[open] you had your maps drawn

[aletta]

Aletta has never had cards. It's always been her stars; she has used them as a compass for as long as she can remember. Her mother - the descendant of the Dalean king, Coca-Cola - had crafted stories beneath starlight about the gray king of the Forbidden Dale. Each star was a story, her mother Ashlynn had said. Each one was a twinkling legend waiting to be remembered. As long as a horse remembered those before them, the lessons of their ancestors would be shining above them.

So she followed them to Beqanna where she learned of the Reckoning. She learned about Nerine and a stallion who had taught her to be wary named Stillwater. She learned about the loss of magic from a bone Magician called Violence and Aletta learned to be cautious when it came to her gifted cousins. Power - Magic - was a corrupter and it made her that much prouder that the blood in her veins was red. Almost pure. Surely that made her that much harder to corrupt.

The iron mare of Beyond had been forged on the mountaintops. Carved and chiseled as the years have gone by and she is proud of the granite in her stance. She is proud of the surety she carries between her slender shoulders. "After Beqanna came a string of islands," the gray mare adds after he speaks. "Then Beyond. And then Liridon. Then Beqanna again." Helovia. Rift. The unknown. The infinite realms that exist have always seemed so delightfully endless. Like galaxies that spin and turn in a never-ending universe that even travelers like she and @[Mesec] will never find the end too.

Her brow arches slightly as she glances back to the glowing pegasus, considering that thought. "Home doesn't have to have a name," Aletta says thoughtfully, (unknowingly) softening to her walking companion. "I've found that it's more of a feeling than anything else." Her home has taken many names - Craignair, Paraiso, Murmuring Rivers, the Pass. The connection that all those places had shared was who she had shared them with.

She wonders briefly what would have made him leave the quiet if it was where his family had settled. Had he not wanted to stay with them? The thought makes her frown slightly but it vanishes with another tilt of her head, listening to his remark about the Reckoning. She answers his statement with a grin of her own - smaller but every inch mischievous. "I've heard weanlings call for their milk-mothers with less complaint." Though she teases, she understands to some extent. She isn't entirely uncompassionate, despite her joke.

A few more steps and the grin fades as she considers the corner ahead. As Mesec asks her if she has found what she was looking for. "Not yet," she muses, looking forward. "But I will," she doesn't doubt. "A startalker sent me down this path, so I'll keep walking it until it ends." Turning her attention back to the pegasus and glancing up at him, she wonders: "have you thought about where your wandering might take you in Beqanna?"