Rieva’s exhausted muscles are relieved when Lucifer doesn’t doesn’t immediately leave the beach. She stands with her knees locked, resting as best she can while the waves batter gently against her lower legs, causing her to sway.
The pale mare is surprised when Lucifer apologizes for not coming for her sooner. She hadn’t really expected him to come at all, not as a personal judgment on his character, but as a reflection of her own self-worth and expectations of everyone around her. She has no frame of reference for normal behavior in any kind of relationship; her father had left, the colt she had tried to play with in the Bay when she was still little had left, Fell had left. Lucifer had left, and come back, and left again; that he had come back even once had been kind of astonishing. That he had come back a second time had seemed downright unrealistic.
"It’s okay," she says simply, finding the strength to begin to move out of the water and onto the soft sand. She doesn’t say anything about the Ridge, about liking it or otherwise, but her curiosity becomes obvious. As she regains feeling in her fatigued muscles and capacity for thought in her brain, she is able to take in her surroundings. Her dark-rimmed ears flick forward in wonder, and her bone-colored coat twitches in the absence of a cold, drying breeze. The air is humid and warm in her nostrils as she lifts her head to scent the air.
Dropping her head, Rieva breathes in the warm, toasty smell of the sand as she makes her way gradually to the dry strip of the beach. She circles once before dropping down and rolling, grunting softly in pleasure as the warm sand sucks the persistent Tinuvel cold right out of her bones. She lays on her side for a minute, ivory mane sprayed out around her neck. Her eyes, so pale they are almost white, watch Lucifer to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere without her just yet.
Finally, she rolls to her feet and rises, shaking the sand from her coat in a gritty cloud. "Where are we?" she asks.
Rieva
the sun hesitates