Adria
I felt nothing at all, freedom of the fall
Crossing the Island was no small feat anymore. It took Adria the better half of a day, mostly due to the fact that all the worn, familiar trails of her childhood had been swept away in the change. It made for tough going at first, (where was the old banyan cove that had sheltered her parents from outsiders and Ischians alike?) but in due time her soft brown hooves had found new trails, worn over by the constant passage of those who’d remained. This place was no home to stallions or the brotherhood anymore; every smell that lingered seemed sweet and tainted by salt or freshwater … much more feminine and wild.
The Nereid had almost forgotten how much she missed the seclusion and beauty of this place.
Slipping through the heavily wooded valley between two verdant mountains, Adria let slip a wistful sigh and enjoyed the temperate springtime around her. Fledgling parrots squawked in their nests on high, demanding food from their overworked parents. Every now and then the flash of color from some specimen or the other would catch her wandering eye, and the seamare would glance up to watch the bonded pairs flitter about with some sensation of desire bubbling up inside of her. The flocks of chittering birds seemed wholly undisturbed by the events gone past, though some showed signs of sickness - patches of feathers missing, weak individuals clinging with sick abandon to vines or branches instead of flying like they should be.
What irked her the most were the few who blurted out phrases in Beqanna tongue, screeching, “Brotherhood! Brennen, Hello Hello!” when she passed underneath them. The familiar voices of her childhood were ignorantly flung down at her, giving Adria the creeps and soon urging her to pick up a trot so that she might leave the canopied forest in a hurry.
“Clever little move lespri.” She cursed them in her native tongue, once the female’s hooves touched the far western shore and the sun gleamed over her backside. It seemed only appropriate to call the parrots ‘evil spirits’, but with their noisy cacophony behind her and the blue sea stretching out in front of her, they couldn’t hold their power over Adria much longer. In fact, when she canters into the surging, rolling waves trickling up the beach to greet her, their beaks and round eyes are all but forgotten.
I wonder if Gwo Dan is still swimming around? The lovely creature ponders, sinking down into the quiet depths of a bright but empty coral reef. The shark her mother had enticed to keep watch over her as a filly, Gwo Dan (or ‘big teeth’,) would be a welcome sight and she begins her search for the animal by gently drifting towards the barrier island at the far edge of the map, just a sandy deposit of rock and sediment with no plant life to see.
A flash of movement - glinting scales not unlike her own, perhaps? - catch her eye from afar and the underwater nymph ceases to move, kept unnaturally in place with her ability to shape the ocean around her. Brennen is gone forever, her mother Nyxa had warned, after Adria insisted on exploring by herself, and the Kelpie have taken up in his place.
@[Lothbrok]