As he stood with his grown son on the beach facing a sky as black and angry as the devil himself, with lightning arcing in the distance and waves spiking and slapping and foaming at their feet, Hasan was taken back to a time some years ago when he had stood in almost this exact same spot, watching the stark silhouette of his elderly mother against an electric sky. How he had begged and pleaded back then for his mother to make the journey to her ancestral homeland: a journey that would, in the end, be her demise, and nearly his own as well. Now the shoe was on the other foot, and Hasan knew what it was to be the one hounded to do the right thing. His gut ached for his long-dead mother and what he had put her through in her final days. Perhaps that was why he was making entirely the opposite decision she had made. (Though, had it really been her own decision, fragile as her mind had been?) His mother's homeland was a cursed place, he had decided. There was no use returning to something that had chewed up and spat back out his entire family — a place he had left so easily and felt no guilt in abandoning.

No. He would not return to Salem. Ever.

Instead, his eyes were turned toward an entirely different place, an entirely different island: his own homeland, the place in which his mother had birthed her children and been truly happy for the duration of her middling years. The place she should have returned to and died in. How foolish Hasan had been not to see why he'd had to dissuade her so strongly from it back then. He would carry that knowledge and guilt within him for the rest of his life. Had he voiced this now, he knew his son, Aether, would have told him to focus only on what he could choose now. There was no point in carrying guilt, he would say; better to put your efforts into making better choices next time. How had Hasan managed to sire such a wise boy? He often wondered about this sweet young stallion who already towered over him at just two years of age. His gentle giant, too good for this world: too good for the curse of the ancestry that hung, unbeknownst to him, like an invisible yoke across his shoulders.

They parted on that beach as warmly as the air was electric. Aether was headed for Salem. They had argued over this for days, but in the end, Hasan had to concede that Aether was entitled to return to his birthplace and mother, even if Hasan would not go with him. "Tell her," Hasan had said to him two nights before, and his own voice had hung, quivering, in the night air, "Tell her I'm sorry." Everything else was superfluous. Aether's mother, a solemn black and white mare called Dirge who had been waiting far too long for them to return from their travels, did not need to know that Hasan felt unequipped to be what she needed, or that herd stallion life felt positively suffocating to him. If she was happy in the desert, let her thrive there without him, if she even still lingered there at all.

Hasan had directed his son to depart here, from the meadow's southern edge. It was a longer swim to Salem this way, but it was the only certain way to avoid unwanted attention from predatory individuals in the common or lagoon. He watched his son disappear among the choppy waves, mentally wishing him a safe journey, then turned his nose east and north, following the shoreline at a ground-eating trot for a few miles while the sky grew darker and the air became choked with humidity that clung to him like an extra coat. His path took him past the small river that was fed by the falls further inland, and onto a narrow peninsula that jutted into the ocean like a long finger. It was only a short swim thenceforth onto a small island just beyond the peninsula's edge, and it was there Hasan stopped for shelter, the sky having broken open while he was still in the water. After a short rest, he abandoned his shelter and continued on — the deluge did not look likely to stop anytime soon, and besides, he was already soaked to the skin.

This was a decision he would come to regret.

The next thing he knew, he was waking upon the hard, lumpy bedding of a pebbled beach, his lungs screaming for air and throat burning as he coughed up up sea water. The rain had dissipated, but he could hear the creaking and hissing of hundreds of trees being battered by the wind. Hasan lurched to his feet, aware suddenly that his face stung like it had been lashed open by claws. He could taste blood. And his eyes — oh, gods, how they scratched like glass in his skull when he moved them, ripping a low cry of pain from his throat as he blinked and swiveled them in their sockets. The world, when he finally managed to prise his eyelids half-open, was little more than a muddy smear of grey.

He could not see.