It’s terrifying and exciting to strike out, truly on your own for the first time. Saying goodbye to tearful parents, or just one parent is more difficult that you imagined when you were little and chafing under your mother’s thumb. Still you say goodbye because it’s time to be free and discover the price that must be paid for that freedom
Seale had been born and raised on Icicle Isle. It had often felt like the cold lived inside her. There was never a novelty in the way her breath had frozen into crystal clouds, and snow was not a play thing but an impediment that tried to starve and smother you.
Then one day she realized that she was grown up, she didn’t have to stay and be cold anymore, or return and make that terrible muscle cramping swim. So she said her goodbyes and swam away from the Isle without any intention of coming back.
She never strays far from the coast as she travels, water, the sea especially is in her blood even if she is just an ordinary girl. While she has been bred to love the water, it is a coastline less frigid that she would personally prefer. In time this journey brings her to the ruined edge of Tephra and the guttering volcano, she would find her mother’s scent here had it not been burned away, the two of them just missing one another thanks to Seale’s dallying and the war that had waged in the kingdom not long before. Instead of lingering, the dark young mare turns her eyes toward the islands, in particular the northernmost one, hurrying across the sandbars before the tide makes the trip more difficult.
She doesn’t know where it is she’s come, or what kind of people dwell here. Her mother has warned her of dangers unspecific, like she was afraid even to speak of what waited out in the world and so for a moment Seale hesitates on the jungle island’s beach, but she has never learned fear or pain as her mother has. So she shakes herself dry and whickers curious and exuberant. “Hello! ” Seale does not leave the beach, her lavender eyes brightly scanning the length of pale beach and the edge of the vibrant green tangle.
she told me she was shallow; her rivers run so deep
if I could only be the boat that leads her to the sea