He is so very cold.
                
It is the first thing he notices when he wakes.  The air is like cool spring waters he’d slipped into as an even younger boy, setting his skin to shiver much the same.  There is no sun glinting off the river’s surface to marginally warm him, no mother to pull him against her in the shelter of her embrace.  There is no fire in his belly, either.  The beast that had woven itself in the chambers of his young heart has since taken flight.  The quakes have dislodged it, he thinks, the rumbling and tearing and breaking scaring off even the most steadfast of creatures. 

He is alone.
                
The yearling rises from his place on the rocky mountainside (so like home that his lungs barely expand with added effort).  The large crowds finding their way down do not dissuade him, though the mists curling away in the distance do.  Something about the way they catch the light and turn like milk.  They make him feel uneasy in their ambiguity, like something is waiting to snatch him from their swirling depths, something new to a world they had once mastered.  He knows, instinctually, that this is a Beqanna brand new; they will have to relearn everything.
                
Sabrael doesn’t know where he is going once he reaches the bottom of the mountain, but he is reinvigorated by the warmer air.  He runs by the dazed group of horses flowing into the meadow.  A new sort of fire lights in his legs and lungs as he searches the land for a familiar face.  He is in no hurry, really.  The freedom from his family is worth the small bubble of worry that rises in his chest.  Eventually, though, his eyes lock with another pair he’s known his whole life.
                
“Mother,” he says easily, as if the world has not shifted around them.  There is worry in the eyes of everyone else but he suddenly finds he doesn’t share it.  Not with his family finding their way together again like a puzzle regaining all of its pieces (he ignores the fact that his father is markedly absent, that his aunts have not yet appeared – surely, it is only a matter of time until they do).  The bay roan looks to his grandparents next, sees their embrace. This is a new world, yes, but it can be their world.  They do not have to sit idly by any longer.
                
His dark eyes settle on each mouth that speaks next, watching each declaration form and pass from the lips of strangers and family alike.  When Tiphon reassures the group with his final words, he solemnly nods his head in agreement.  “We are the future-makers.”  It isn’t much, but it gives him strength nonetheless, fills him with some of his old fire.           

Sabrael

How easily they had found each other: fate.

Her life is a series of befores and afters -- before and after Scorch’s death; Ramiel; becoming a queen, a mother; the destruction. Before, she never believed in fate. She was in charge of her own future, every step she took along the way mattered.
But now?
She can’t help but wonder if she is entirely at the will of Beqanna or Carnage or some other higher power, if everything she does is predetermined.
They were all meant, from the very beginning, to fall and rebuild.

“Yes,” she says, to all of them -- to Ashley and Phaedrus, Vida and Tiphon, to herself. “Vida, it’s wonderful to have you,” she says quietly, politely, and then she hears him. Sabrael. She moves to him, even though he is so close to her already, and reaches out, placing her nose gently on his neck. Ea wants to embrace him, to hold him against her body like she did when he was just barely a weanling, but already he seems much older than before.

“Yes,” she continues, “we will find a new home. Vida, Sabrael, Adalyn --” she directs her attention to the children and the injured, “you stay nearby, somewhere safe. I will find you again when it’s time to go home.”
She takes another long look at Sabrael, then turns towards the Mountain. And her fate.