It will all work out, Kohelet murmured, brushing the dark mare's forelock from her face with a gentle, motherly touch. Rethe was spent, laying prone beside her with the evidence of a night of tears crusted on her cheeks. She did not move at her dam's touch, her glassy-eyed stare fixated on nothing at all, her mind working sluggishly back through the prior night's events.

After leaving Tefnut in the surf, Rethe had returned to her mother and woken her. She'd scarcely given the tobiano mare a moment to wake up before she'd poured the whole sordid story out and collapsed against her. They'd talked through the long hours of the night while the stars walked through the sky above.

Mostly, Rethe listened. She didn't believe everything Kohelet said and could not trust some of the well-meant claims that she made, but it wasn't the words that Kohelet spoke that were important. It was that she was there. She was there to comfort her, to offer words of wisdom - no matter how unheeded they went, to pull her close when the night was long and dark. Rethe was a grown woman, but somewhere deep inside her chest was a girl that had never stopped crying out for her mother.

When the dawn broke the next day, Rethe greeted it with bleary eyes, having slept next to not at all. She rose and bid her mother goodbye before setting across the territory. She wasn't entirely sure where she was going or why, only that she couldn't stay still right now, and she no longer wanted to be comfortable.

She strongly regretted what she'd said to Tefnut the day before, but apologies were not something that came easily to the sharp-tongued black mare. Nor did she want to take back everything she'd said.

Losing the Arch entirely to horses that didn't care about it, or its history, or its ties to the rest of the island was a bitter blow she hadn't foreseen. It was a painful, obvious reminder that her father was not here and was likely never coming back either. It felt like she was being forced to grieve his loss anew while simultaneously facing the fact that it had never, not once, occurred to Tefnut to ask her about the Bay before promoting strangers.

She was an afterthought, no matter what Tefnut or her mother said.

She marched as if she were being commanded to, trudging along with her head lowered and shoulders hunched as if expecting a big cat to leap upon her back. Her ears remained pinned to her nape and though she had done her best to rub the crusty salt trails from her cheeks, her eyes still felt swollen and uncomfortable in the bright morning sun.

Rethe didn't stop until she'd climbed half the Cove's mountain and come back down again, her sides heaving with the exertion. The physical activity had held to quell some of the restlessness in her legs, but she still felt like a wrung-out tube of toothpaste: worthless and used. She paused on a hill that overlooked the lower reaches of the Bay, a place she had stood countless times, pretending she was like her father, watching over their family. A family she barely had anymore, and friends she couldn't even call her friends. And though she tried to stop them, tears spilled over her cheeks again like the snowmelt cascading down the Cove's mountain, soaking into the forest litter at her hooves.