"you're my

silver lining,

Clio"

It was insanity, throwing herself into the pitch dark sea as a storm rolled in from the south. But it was the only way - the only way - for the mare to seize hold of a chance at freedom. It was not some terrible hungry predator she was fleeing, nor some cruel and callous beast who'd hurt her, or threatened to do so. It was her father, whom she loved, and who loved her in turn.

Too much, maybe, or perhaps just in a misguided way.

Because if htere was one thing she was certain of, the mare was certainof this: tha ther father would never have harmed her. From the first, he had been her fiercest protector. But she was grown now, and desperate to see the world that he was determined to shield her from. She'd begun to understand why; when he was her age, everything had been torn away from him - his family, his future... He'd fled to preserve his life, and in doing so, found a chance at happiness, but that, too, had been taken from him, and what little he had gained - his first love, his first born, were lost to him.

The only stories he never told were of how he'd come to dwell on the barren slopes of a lone mountain, and where her mother had come from. And given that her mother had never got to see her grow up, the mare had come to accept that these were things she'd never know. What she couldn't accept, however, was standing idly by and let her father shape the course of her life for her. Maybe it was grief piled upon grief that had mad him slightly mad, but in the end, after failing to get him to see reason, she risked the stormy sea.

Perhaps it would all be for naught - that she would drown, just as her father's warning bellows made transparently clear. But the mare was undaunted - to drown would be far quicker than suffocating slowly under the weight of a life she did not want. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she cried back ot him over the waves. He was stronger, and if time had been on his side, he would have caught her. But the storm roared above them, snatched and snapped at the waves with catching claws and teeth. The white of her coat hid her amidst the whitecapped waves, and bought her just enough time to find a current htat would bear her away.

The howling wind swallowed up the wails of her father and it pushed him back to his lonely mountain, and eyes stinging (from her tears, and the spray of the sea), the young mare looked forward, determined to make it through the night so that the hard-won battle, and all that she had sacrificed to gain the world, would not be in vain.

It was upon an verdant isle, much of it consisting of a dense, tangled jungle, that the mare dragged herself ashore and collapsed, exhausted deep to her very bones. How long she lay there, chest heaving, eyes closed, she did not know., but at the lapping of a rising tide at her heels, she stirred into movement, despite the way every muscle protested - some small spark inside her winning out against idleness, so that she did merely stop a few paces further inland to rest further, but pressed on for the treeline, despite the immense effort it took, and the way her hooves dragged through the sand.

She stopped just short of cover, upon realizing that she wasn't alone. Eyeing the large stallion warily, taller than she, more heavily built and his dark coat blending into the tree-shadows, the slender mare tipped her ears back, ever so slightly, and willed her legs to stop quaking with exhaustion a moment so that she could make some kind of favorable impression, or else just offer a glimpse at what she could be, when not half-drowned and completely spent of energy.

"Please," she rasped, not having the strength or presence of mind to introduce herself more formally, and ask after him, and whether she might beg hospitality from him if this was his home, but the intentions were there, in that single word, and the dipping of her head was not solely out of physical weakness. "Water." After the long, exhausting fight to get here, she was desperately thirsty.

Insanity again, to put her trust in a stranger, following him into the depths of a foreign land when she was in such a vulnerable state, but she would argue it was not insanity at all, but clarity. The dark mare, with patches over white breaking over her like waves upon rocks, did not want to die.

She wanted to live.

With her next breath, acutely aware that she was encroaching here, and asking for aid, offered something up of herself in fair exchange, drawing in breath and tilting her elegant muzzle upwards ever so slightly, to meet his gaze across the small distance that remained between them. "My... My name is Clio."

three // mare // morab mutt // dominant white // 15hh
Played by Jessy