Meadow

The heat of Summer receded, and the pale figure that had haunted the windswept moor and meadow vanished into the mists curling out of the wooded vale on the first cold night of Fall. There was a bite to the wind, and when dawn broke the next morning, there she was, not a ghost at all, but flesh and blood and bone, bowing her graceful head to kiss the first of the blooming wildflowers with speckled lips.

As she had in the days now gone when draped by thick blankets of fog, she did not cease in her roaming, but it was not so easy for her to hide, now that the fogline had yet to reach far past the border of the woodlands around the Falls and the shadowed valleys of the Peak. It would be wise of her to retreat, especially given the season - it would have been wise for her to have left this empty expanse the very night she’d first set hoof to it many seasons ago. But, day after day, she lingered, long, long after Atreides had gone. Iphigenia had no desire at all to follow him. Fate and faithless warring had tied them together, long before even the ink speckled mare had been born. But Iphigenia refused to be bound to him any longer.

It was because of him, and for him, that everything had been taken from her.

But that was another life, a winter that had passed. Followed by another, and another. That was not to say that the thaw would come quickly, or be easy to bear, but Iphigenia would treasure the new life that might await her here, if only she’d be bold enough to seek for it, and humble enough to accept it, no matter what form it took, nor how different life would be for her here, so far from the place where once she’d been beloved by all who’d known her.

She had tried to leave, twice, thrice, but the ocean always bore her back to the isles, and the third time, she accepted that this was her fate now.

There was no smile upon those speckled lips as she roamed, carefree (or careless, perhaps, from the perspective of some), but at the right angle, one might glimpse a sort of wistful tranquility glinting in her eyes that were the colour of clouds at sunset. And there, once hidden by the mists of winter, a hitch in her step, caused by an invisible injury to her left shoulder. There was no mark upon her, nothing upon her flawless coat to hint toward the imperfection. In repose, she was a thing of beauty.

But, more than most, Iphigenia knew life could not be lived in stillness, and so she only paused every so often for a brief rest before wandering on, following a circular path that had become familiar to her over the handful of lonely seasons she'd spent in solitude upon her last return to the isles, bending her head to appreciate every cluster of wildflowers she limped passed, a thick tangle of her forelock serving as a veil in place of the dissipated mists, falling across one emberglow eye.