve of her breast and the woody stalks of her legs. Her nostrils widened, smelling the land.
Birds and beasts and horse flesh. The flowers of summer died and fell away into paper-thin wings against the ground. She lips a blade of grass gently. Where did she go from here? Echidna could not be sure, she was no prize to be taken to some stallion’s home. She could not be docile, she could not be kind. Those things were not in her. They were foreign in her mind.
So what use could she be? None at all, not anymore. Once she had been a warrior, striking terror into the hearts of the horses around her. She had struck down old, ancient names. Names now like lead on her tongue, heavy and unsavory to say. They, too, she left behind her.
Many things were left behind.