No memories here.

No memories here.

No memories, except those she kept closest to her chest.

Those lazy summer days when the most pressing thing on her mind had been keeping her ocean playdates from her fierce mama's knowledge. She walked through those days as she napped, traversed this very same beach on hooves a fraction of the size they are now. Looked out over the ocean she had once been obsessed with crossing, and let herself grieve the life she might have lived.

Had Catalina not grown up with the sharpest-tongued mare the islands had ever seen, she might not have been conscious enough to follow the mare's initial statement. But sleeping with one eye open was a skill she had learned out of necessity after living with Switch, and refined to perfection following her padre across all of the islands and beyond. Thus, one brilliantly blue eye cracked open the instant she heard the mare's voice, and was shortly followed by the other as the sabino woman rolled herself upright with a huff of annoyance.

"SíYes," she muttered tiredly, yawning as she stretched and forced herself upright. "I'd forgotten how little mercy she has."

The heavy weight of the herbs she'd ingested kept her feeling blanketed and slow, but she raised her gaze to the silver-maned mare nonetheless and watched her for a long moment. Catalina didn't remember much of her time on Salem. She'd been so little then, and her mother so unhappy. She'd taken every chance she could to play with her papa on the beaches, and when her padre had offered to take her to places unknown, she had jumped at the chance.

Nothing had been the same after.

Whatever youth and naivety she had possessed as a girl had vanished the moment she'd left her mother's side.

The mare that stood in front of her was unlike most that Cat had encountered. She carried herself like a panther, languid and lithe, her gaze as sharp as a predators. There is something about her that reminds Catalina of the spotted mare that had once flirted with her father, but it is a fleeting resemblance, baked into their self-assuredness. This mare, Cat assumes, is used to getting her way.

"I was born here," she admits, leaning on her connection to the land to help assuage whatever calculations were going on behind those watchful eyes. After a moment she elaborates, hating how pathetic her words sound. "And I had nowhere else to go, soasí, here I am."

Her damp tail, sandlogged and tangled, slapped at her hocks. "I'm Catalina." Lover of Azreal. Mother of Alita. Daughter of Fiero and Khajiit and Switch. "I take it you own the Desert now, no?"