Adria
I felt nothing at all, freedom of the fall
Sometimes, when Adria swam out to the furthest reaches of Beqanna’s ocean, she felt a sense of what it must be like to fly or walk among the stars. Out there in the blue, where a deathly quiet and stillness ruled everything, the Nereid became a small creature devoured by a much bigger purpose. Nothing of the world she left behind seemed to matter anymore when she became a piece of living flotsam, bobbing aimlessly with the current and seeing no end or beginning to anything. Just blue.
Before she’d made her way to Hyaline, Beqanna and her land dwellers had given her the same sort of feeling. A “blueness”, you could call it. That sense of being overwhelmed by something larger than you, and then shrunken down to nothing, nobody.
But when Yidhra turned that terrible beak to speak to her, and Kagerus had addressed her likewise afterwards, for the first time in a long time Adria no longer felt like she was a nobody. It made her blueness fade away to warm, rich gold. It made her want to right wrongs and fight evil. It made her feel ten feet tall, instead of the slender waif she was.
So with her Caretakers blessing and the Kraken’s dismissal, Adria took it upon herself to make right one wrong she’d committed. The water mare had slipped back into her cherished element and shifted, sparkling with gusto and a smattering of white-bronze scales as she swam south from Hyaline’s lake.
I’ve no notion what his name is, She thought as she meandered through a bend that sent her right past the foot of the Mountain, Only what he looks like … and that he must be very sad now.
She feels shame.
At long last the seahorse eases herself to a stop in a swirling eddy of river water, bobbing up from the surface behind a boulder who still held out against the swell of her magically-shaped water. With a damp forelock parted between two periwinkle eyes she looks out at the opposite shore, into the shrunken Forest where the shadows of late evening greedily pawed at one another. A thrill of fear (should she risk it? They’d only met the one time…) seizes her for a moment, leaving her to contemplate the pros and cons of taking a walk on land but in the end, her incessant curiosity over the platinum and black stallion wins out.
She drifts closer to the foreboding woods, rising up and out of the water without a sound before one hoof crunches noisily atop the sandy, rocky bank. From here on out her life is in fate's hands; every step she takes further into the embrace of darkness drains her of power, leaving only a sodden, mythic beauty where once a sea nymph stood.
All of this for one chronically depressed soul.
Worth it, The young female nods in silence, glancing back to watch the bend of River disappear and the curled, bare fingers of tree limbs close behind her. Now she can only hope to find what she came for.
@[Jinn]