When Avery had swam away from Salem she had sworn her hooves would never touch the sun-baked golden sands of her birth island again.
Yet, a year and a half later, she stood ashore again, peering quietly inland as water dripped off her body and speckled the ground under and around her. Though she’d purposefully made certain to swim toward the eastern side of the island, exactly opposite the Badlands, there was nowhere else on the desert island she could turn to. She had left without so much as a goodbye to her parents or her siblings, when the leadership of the Badlands kept shifting around and everything happened with her father taking that mare from the Dunes leader with the lovely dark brown eyes.
Thinking of him again, of their brief moments snuck between the territory borders where she’d grown to know him, made him ache the same way it had since she’d parted from him. In truth, the way she felt herself drawn toward the blond chestnut was another reason she had fled from the Badlands, too afraid her father and mother were going to learn the truth of what she’d done.
Her dark hooves had begun to carry her down the eastern shoreline of Salem and around, skirting the southern end of the island with the intent to walk west until she’d reached the Badlands. It meant she’d have to travel the entire length of the islands rather than taking any short-cuts through. She was absolutely drawing out the inevitable, of finding out if her family still even lived in the Badlands or not, or if they’d ever figured out that she’d been the one who’d helped Helios get his mare back.
It was a coincidence that her chosen path brought her into the Dunes first; that she would have to walk the entire length of the Dunes just to reach the Badlands; that she had given herself plenty of chances to run into the handsome blond stallion long before she ever had to face any of her family again.
|