Something had gone wrong somewhere, but Aether supposed something was bound to go wrong when one decided to traverse an ocean in the middle of a storm. The heavens had opened not even halfway into his swim, and with land barely in sight in either direction, the young stallion had no choice but to simply carry on, legs kicking furiously to keep him afloat in the rocky embrace of the sea. It was a turbulent ride, in both the physical and internal sense, for as lightning arced above his head and water crashed over him for the hundredth time Aether felt certain he was about to drown or be electrocuted or both. He silently cursed his father for telling him to take this route, and cursed himself for listening; who would it have hurt if he had simply waited a day?

But, perhaps because he swam southwest, directly into the storm's path, it passed over him quickly; sunshine soon peeked out at him from behind the wall of black, and as the deluge cleared, the bleak mass that was Salem emerged from seemingly nowhere, closer than he had expected. Though his body ached and trembled and his stomach fluttered from the terror of his journey, as he swam the last stretch to its shores, Aether smiled in spite of himself. He was home.

He was a tall young stallion and already towered over his sire, but as the island loomed closer and closer until finally he was scrambling onto the soft sand of its shore, he was overcome by a feeling of smallness that took him back to his childhood. Everywhere the cracks of the earth that he remembered had been washed away, melted together by the deluge into a sea of damp brown. The landscape undulated, too, more than he remembered, rising in huge mounds and — and where was all the green?

Despite his weariness, instinct drove him further inland to where he would hopefully find fresh water, grass, and some sort of shelter from the baking sun. Yet the further he strolled, the more his stomach seemed to sink with a deep sense of unease. He knew the nature of Salem was that it was carved by wind and rain and everchanging, but he did not recognize a single hill, rock, or grain of sand. Heaps of dung found along the way soon cemented his suspicions. This was a stranger's home, and his mother was not here.

And it was too late to escape quietly, he realized, as he turned his head to spot a figure travelling quickly, very quickly, toward him.