Common

They were both gone.

Last spring, she'd been a girl living at home with both of her parents and a comfortable life to call her own. Now she was an orphan. Or well, were you really considered an orphan when you were technically grown? She was supposed to be well past the age of needing either of them, but she did. Her mother had been the one to make the future seem bright, even when the clouds rolled across her mind and made everything gray. And her father had always promised her she could stay as long as she needed to.

And she'd always believed that she needed to stay.

After all, it wasn't exactly safe for her to wander about alone in wolf territory with the unfortunate habit of falling asleep the second adrenaline kicked in. Nor did her father ever want anyone to take advantage of her or harm her when she was incapable of saving herself. Svetka was pretty sure, at least in his mind, she would find herself a best friend of some kind or a partner, or someone that would look after her day-to-day. For a moment, she'd thought she'd found that in the mysterious man creeping through Tinuvel that night, but she'd never seen him again.

And finding someone to take care of her kind of required leaving the island, and oceans were definitely on the list of things she could not do.

Or were they?

Left empty and bereft after days of crying, Svetka stood at the edge of the Cove's shoreline and watched the waves roll in in contemplative silence. There was nothing left for her here. Only sad memories and more pain than she had any capability to deal with. With a fearful grimace, the painted daughter of Solomon and Nadja stepped into the surf and began paddling for the Crossing.

---

Arriving was not graceful and she could feel the paralysis coming even as she drunkenly stumbled up the sandy shoreline. The relief of landing was finally overriding the white-knuckle panic that had kept her awake as she made her first ocean trek. What should have been a comfortable stroll ashore became a race against her own body to land on sand rather than in the water. A race she only just won before crumpling to the ground like a newborn foal, a soft, - "help!" - escaping her before her eyes rolled back and closed.

Water lapped at her heels as the incoming tide began its slow, inexorable climb up the beach.