What is home to Margot, if not the dirt caked to her porcelain legs or the hot sun beating down on her gleaming back? What does the little mare know more of than the long, perpetual blue sky above her? The crashing ocean at her back, the hardy weeds scratching at hocks? Her tail tangled with briars and tumbleweeds, her pale eyes reflecting the barren nature around her.

And still she finds beauty. Carved within those naked walls is a determined river, sometimes just a mere trickle in the heat of the summer. Such water feeds blooming jasmine in the spring, night-blooming flowers in the summer, ferns and lichen and moss and all manner of creepy and crawling things. No land can live to be so bland, so uninhabitable without some form of oasis; and Margot is determined to find every slice of paradise within these wide open spaces.

She laughs to herself now, triumphant. Staring at some strange new beetle. Rainbow and opaque, so shiny it reflects her face with an oval warp. She giggles, noses the thing, love blooming for the insect as its wings flap obnoxiously against her nose in an escape. She watches it fly into the blue of the sky, disappearing into the sun’s glare.

All around her the inhabitants of Pangea sing. Snakes, jackels, mosquitoes, skinny hares and cawing vultures. She laughs. Joy and madness, joy and madness, joy and madness swell in her chest.

Mine, she thinks for the first time.

“Mine,” she whispers like a prayer, reverent worship, zealous.

“MINE!” she yells, and the laugh that echoes—a laugh that seems to bounce between every wall in Pangea—lingers like a ring in her ears.