While Gale sleeps, Mazikeen attempts to clear her head of him. It’s never worked before, but so much has changed since her most recent death. Maybe this will be the time. She keeps away from everyone she can after she’s filled her stomach with venison, after she’s bathed in the icy waters and attempts to forget who is normally living there. How Sabal could stand living down there was definitely behind her. How or whether Chasm was still down there was not something she felt like investigating right now.

She kept hoping that one day she’ll wake up and find no one else here in Hyaline.

Now she still has that hope, but it is a hazy - distant thought in the back of her mind. She won’t be chasing them out this afternoon. Not until she has a real reason to.

For now, things are fine.

No one’s approached her about being harassed, but she also hasn’t exactly making herself available. So she resolves to do that today. Resolves to talk to someone that isn’t wearing Gale’s body as the snow finally gives them a break and a weak sun shines through dark clouds.

She doesn’t remember what it’s like anymore to just walk up to someone and start up a conversation. How to shut out the memories that linger even if they don't truly bother her anymore. The spot where Sickle died twice still smells faintly like her daughter's blood but the rain and snow have covered it. Mazikeen does not linger there, she passes by it as though it is just another spot by the lake. And then she moves along the shore of the lake - her attention divided between the small floats of ice that roll in with the tide and her surroundings. Today she walks not as a predator, she is just herself - the scars, the horns, and her eyes that are a deeper orange than they ever were before. As though this were any other day in any other winter and she were just any other mare.