It should be beautiful, this field of wildflowers turning their springtime baby-faces to the sun.  It should be, but it isn’t.  Because she remembers how her little sister had looked running through a similar meadow years ago, all legs and no coordination.  She can feel the phantom laughter rising in her throat, an echo of a happier time with a whole family.  She can see the curve of her dam’s lips widen as she had watched the filly (one of her last smiles).  Everything had been different, then.  The flowers had since lost their air of innocence, of purity (as had she).  

It is new, at least.  A do-over, she thinks to herself, but that is not exactly right – not nearly enough.  Because she doesn’t want to forget or erase all that she’s already been through.  She doesn’t want to wipe away the faces of her mother and sister, of her herdmares, (of him, even) from her memories.

The violent red splatter of the blooming poppies across the rolling ground makes her certain she won’t be forgetting any time soon.

Zosma walks into the new, would-be beautiful land with a careful eye but without hesitation.  Surely, there will be as many oddities here as there were in the first meadow she had discovered.  The Meadow, she reminds herself.  This place has its own culture and language that she is eager to learn; there are colors and accoutrements and abilities the likes of which she’s never seen.  She recalls the recent words of the glass-man (thinks of him when the sun hits the surface of a nearby lake just so; how he glistened and shined, how unnatural he’d been).  Ah, but isn’t the unknown a part of why she had come here?  A taste of magic and the chance for adventure in the famed lands of Beqanna?

The pale woman turns over thoughts as easily as stones underfoot.  

Only the deafening silence manages to pull her from her mind.  It permeates every space in the air not filled with birdsong.  It is a curiosity (as much as everything is these days) because the Meadow had been quite the opposite.  In fact, everywhere else she’s managed to traverse has been louder than this silent stretch of flowers and green.  A towering tree with branches that are so low they nearly sweep the ground rises just ahead.  As good a landmark as any, she grumbles, intending to circle out from the tree in order to find the others.  Surely, they exist.  The black mare she had met alongside Contagion had told her about this place, that it was a kingdom in which she could grow and learn.  A base to further study this famous new home she’s chosen for herself.  Zosma had obliged to at least seeing the Gates for herself, but now, she wonders what the real draw is.  Where are the others that reside within the golden sunlight pulling up the wildflowers?  

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