Common

The grass far was far too sweet here, she thought. Willa missed the Prairie grass and the taste of the dark blue flowers that grew at the base of her favorite tree. She missed her parents. She missed her siblings. She missed her cousins. She even missed the way the sky grew dark and rumbled during storms, though she'd mostly hidden away at the sight of it; now she wished she could experience it just one more time. To tuck her face against her mother's shoulder while Eirena told her she would be alright. What she would not give to have one more smile, one more brush of Eirena's muzzle against her pale mane in reassurance. Her father could return one day, and she hoped he would, but mother was gone for good. Despite her age, Willa had not understood death until it came to claim her mother, and even then it had taken another of the lingering mares who took pity on her to explain what it was after she had attempted to rouse her mother from sleep unsuccessfully. It had been a difficult thing for her, to lose everything she had ever had or known all at once. Like a cracked mirror, it had distorted everything about her world. Her curiosity for the outside had been sated and she would have begged and pleaded to return if it might set everything back to how it had once been.

She is enveloped by her own grief, so much so that she is oblivious to the approach of the stranger until he is next to her and speaking. Willa's head shoots up, a startled snort accompanied by the pinning of her small ears. It was a foreign sensation to her, and she doesn't like it. Willa had never been scared in her life, at least not when she didn't have her family to lean on for support. He did not look or smell like a Prairie storm, but the same unease settled on her bones as she looked at him.

Willa's face goes from worried to nervous to calm as he speaks. His words of warning have little effect on her. She had always known safety and comfort, why should she expect it to be different anywhere else. "I have a home," she says, even if she didn't really. The Prairie would always be her home, she thought, even if she wasn't there now; just like her family would always be her family. Wouldn't they? Naïve as she was, even she could feel even a little doubt faced with what he was saying. "Oh," she had never met a stranger before, not really. Everyone in the Prairie was family to her. "I'm Willa," her voice is soft and warm, like summer rain, and light. "This is...the Commons?" she asks, looking past him into the clearing toward the other horses dotted about. From a distance they almost looked like flowers, a myriad of colors and shapes. The corners of her lips pull up at the thought and she stifles a small laugh, "how dangerous can flowers be."